Man, what a difference a year few months makes. At the front end of 2008, panel makers the world over were boasting about big investments to expand production lines and live large on Malta. Now, it's tough to go a week without hearing of at least one plant closing. Take Taiwan's AU Optronics, for instance -- in February of this year, it pledged $9.3 billion to build a pair of LCD factories. Now, it's placing those lofty plans on hold, noting that construction on "two new LCD plants" would be delayed by at least six months. According to chairman KY Lee: "One has to use the brakes and slow down a bit on a downhill path." A curious analogy, but we suppose it works.

Unbeknownst to most, there are actually quite a few flavors of OLED out there. We've got passive-matrix (PM), active-matrix (AM) and transparent, and evidently Samsung SDI isn't really feeling the former anymore. Reportedly, the outfit will begin to phase out of the PMOLED business, and it will begin looking for ways to alter its existing PMOLED production line for "other uses." The plug is being pulled (at least partially) as decreasing panel prices and a small bucket of buyers have reduced profitability, leaving it little option but to readjust its focus on the more promising AMOLED. The move isn't entirely surprising -- after all, LG Display suspended its entire PMOLED business last year, and while there is a slight possibility that the firm keeps a small bit of PMOLED production going, it'll be minor (if there's any at all). Our take? We're stoked. It's the AMOLEDs that'll end up in that mythical 40 inch (and beyond) OLED HDTV, so we're all about giving more attention to that baby's commercialization date.

Possibly buoyed by margins produced by its $2500 XEL-1, Sony is pumping 22-billion yen ($203.5 million) into scaling OLED production technology up to medium and large panels. No word on what sort of sizes are meant by "medium" and "large," but we're hoping that "medium" comes in around 30-inches and "large" runs upwards of the 45-inch mark. Competition being what it is, Sony probably hopes so, too. With OLED lifetimes on the rise, the only thing that keeps these power-miserly, high-contrast, great color and wide-viewing angle displays out of a home theater setup is sheer size. Given the race between manufacturers, we're hoping to see falling prices, rising sizes and shorter times to market.

Much like SED, OLED and Laser TV technologies, high dynamic range has been lingering in the background for what seems like ages, but a new writeup over at Sound & Vision is bringing it back (at least partially) into the spotlight. Reportedly, Dolby -- which purchased BrightSide Technologies earlier this year -- will be making some sort of announcement about the tech at CES, but judging by current estimates, we won't see sets based on HDR for "two or three years." For those who've forgotten what the fuss is all about, high dynamic range is purportedly able to offer whites whiter than white and blacks darker than anything else out there, but such luxuries aren't apt to come cheap for early adopters. Dolby refused to cough up an estimated price range for the first retail models, but who knows, maybe we'll learn a touch more about all of this in just a few weeks.

According to unconfirmed reports stemming from Taiwan (where else?), Michael Dell is pulling his company out of the LCD TV biz to return focus to its core PC efforts. Unlike Apple's ridiculous desktop display markup, Dell has concentrated on providing low-cost computer and home theater offerings, something particularly dangerous in the cutthroat LCD TV market, so it's not a total surprise to see 'em bail now. Dell is purportedly set to stop manufacture this month, so we should know soon enough how legitimate these reports are, a Dell spokeswoman wouldn't comment on the rumors, only stating that Dell currently sells LCD TVs in a limited number of markets.