The biggest technical problem for OLEDs is the limited lifetime of the organic materials.[44] In particular, blue OLEDs historically have had a lifetime of around 14,000 hours (five years at 8 hours a day) when used for flat-panel displays, which is lower than the typical lifetime of LCD, LED or PDP technology—each currently rated for about 60,000 hours, depending on manufacturer and model. However, some manufacturers of OLED displays claim to have come up with a way to solve this problem with a new technology to increase the lifespan of OLED displays, pushing their expected life past that of LCD displays.[45] A metal membrane helps deliver light from polymers in the substrate throughout the glass surface more efficiently than current OLEDs. The result is the same picture quality with half the brightness and a doubling of the screen's expected life.[46]
In 2007, experimental OLEDs were created which can sustain 400 cd/m² of luminance for over 198,000 hours for green OLEDs and 62,000 hours for blue OLEDs.[47]
Additionally, as consequence of the fact that light emitting components of different colors have different lifetimes, it's obvious that the quality of a color picture would degrade over time since emission of each color reduces by a different amount. At some point color picture quality would become unacceptable, so overall display lifetime could be even worse than lifetime of separate components because many uses are putting certain requirements on picture quality. This can be partially avoided by adjusting color balance but this may require advanced control circuits and interaction with user, which is unacceptable for some uses.
The intrusion of water into displays can damage or destroy the organic materials. Therefore, improved sealing processes are important for practical manufacturing and may limit the longevity of more flexible displays.[48]
