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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."
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This is extremeley disappointing. After seeing the technology at this past CES, I've specifically held off buying an HDTV to wait until next spring to get one of these.
With Toshiba canceling their LCOS earlier this year, and now this, I'm starting to wonder exactly what is wrong with LCOS. I've heard rumors that the yield isn't high enough, but still.
From what I was told at CES, Intel was hoping to revolutionize TVs like they did computers. Their goal in creating a LCOS chipset was to basically create a motherboard for TVs. Want to build a 36" LCOS HDTV tv? Use this board plus this chip. Want a 50"? Same board with a slightly bigger socket to hold the chip / mirror.
It wasn't even the price reduction that got me excited - the quality of the picture was supposed to have been a step up from current DLP (and at half the price, I wasn't going to complain). Ah well, back to drooling over the Samsung or JVC DLPs.
Now that it can continue its hold on big-screen technology, Texas Instruments can implement its new plan to please geeks everywhere...the big screen graphing calculator! No more squinting to see how that integral came out with the TI-8900--no sir!
Live free or die
Perhaps this is a little off topic, but can someone explain to me why there is such a huge price discrepency between standard 4:3 televisions and standard widescreen televisions? For instance, here in Australia a 68cm 4:3 Sony TV costs around A$850-900. A 76cm widescreen costs about A$2000-2500.
Am I missing something obvious, or is this just blatant pimping of the market while demand for widescreens is high? I can't see why there would be much more tech involved in a widescreen vs. standard ratio screen.
As a secondary question (for extra credit), are people really so dumb that they don't realise that a large 4:3 TV is the same *width* as a marginally smaller 'widescreen' TV at a fraction of the price? If consumers are this dumb, what hope is there for market-driven 'evolution' of technology?
Read Pynchon.
For reference on the value of DLP systems, I had my 43" DLP TV serviced by a technician (under warranty of course) because of startup problems and he replaced the light engine. The light engine is basically all of the important parts of the TV (DLP chip, control circuitry and optics) which is built onto one large assembly.
Being an electrical engineer I of course asked what he was going to do with the old one, I mean it still worked 95% of the time. He told me that they get sent back to Samsung (probably to be reworked) and that they are an $1800 assembly. Basically this tells me that if you add on the rest of the components (outer case, projection surface, input jacks and circuitry) a price of about $2200-$2400 is not too unreasonable for what most would consider a luxury item.
It turns out that I didn't do too poorly when I bought it for about $2600 new after a crazy set of good deals that included a sale on large TVs, a $300 rebate sign that was left out on the floor past the rebate period (hooray for threats of false advertising!) and no sales tax =)
This unit normally sold for about $3500
For further reference, Samsung DLPs are awesome.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!