HDTV Almanac

The new spring models have arrived on store shelves around the country, and more are set to ship throughout the summer. Many retailers still hold inventory of older models, and they have to get rid of them. So they put them out for sale at clearance prices. The database used to create Professor Poor’s Weekly Price Intelligence Report makes it easy to keep track of the advertised specials. Below is a table of items that were advertised as clearance or close out items by major national retailers during the month of May. Note that many of these offers are limited to the available stock, and so may be sold out by now. Still, it gives you some indication of the price cuts available when a newer model comes along.

The Society for Information Display conference is like a candy store to a techie display guy like me. It’s almost all about components and new technologies and future stuff that just over the technology horizon. But occasionally, there are commercial products worthy of note. For example, Sharp was showing their 108″ 1080p LCD TV monitor, but that’s more of a novelty than a serious product, and besides, they had shown it already at CES 2007.

But over in the OSRAM booth, there was a new product that caught my eye: the Sony KDL-70XBR3.

OSRAM was showing off the set because it uses the company’s Golden Dragon LEDs as a backlight. The 1080p display is 70″ diagonal, and has a 120 Hz refresh rate and supports Sony’s xvColor standard. The backlight uses 1,152 LEDS, arranged in quads of red:green:green:blue. Together, they produce an image rated at 500 nits. The LEDs offer a number of advantages. They are friendlier for the enviroment, and they produce a thinner backlight; the backlight is only about 2 inches thick. Perhaps most important, the color gamut is better than with a traditional backlight. Reds are clearly richer and more saturated.

Backlights are an essential and expensive part of LCD TVs. LEDs offer some distinct improvements over fluorescent designs, and while they come at a premium price for now, expect the prices to fall as production levels increase.

Some may call it an inconvenient truth, but worldwide consumers are becoming more conscious of energy and environmental issues. (Do you think that $3/gallon gasoline could be a factor?) The big take-away from the SID 2007 conference is that the display industry hears that message loud and clear, and many companies were talking “green” about their products.

Starting right at the component level, Corning Glass touted their new Eagle XG glass substrate for LCD panels that eliminates heavy metals that are of environmental concern. LCD makers were showing how dynamic backlights could save 40% or more over traditional backlights that remain on at full power all the time. The photo below shows two panels; the top one on has a dynamic backlight that adjusts its output based on the image on the screen. The numbers to the right show that the top panel is only using about 60% of the power used by the lower panel.

Perhaps the “greenest” story of all, however, was the new Laser TV prototype. According to the laser manufacturer Novalux, a 65″ Laser TV should draw about 25% as much power as a 65″ plasma HDTV.

With energy prices rising and consumers wanting to do something “good” for the environment with their purchases, a “green” sales pitch will give companies a competitive advantage for now. Perhaps as soon as the next holiday buying season, however, not having an environmentally friendly spin on their products soon will put them at a disadvantage in the marketplace.

There’s a video clip making the email rounds these days. It’s a clip of an under-bed HDTV mount from MK 1 Studio. This motorized lift slides your HDTV out from under your bed, and positions it at the foot of the bed. It can even automatically adjust the viewing angle to your preference.

Now, this is a slick piece of engineering to be sure, but that’s not why it’s important. The breathtaking five-figure cost is also interesting, but that is also besides the point. The fact is that this is about the only way that you can position a 42″ flat panel HDTV at a proper viewing distance when you’re lying in bed. If you put it on the wall across from the foot of the bed, it will be much too far away. With a 42″ screen at that distance, you may as well get an EDTV panel because you won’t see the extra resolution from that distance. Of course, buying a 60″ or 70″ rear projection model to put across from the bed may be a much less expensive solution than the MK 1 Studio lift, but that’s a whole other issue.

What’s the right size HDTV for your bedroom? Find the answer in Professor Poor’s Guide to Buying HDTV, now available in paperback from Amazon or other fine booksellers.

Once again, there are lots of 3D displays being shown at SID 2007, but this year I’ve started to think differently about them. Until recently, I only saw them as niche products that had practical appear for narrow applications such as pharmaceutical design or medical procedures. Head mounted goggles are too bulky or geeky for consumer acceptance. Passive or active glasses may be a nuisance for people. And the autostereoscopic technologies only work when you view them from limited, specific positions, and even then they often make my head hurt.

So what has changed? One critical factor is the advent of digital cinema theaters. These make it relatively easy to provide separate left- and right-eye images to audiences, and Hollywood is starting to take advantage of this feature with mainstream feature releases. There have been many IMAX 3D titles, but now we’re also seeing movies such as “Chicken Little” and “Meet the Robinsons“. And if this trend continues and the movie-going public appreciates the 3D effects, I believe that this will pull the technology through to the home living room.

