The company has talked about taking TVs a further step away from the traditional bulky sets for nearly five year. Sony has announced it is set to start selling the OLED TV format within the year.

Samsung, Toshiba and Cannon have toyed with this for a while, but Sony has announced it is expected to become the first to market the ultra-thin television displays. The TV sets come with a much thinner panel than LCDs because it uses organic light-emitting diode technology. The panels are just 3mm thick.

Sony is expected to launch the first model, an 11-inch OLED TV, this year, compared to Samsung’s 40-inch. The advantage, with OLED screens, is the bright, colourful images produced without the need of a backlight and are also claimed to be energy-efficient and good at reproducing fast-moving images.

The technical specs include 1024 x 600 pixels across the 1,000,000:1 contrast panel capable of 8-bit RGB color. The price tag is expected to be pretty high.

OLED is already used in digital cameras, mobile phones and many other small panel devices.

We will keep updated with UK availability and prices.