After Japanese electronic stalwart Sony announced its first OLED display, Samsung SDI of Korea is toeing the line with its 31-inch OLED screen.

This OLED screen will be displayed for the first time in the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in January 2008 at Las Vegas.

OLED or organic light-emitting diodes are energy efficient display panels, and the reason for this is that unlike LCDs, an OLED display does not require a backlight to function, thus saving on power. Also an OLED panel makes for super-thin, ultra-light display. And most importantly, OLED also makes for crisper images and offers superior viewing experience for fast moving images.

While the 31-inch OLED display remains a prototype product, Samsung is tightlipped about if and when this will be mass produced. The 14-inch screens will most certainly be mass produced, said Yoo Eui-jin, head of Samsung SDI's AM-OLED team.

The 31-inch screen is really slim at only 4.3 mm thick, which means it is one-tenth the size of a regular LCD screen. Besides, as state above, it is likely consume only half the electricity guzzled by a 32-incher.
OLED screens promise a lifespan of 30,000 hours but Samsung's model is poised to deliver much more - that of 35,000 hours.

OLED displays incur high costs of manufacturing - one of the reasons why Sony has limited its production number of 11-inch OLED TVs to only 2000 units per month. Japan's Sharp, however, shelved plans of selling OLED TVs in 2009-10 due to high cost of mass production.

Read about Epson's OLED plans here.