There is a precedent for this. Multichannel sound was developed for the movies back in the 50s. The four channel technology was too complex for home use, so home sound was designed for the two channels that we now call stereo. Before that time, high fidelity sound systems only had a single monaural channel. Just as the expectations were set in the movie theaters for three dimensional sound in the 50s, so may the expectation for three dimensional images be set in movie theaters now.

I expect that it will take years before 3D video takes hold in the home market, but the display industry is ready. All the new Samsung rear projection HDTVs announced for this year have support for 3D images. The early adopters are likely to be the game console enthusiasts, but I believe that it is likely that 3D video could catch on quickly once it gets started.

Rear projection HDTV sales continue to defy rational analysis as buyers choose to spend an extra $1,000 or more to get a flat panel model instead. One development on the near horizon that could change this is the arrival of the Laser TV.

A Laser TV is really a rear projection HDTV that replaces the projection lamp (or high brightness LEDs) with lasers as the lighting source. This creates a number of advantages. First, the lasers are solid state devices and effectively last forever. Okay, not forever maybe, but longer than the rest of the TV is likely to last. So there’s no expensive lamp to change every year or two.

Also, the laser light is a coherent light beam that does not spread out the way light from a lamp or LED does. This makes the lighting much more efficient, as the light does not stray as much and more ends up on the screen. This means that the beams do not have to be focused and controlled as much, eliminating expensive optics. Fewer optics means a much thinner case design, which solves another problem with rear projection HDTVs. And the lasers put out carefully controlled colored light; the color does not shift with time or temperature as can happen with other light sources.

So yesterday, I got to see a demonstration model put together by the laser manufacturer Novalux. Their engnineers took a stock LCoS rear projection HDTV from a major manufacturer, and tore out its insides. They removed the lamp and related optics, and coupled the lasers directly with the three LCoS imager panels. How did it look? It was great. The colors were remarkably rich and saturated. The blacks were deep, which helped give the color more snap. The only major problem was speckle; the laser beams are so accurate that they create a pattern that almost shimmers. This can be solved by making the beams slightly less accurate, using a vibrating diffuser to mix up the beams a little before they reach the screen.

So when can you expect to see one of these new displays in commercial production? Multiple sources have told me that they should be on sale in time for the 2007 holiday buying season. So in another six months, you should be able to see Laser TV for yourself.

What’s the right technology for your next HDTV? Find out in Professor Poor’s Guide to Buying HDTV, now available in paperback from Amazon or other fine booksellers.

I am the first to admit that I have been bearish on plasma HDTVs. The rising tide of LCD has steadily eroded plasma’s market share, taking over larger and larger segments until we have reached the point where LCD owns the flat panel market below 50”, and is threatening to take over the 50” to 60” segment. Philips has announced plans to drop plasma from their lines everywhere but North America. LG Electronics will close the oldest of its four plasma fabrication plants. It seems that the only optimistic sign in the market is the fact that Matsushita — parent company of Panasonic — is going to double down on its plasma bet and build an enormous new plant; is this an act of desperation or do they know something we don’t know?

Well, already this week at the Society for Information Display conference in Long Beach, CA, I’ve found a couple of data points that may make me rethink my ideas about the future of plasma HDTVs.

First, Ross Young of DisplaySearch alluded to a technological development that will increase the light output per watt of a plasma panel by three or four times the current levels. This could result in lowering production costs by as much as one third. This means that a panel that costs $1,800 today could sell for $1,200 and maintain the same profit margin percentages for manufacturers and retailers. Such a price drop could do wonders for the unit sales of plasma HDTVs, and put pressure on LCD HDTV prices for a change. According to Ross, we’re about two years away from mass production of this new plasma panel architecture.

An even more significant development was on display at the DuPont booth. The company has developed a Transfer Materials Technology — TMT — that can be used to create the barrier ribs in a plasma panel. These are the physical elements that divide the vertical lines of the panel and define the horizontal pixels. This new process can make ribs with a pitch as small as 20 microns. This is more than small enough to easily create 1080p resolution in a 42” panel, and the process actually is simpler and more environmentally friendly than traditional processes. This development could result in plasma HDTVs with true 1080p resolution, which will be essential for plasma to continue to compete effectively against true 1080p LCD HDTVs.

