Sony is pulling resources away from OLED television development, according to reports from Nikkei Asian Review. The company plans to focus instead on developing its 4K TVs, prioritizing the display resolution that has received a big push over the past couple of years.
OLED can bring several benefits to the form and function of TVs—the image response times are faster, and the displays are thinner and lighter than LCDs. Because OLEDs don't use a backlight, they can also display deeper black levels than LCDs can.
However, TVs have already come a long way in form factor in the last decade. It appears that Sony has found that what makes an OLED a premium investment will be a harder sell than the more concrete benefits of a 4K display.
Nikkei notes that Sony's TV business has been operating at a loss for some time, though it's currently the market leader in the 4K TV segment, where models are priced about $970 higher than flat-panel HDTVs on average. The company plans to release eight more 4K TVs this coming summer.
