With the recent demise of Plasma display technology, LCDs are the primary technology used for large-screen displays. While OLED displays are increasingly showing up in the marketplace, IDC’s DisplaySearch has projected that Quantum Dot (QD) technology embedded into LCD televisions are going to increasingly challenge OLEDs as the future of the industry. The firm estimates that in 2015, televisions using QD will account for 1.3 million units shipped in 2015, and spike to 18.7 million units by 2018.

Part of the reason that the company believes that QD is going to be a firm challenger to OLED technology is that QD provides high-quality imagery while the production facilities and lines don’t have to be completely changed. QD technology allows manufacturers to eliminate a color filter in an LCD panel while producing even higher quality colors than existing LCD HDTVs. OLED technology, currently championed by LG, is still expensive to produce, and Samsung has abandoned plans to use the technology in the short term.

Overall, North America and China are expected to be the largest markets for QD TV shipments over the next four years, with about 1 million units expected to be shipped to each market in 2016.