DUBROVNIK, Croatia ― Samsung Electronics announced Saturday that it would unveil a differently-designed OLED television at the upcoming IFA consumer electronics trade show in Berlin in August.

Michael Zoeller, Samsung’s European marketing director, said that it will showcase an “OLED TV with improved design,” stating that it would be different from the one already shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January.

“We will show another OLED TV that has a pretty new design concept,” he said during the firm’s power briefing at the IFA Global Press Conference held in the city of UNESCO World Heritage.

A key executive of the IFA organizing body Messe Berlin also confirmed that the pricy OLED TVs will be featured at the trade show, scheduled for Aug. 31-Sept. 5.

Zoeller further elaborated that Samsung’s OLED TVs will be launching globally in the second half of this year.

However, he did not elaborate on the specific change in design and the month of the roll-out of OLED TVs.

The announcement comes months after Samsung and its rival TV maker LG Electronics both showed off high-tech 55-inch OLED TVs at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Korea’s two electronics powerhouses flexed their muscles at the world’s biggest electronics show in Las Vegas, publicizing the first-ever 3-D enabled OLED TVs. They claimed the new technology shows off thinner, lighter, clearer and more efficient displays than the current liquid-crystal display TVs.

Samsung even went a step forward with its TV chief Yoon Boo-keun saying that the product was estimated to be priced below 10 million won ($8,819).

The two firms, however, use a slightly different technology for the display panels of their OLED TVs with Samsung adopting the RGB-OLED and White-OLED for LG.

Heightening competition

The competition between the two IT behemoths is fierce.

Following the first roll-out of the OLED TVs, Samsung and LG were recently at loggerheads over their key technical knowledge as the world’s top TV maker Samsung accused LG of stealing its technologies used in manufacturing display screens for the company’s OLED TV.

Earlier this month, police arrested 11 people, including former employees of LG’s display screen manufacturer LG Display, for trying to get their hands on key technologies belonging to Samsung Mobile Display.

Police said that a portion of the arrested group was even intending to find new jobs at a Chinese firm using the key technologies from both Samsung and LG as a bargaining tool.

Samsung estimated the damage caused by the incident to amount up to 30 trillion won in the next five years.

Although the accusation was denied by LG officials, the case was sent to the Suwon Prosecutors’ Office on Friday for a thorough investigation on those involved in the matter, including an LG Display executive, according to the police.

Dim outlook for OLED TVs

Despite the competition involving OLED TVs, global market research firm DisplaySearch provided a relatively dim outlook for the market of high-tech OLED TVs at the press event here.

Paul Gray, TV and electronics research director at DisplaySearch, stated that the OLED TV remains a niche market.

Calling OLED TV a “science project,” he said that “OLED remains very immature in terms of process technology.”

“OLED still has many technical problems to solve even before capacity investments are considered,” said Gray.

“We think about 55,000 OLED TVs will ship this year. Only 5 million OLED TVs will ship in 2015.”

But he said Web-connected TVs would evolve, pointing to consumer-controlled services like Google TV, set-maker controlled services such as smart TV and the broadcaster-controlled services.

“In the fourth quarter of 2011, all regions had a minimum of around 25 percent of connected TVs being shipped. Connected TV is an established category.”

For smart TVs, already widely manufactured by the Korean TV makers, Gray said the key was to deliver a social, shared experience with a large screen ― new ways of delivering video, new sharing opportunities and ease of use.

“Things that underpin all smart TVs and what determines the value is that it has to be easy to use. Making that sharing effortless will be the future of smart TV,” he added.

By Cho Ji-hyun, Korea Herald correspondent
(sharon@heraldcorp.com)