Will these new advances be enough to save plasma HDTVs from being sandwiched by LCD and rear projection models? It depends on whether or not they can actually deliver the predicted cost savings and resolution improvement, but if they can, they stand a good chance to claw some of the market share back from LCD.

One fact is becoming clear in the HDTV market; 1080p wins. It wins for a number of reasons, some good and some not so good. One of the weaker reasons is that many consumers shop by comparing specifications; 1080p has more pixels than 720p and more must be better, so 1080p wins. A more solid reason is that the 1080i broadcast content should look better on 1080p than 720p, as it does not require image scaling, so there should be no visible scaling artifacts. And for some technologies, 1080p costs little or no more than 720p. Rear projection is one area where 1080p is taking over rapidly.

You don’t need to look any further than Mitsubishi’s newly-announced line of DLP rear projection HDTVs. All nine models have 1080p resolution. The 733 Series comes in three sizes: the 57″ WD-57733 ($2,499), 65″ WD-65733 ($2,999), and 73″ WD-73733 ($4,699). They feature a six-color light engine and three HDMI 1.3 inputs. The 734 Series comes in the same sizes add dynamic contrast within the image and a front HDMI connector: 57″ WD-57734 ($2,799), the 65″ WD-65734 (no price yet), and the 73″ WD-73734 (no price yet).

The Diamond Series is the top of the line, adding 3D support, FireWire (IEEE 1394), and an RS-232C serial port connector: 57″ WD-57833 ($3,399), the 65″ WD-65833 ($3,999), and the 73″ WD-73833 ($5,899).

Confused about which technology is right for you? The answer is inProfessor Poor’s Guide to Buying HDTV, now available in paperback from Amazon or other fine booksellers.

Okay, I’ve written in the past about diamonds in HDTVs, but they have been cosmetic features, intended to differentiate the model with a little bling. And yes, diamonds are pure carbon crystals, so in a sense you could say that using carbon nanotubes in a display technology would be a little like using diamonds. But I’m here to talk about using real diamonds to create the picture on the screen.

Field emitter displays — FEDs – have been pursued by many companies for a dozen years or more. The concept is compellingly simple. If you want to have a thin screen that gives you a picture as bright and colorful as a CRT picture tube, then all you need to do is replace the big electron guns with microscopic electron emitters behind each individual pixel. Companies have tried using all sorts of semiconductor emitters — Canon’s stunning SED screen is a variation on this theme — and some are trying to use carbon nanotubes as emitters. These solutions all have production or performance or lifetime issues.

A group of researchers at the University of Bristol have come up with a new approach. They have found a way to use diamond dust as an electron emitter source. When processed with lithium, the nano-diamond crystals become highly efficient emitters. Simply coat a substrate with the special powder and you’re in business. And you don’t have to isolate the diamond dust from oxygen, which destroys carbon nanotubes.

Now, this may sound like a display that only The Donald could afford, but you may be surprised. Industrial diamonds cost less than $1 per carat, and the researchers estimate that the emitter material could be produced for just $.20 per square meter. That’s about enough to coat a 50″ HDTV screen.

We’ve seen lots of enthusiastic and optimistic claims about FEDs in the past, but if these folks are truly onto something here, we could quickly be made to forget SED and OLED and other novel technologies, and we could see an affordable challenge to the reigning plasma and LCD flat panel HDTV technologies.

Sony has reported dismal financials for last year, due in large part to all the money they lost on the Playstation 3 by selling them with Blu-ray drives at less than the manufacturing costs. Now Toshiba is turning up the heat in the high definition DVD race by cutting prices on their HD DVD models.

A new rebate program offers $100 off the entry level HD-A2 model, starting Sunday, May 20. This drops the price by 25% to $299. And for the last week of the promotion, June 10 through 16, the $100 rebate will apply to any of Toshiba’s HD DVD players. During that time, consumers who also purchase a Toshiba HDTV 42″ or larger will get an additional $100 rebate.

Toshiba is also running a separate promotion; through July 31, any customer who purchases a Toshiba HD DVD player will receive their choice of five HD DVD titles from a list of 15 titles that include Apollo 13, Dukes of Hazard, Blazing Saddles, and The Perfect Storm.

The bottom line here is that Toshiba is willing to assign significant resources to promote HD DVD, especially as we enter the slow season for consumer electronics sales. And you can expect that these discounts will become permanent by the time that the holiday season rolls around. The HD DVD camp has a strong price advantage over Blu-ray, and these prices will make it more difficult for both Blu-ray and the new hybrid Blu-ray/HD DVD drives to compete for consumer dollars.