One of the main drawbacks of the OLED technology is the pretty short life of the display panels manufactured using it, since about 30,000 hours declared for a brand new OLED TV from Sony, the XEL-1 isn't too much at all, considering that most common LCD panels exceed 50,000 hours. Well, that seems to have become a part of the past now, because Toshiba and Panasonic just doubled the life expectancy of OLED displays!

The idea behind the new generation of OLED displays is to increase the efficiency of the way the emitted light is used, so the organic materials used to build the screen have a much longer life expectancy. How is that achieved?

Well, the new OLED displays from Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology added a metal membrane inside the screen, so light from polymers in the substrate is delivered with an increased efficiency, compared to existing models. This way, you can get the same picture quality, with only half the effective brightness delivered by the polymers, so the life of the organic components should double, obviously.

While this sounds great, for now we only know about a prototype display using this technology, so we need to see if products using it start appearing soon enough to push back the LCD TVs a bit, since they are getting better and better with each day...