- IJP OLED can be 30% to 35% cheaper than current OLED production
- Challenges remain, particularly power consumption and blue OLED lifetime
- Expect to see the technology in premium laptops first, but TV is on the cards
A new report says the long-awaited arrival of inkjet-printed OLEDs will lower the cost of OLED production, making the technology much more cost-effective and the resulting displays much more affordable.
That’s good news in the relatively short term for laptops (such as a near-future OLED MacBook Pro) and for smaller screens in devices such as phones and in-car consoles. And in the long term, it is also good news for TV buyers.
The dominant production technology in OLED production is FMM, which is short for Fine Metal Mask. According to display analysts Omdia, FMM costs are getting lower – but inkjet printing is getting even cheaper, with a price difference of between 30 and 35% compared to FMM production. Given that OLED is an expensive technology to produce, this could make a big difference.
And the price is not the only advantage. Inkjet printing offers some significant advantages over FMM. However, it’s important to note that these lower costs are a prediction for the future, not a measurement of how much IJP OLED costs to produce currently.
This is still a very new display technology, and that means it’s still expensive to manufacture because the yield – meaning the amount of panels produced that are good enough to sell – still needs to be improved.
We’ve been told by TCL, the biggest player in the IJP OLED game right now, that it will be several years before it’s affordable in mass-market TVs – but in portable and even screen-sized panels, the technology is rolling out.
What is so exciting about inkjet printed screens?
For manufacturers, the lower cost of inkjet printed displays is not the only advantage. It’s set to be much more efficient once it works at full quality – Omdia says that for 16.3-inch OLED portable displays, manufacturers can produce 10% more panels from a single substrate compared to FMM processes – and the machines cost less to buy.
That is the good news. But there are still some challenges for inkjet printed OLEDs to overcome. One of the main challenges has been the lifetime of blue OLEDs manufactured using the IJP process: according to TCL CSOT, the lifetime of its blue pixels in 2020 was only 40 hours. Power consumption was also a significant problem.
But by the end of 2025, the TCL CSOT had improved the life of its blues by ten times to 400 hours, and it had reduced power consumption by a third – the technology has continued to develop since then.
This is a very fast developing sector and big money is being spent to develop it: TCL CSOT alone has invested 4 billion dollars in its T8 factory, which will be located in Guangzhou, China. It is designed to produce 22,500 substrates per month.
These panels will be intended for monitors, notebooks and tablets, but TV is also on the roadmap: as we reported last year, TCL has shown TVs with panels up to 65 inches in size. Mass production of the first panels from the factory is likely to begin in late 2027.
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