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Intel Delays TV Chip Launch
portscan writes "The Financial Times is reporting that Intel has dropped a planned technology that would have halved the price of big-screen televisions by year end. This is the latest mistep in Intel's consumer market strategy. Slashdot has reported on the technology, LCOS, before."
404 on the /. link
Maybe he meant this article.
michael greene
You bring up some great points. Occasionally, the smaller widescreen TV's will be more oriented towards the HDTV market so some of them will have HDTV tuners built in whereas most 4:3 screens won't. I personally prefer for my TV just to be a monitor and I'll provide the tuner. For just the point you mentioned I bought the 40" Sony Wega 4:3. It's letterbox picture is the same as the 34" Sony widescreen. So when I watch HDTV on it (via Samsung T-351 tuner) it's the same picture, but then with regular TV the picture is huge. And the price... the same if not a little less than the 34" model. -Troy
A lot of 4:3 TVs do anamorphic squeeze too, so you can get the same resolution by collapsing the vertical scan height. It looks very nice. Until most of the video (TV, games, cable, DVD) you watch goes widescreen, there is little reason to get a widescreen with such large price discrepencies. It is sad that for less money you can get a wider 4:3 screen which will make even the 16:9 image area larger, and for 4:3 video, you get a MUCH bigger screen.
It's not so much the aspect ratio as it is the underlying technology. All the 4:3 TVs out on the market today are CRT-based or CRT-based Rear Projection. this technology has been around for many a year now, and it nice a cheap to produce, and hence sell at a low price. The hot new TV technologies that we are seeing in these widescreen TVs are such things as DLP, LCOS, and RPLCD (I'm not even going to touch on LCD or Plasma). These have some benefits such as a much thinner, lighter set (sub 100 lbs), no image burn-in, and arguably a better picture (big topic of debate). I am sure that companies like Texas Instruments (DLP) and Intel (LCOS) are charging a nice chunk of change for the chips. I think that most manufacturers are trying to sell the new tvs because once they ramp up production, It's going to be a lot cheaper in the long run, especially when your entire set consists of essentially a chip, a screen, and a bulb. and FWIW, I have not seen many of these new projection TVs in sizes smaller than, oh, say 42" (~106cm), so even at that size, the 4:3 image displayed would be larger than most CRT tube TVs. Besides, have you *tried* moving a CRT tv larger than 32"/ ~80cm?
Interesting. Up until I did some research to refute your post, I had never heard of a single-chip LCoS set. I thought DLP was the only technology to use a color wheel. Every LCoS projector or RPTV set that I've ever seen is a three-chip solution, including Toshiba's 61" RPTV monster from last year, and JVC's D-ILA series of front projectors .
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