OLED notebooks to ship by late 2010, Samsung says

Consumers will see the first commercial OLED laptops a year from now, Samsung said this week at the IFA show in Berlin, Germany.

Kyu Uhm, Head of Worldwide Sales and Marketing for Samsung's Computing Division, reportedly said that the company would look to release towards the end of 2010.

"Samsung is the largest OLED screen manufacturer," Uhm is reported to have said. "And as soon as it's available commercially for laptops we will adopt it...probably sometime Q3 next year."

The company's senior product manager for Europe, Patrick Povel, said research firm Gartner believes mainstream OLED notebooks will become standard in the next five years.

If you've ever seen an OLED display in person, you know that's great news.

Displays made from OLEDs, which stands for organic light-emitting diode, have far more brightness and contrast than typical backlit LCD displays. Color reproduction and refresh rates are better too, with active-matrix OLED displays ("AMOLEDs") reproducing four times as many colors as a typical LCD display and sporting faster refresh rates. They're also more power efficient.

Here's a good example of the difference, as viewed on a mobile phone: