What's the difference between LED and OLED lighting?

The main difference is the use of organic materials in OLEDs. Traditional LEDs are coated with yellow phosphor to emit light. OLEDs utilize several thin layers of organic compounds to create light through electric currents.

What are the advantages of OLED lighting?

OLEDs are brighter than LEDs. OLEDs don’t require backlighting like LCDs. OLEDs create their light, giving them a much more extensive viewing range.

What are the disadvantages of OLED lighting?

While red and green OLED films have lifetimes between 46,000 to 230,000 hours, blue organics have shorter lifetimes, up to around 14,000 hours. Manufacturing processes are expensive at the moment, making them pricey. Water can damage OLEDs easily, as well.

What is the organic material in OLED?

The organic components are layers made of organic molecules, like hydrogen or carbon, that contain bonds or conductive polymers.

Why is it called an organic LED?

It’s similar to the light-emitting diode (LED) but composed of multiple layers of material. An OLED is a flat light produced by placing a series of thin organic films between two conductors.

OLED lighting was created by chemists Ching W. Tang and Steven Van Slyke in 1987.

Does OLED lighting degrade over time?

The brightness of OLED elements correlates to the strength of the current being applied. An OLED’s lifespan decreases as the current increases. Environmental heat also affects its longevity. OLED panels also increase in power consumption as time passes. This is probably because of wear on the OLED elements and the backplane, paired with increasing the current to maintain brightness.

What is the lifespan of OLED lighting?

OLEDs have a shorter lumen life than most LEDs. For example, some light panels have 40,000 hours of luminance, where some traditional LEDs may have up to 100,000-lumen hours.

Is OLED lighting better than LED?

Beyond a high price tag. OLEDs have a shorter lumen life than most LEDs at the moment. Currently, OLEDs can’t achieve the same amount of brightness created by most LED lamps.

What is the light source of an OLED light?

In LED lighting, electricity goes in, and light comes out due to a semi conductive material, instead of a white-hot metal filament like a traditional lightbulb. OLED technology works by taking this same idea but flattening it.

How does OLED lighting work?

OLED is a solid-state lighting (SSL) technology. It’s made up of thin organic layers sandwiched between two electrodes. When current is applied, charge carriers from both the anode and cathode are injected into the layers, electroluminescence occurs, and light is emitted.

Learn about OLED Lighting

OLEDs are Organic Light-Emitting Diodes. They are made from organic materials (carbon-based), applied in sheets that create a diffuse light, unlike LEDs, which are point light sources. OLED is in its early stages, with products like desk lamps, light panels, and TVs available that offer comparable quality, efficiency, and lifetime as LEDs. The OLED products are still some years away from widespread use because their cost is still relatively high.

Check the energy consumption rating in Watts, the amount of light output in lumens, and the color temperature in Kelvins, to get the amount and color of light you want.

OLED lighting and displays have nearly the same great energy savings as LEDs. The main advantage over LEDs is that OLED material is a carbon-based dye that can be printed onto a variety of surfaces - rigid, flexible, transparent, glass and metal to create a light source that radiates from a broader area. The light quality is really nice too!

The Seoul National University in Korea installed 1000 OLED desk lamps in its library for student use in 2015, because they love the light these lamps produce.

Learn about OLED Lighting

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