According to the industry survey results of CINNO Research, the global demand for display polarizers in 2020 will be 540 million square meters, and it is expected that the market demand will continue to grow in the next five years. I thought that the value of polarizers would rise with market demand, but since Samsung's conference brought the Galaxy Fold 3 to use polarizer-free technology, the development of polarizers has once again caused heated discussions, and the future of the polarizer industry seems to be a mystery.
In the application of OLED screen, the polarizer is attached to the panel and acts as a filter to adjust the light entering from the outside, so the reason why we can clearly see the screen picture in the sunlight is also because the polarizer has an anti-reflective effect. PLP technology (Pol-less) is a new technology to replace the polarizer, through the color film to block the reflected light of the electrode as much as possible, thereby improving the contrast of the OLED display, in the strict sense, PLP belongs to the technology of filtering the reflected light by carrying an additional layer of structure.
In digital electronic products, LCD screens are a large consumer of polarizers. Polarizer on LCD screen, mainly used to form polarized light, and then transparent light to form color and light and dark contrast. However, unlike LCD, conventional OLED devices use circular polarizers to reduce the influence of external incident ambient light on the display effect. Although OLED devices equipped with circular polarizers display excellent results, the thickness of the device increases by about 50 to 100 μm while losing some of the brightness. Therefore, PLP technology can further reduce the thickness of OLED panels by improving the OLED device and directly making an optimized color film plate with a thickness of about 5 μm on the device. This new OLED device will be about 20% less thick than conventional foldable OLED screens. At the same time, PLP technology can also play a role in increasing device brightness and reducing power consumption.
In fact, as early as 2021, TCL Huaxing exhibited the world's first polarizer-free polarizer extremely small radius 360 ° folding screen + the world's first 8.01" polarizer-free VIR1.2 folding screen at the annual DTC Global Ecological Display Conference, these two very new forms of polarized demigold demos are fully integrated with PLP technology and DF folding products.
Compared with the commercial Pol-less technology, the main advantage of TCL Huaxing PLP technology is low power consumption, high color gamut, TCL Huaxing PLP has obvious advantages over POL, which can reduce EL power consumption by about 30%, while WO LTPO+ PLP technology combination can reduce the total power consumption by >30%; high color gamut products in the benchmark market, TCL Huaxing PLP color gamut is as high as 118%, WAD through microcavitation / luminescent devices to improve better than the market indicators. In addition, TCL Huaxing PLP/WQ LTPO technology is ready, and the future t4 project production line will have a 15K LTPO mass production capacity.
Many people feel that the strong development of PLP technology will bring great impact to the traditional polarizer industry, but in fact, unlike OLED screen display, LCD's polarization-free film research is mainly concentrated in some areas, and the application space is limited. Since the liquid crystal display entered the mature period, polarizers have been applied to the LCD screen display market as the most mature and economical device at present, and the position has tended to be stable. However, with the development of PLP technology, it has also brought new opportunities and challenges to the field of screen display, and where will the polarizer industry go in the future, perhaps time will bring us the answer.