Industry

A blog quoting a Japanese source suggests that Toshiba is abandoning LCD and plasma and instead putting its display R&D into yet another display technology: SED.  SED stands for Surface-Conduction Electron-emitter Display, which, if I understand it correctly – and I probably don’t – is an array of millions of tiny tube TV sets.  Advantages include many of the same claims made for another technology working its way through the labs, OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode – don’t you just love these terms?):

• really really thin
• incredibly bright, sharp images
• more energy efficient than plasma
• a technology that [insert Korean or Japanese competitor here] doesn’t already have locked up

I’m convinced that performance is almost irrelevant: whichever technology is cheapest and can be manufactured in volume will win.  Consumers have shown that they have absolutely no understanding of the technologies, and retailers have shown absoultely no capability of explaining the differences between them.  Resolution and picture quality doesn’t even seem to matter much – consumers are snapping up EDTV panels at far higher rates than HD-capable displays. As such, consumers are basically buying these things based on depth and price. 

I’m sure that next week at CES we’ll see gigantic LCD displays, enormous plasmas, and ever-larger OLED prototypes, and that we’ll all be falling over ourselves discussing why LCD is better than plasma or vice versa.  But thus far, the bottom line has been: is it thin enough not to overwhelm a room, and, if so, how much does it cost?

-avi

I was wandering through IKEA yesterday and noticed that Philips appears to have an exclusive on all the A/V display props; an interesting product placement ploy.  Even more interesting were the sheer number of plasmas sitting on top of $79 build-it-yourself furniture.  Plasmas and LCDs may win on decor friendliness, but not on budget, where microdisplays offer a reasonable compromise between the size of the unit and the size of your wallet.

Usually, microdisplays means DLP or LCD, but I’ve always been a fan of LCOS, which can offer the resolution of a digital technology and the fatigue-free experience of a three chip technology, without adding overly-sharp, hard edges to the picture. Having worked at Intel in a past life, I was wondering just what got them to pull out of the LCOS game after making such a big splash (promising, among other things, to bring street prices of large screen TVs down below $1,000).  Insight Media, a CE research firm I never heard of until I just Googled it, backs up Intel’s official, "there isn’t enough money in it," claim with some interesting backstory.  But the New York Times reports that it’s all about chip yield – Intel expected 90% rates and was getting well under 10% – the same problems everybody else trying to build LCOS chips has had.  Well, not everyone:  JVC has teamed up with a smaller company to make the silicon backplane, dubbed this LCOS variant "D-ILA" and are the only ones to have a mass market product, and a good one – I have been impressed with their 52" HD-52Z575.  Philips also has an LCOS RPTV on the market, but it’s a one-chip+rotating prism affair, and doesn’t offer the same level of performance. Sony’s take on LCOS, "SXRD," is extremely impressive, but for the moment they’re only using it in their high price, low volume Qualia line, which would mask any yield problems they could conceivably have. 

Which leaves Texas Instruments, the sole supplier of DLP chips, in a great position, at least until plasmas or LCDs get cheaper to manucture or OLED or some other new technology is commercialized. BusinessWeek (subscription required) this week has a profile of TI’s marketing efforts, as TI is planning a DLP branding campaign where they will reach out directly to consumers for the first time in a long, long while.  Like any "branding the technology inside" ploy, comparisons are immediately made to Intel’s "Intel Inside" program.  But here’s where BW gets kudos: they correctly point out that the success of Intel’s program was based not on Intel’s own ad budget, but on the comarketing dollars they spread around (and the tight program control they imposed on those dollars).  TI is not doing this – nobody’s handing Samsung millions of dollars to push DLP as a technology.  So while I look forward to TI’s Super Bowl commercial and note that DLP does have a lot to recommend itself to consumers, I’m also fairly certain that the branding campaign will not have an Intel Inside-sized impact on the market.

-avi