MicroDisplay Claims Progress Toward Elusive LCoS

zajaco0 writes "USA Today posted an article that talks about the LCoS (liquid crystal on silicon) technology that is being researched for the next thin, big-screen TVs. Big companies invest millions of dollars researching this technology and none of them seem to be making any headway. The companies who have this project on their failed list include Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Intel, and Philips. MicroDisplay seems to be making some progress though, says the company's CEO: 'After 22 designs, 320 man-years, a 50% staff of Ph.Ds, and $50 million, you end up with a design that works.'"

Comments

Great...

[goldspider]

The more they dump into R&D, the more they can justify selling the damn things for. I'm not going to hold my breath until one of these finds its way into my living room.

Re:Great...

[stratjakt]

I was promised by our corporate masters that by now an LCD computer monitor would be less than a CRT.

To hell with all of 'em. A team of PhD's working around the clock to invent a more expensive replacement to current tech.

Bah

Re:50 million

[Manan Shah]

By well, if you mean 'not so well', then yes. Compared to management, a lot of phD's don't make all that much in research. Most people go into research (any type of research) because they are intrested in the field and subject.

Consider the source

[Anonymous Coward]

USA today. The mouthpiece of marketing droids everywhere. Call me cynical, but I'll believe it when I see one down at Best Buy.

If and first you don't succeed?

[jacobcaz]

• "After 22 designs, 320 man-years, a 50% staff of Ph.Ds, and $50 million, you end up with a design that works."

How many tries did it take Edison to invent the light bulb? Thousands. This is a little more tricky than building a light bulb that can last for 1000 hours.

Edison himself said, "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."

Re:If and first you don't succeed?

[Anonymous Coward]

"How many tries did it take Edison to invent the light bulb?" I don't know, why don't you ask the people he pushed and then took the credit?

Re:If and first you don't succeed?

[Monkelectric]

Edison was stupid. He just tried to dumb luck into the right solution. If he had had ANY brains in his head he could have reasoned what he was looking for:

A metal with the some of the following properties: high tensile strength, high melting point and a low evaporation rate.

He then would have talked to a few chemists, who surely by 1900 would have had lists of the properties of chemicals, elements and alloys. He would have selected a few that looked promising, tested them, and hopefully tungsten would have been on the list.

Re:If and first you don't succeed?

[Cryptnotic]

Hindsight is 20/20.

Anyway, Edison wasn't much of a scientist, he was a better entrepeneur.

Re:Price!

[stratjakt]

I've said it before, even in this thread..

But the first to market with a 27" or higher HDTV for under 500 bucks will own the market. Whether it's flat or boxy, it doesn't matter.

I say 27" arbitrarily, that seems like a common minimum size for the set in most families' living rooms.

Why can't they just make a cheap high res CRT? A 15" VGA monitor can display HDTV resolutions, so just make one thats 27", and eliminate all the multi-syncing crap, 30fps is all it needs.

Seriously, what's the barrier in just scaling up a plain VGA monitor with a fixed refresh of 60hz? Would that not, in theory, be right around the price range of a standard CRT?

Plasmas, LCDs, OLEDs, LCoS, SED... None of that will be cheap in my lifetime, no matter what the developers of the tech say.

Re:I'll buy one when they build one that'll last..

[the eric conspiracy]

Now for the actuall facts.

Those $3000 TVs are usually purchased with an extended warranty. Cost: $200 year. It is a full replacement warranty that covers everything including cleaning and bulb replacement. Normal life of TV: at least 5 years. More typically 7 years.

Cost for a 60" HDTV: more like $600 - $800 per year. For a family with a $100,000 year income that is less than 1%.

Re:I'll buy one when they build one that'll last..

[Qzukk]

Normal life of TV: at least 5 years. More typically 7 years.

Hooray technological progress!

We have a ~20 year old TV that worked perfectly fine until about 2 months ago when it blew one of the capacitors in the color system. Still works fine, but any green on the screen "glows" now.

We bought a new TV and fully expect this piece of junk to work for 5 years. You can't even pay for the kind of quality you got 2 decades ago, it seems.