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
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