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Laser TV — the Death of Plasma?
spoco2 writes, "As reported in major news outlets yesterday in Australia (The Age, the Herald Sun), a new television technology has been developed which is touted (by the developers) as far and away superior to both plasma and LCD. From The Age: 'With a worldwide launch date scheduled for Christmas 2007, under recognisable brands like Mitsubishi and Samsung, Novalux chief executive Jean-Michel Pelaprat is so bold as to predict the death of plasma. "If you look at any screen today, the color content is roughly about 30-35 per cent of what the eye can see," he said. "But for the very first time with a laser TV we'll be able to see 90 per cent of what the eye can see. All of a sudden what you see is a lifelike image on display."' The developing company, Arasor International, is said to be listing on the Australian stock exchange shortly."
Where's the white paper explaining how this works? Did I miss that article on ArsTechnica?
moox. for a new generation.
I found this link on the optical information: red, green & blue lasers.
This is real, and currently the only barrier is that red lasers aren't as stable / powerful / easy to create as blue & green ones.
If Novalux have overcome this, then real TVs using this tech will be on the market in 12-24 months.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Even if laser tech allows one to see amazing 99.99% of what their eyes can see.. it'll just not a make a lot of difference.
We have incredibly humongous content in digital RGB, YUV, PAL, NTSC, movie reel formats. These formats contain only what you can see on an existing TV. Hence an DVD would look as vibrant on a normal plasma as on this laser.
Now of course things are not as simple, since for advertising purposes they'll scale the range up to demo the colors. If they overdo it though, they'll just skew the picture too much and receive at grotesque results.
There's a point where a tech is just "good enough" and color representation of a *modern* TFT (notice the stress) or plasma is sufficient.
Laser TV's may succeed if one or more of the following are met though:
- longer life, more durable
- less power consumption
- more portable (?)
- cheaper
I agree. The best CRTs are very very good, at least until the CRT starts to have problems. However it's rare to see a good CRT these days. I have some old Apple CRT monitors that are exceptionally good, but for every one of those, there were probably a thousand ghastly low end monitors with 60Hz refresh rate, greenish tint, and a convex surface guaranteed to turn any light source into glare no matter how you position them.
The thing about LCDs and plasma is that they are consistent. There's less art to making a decent one or scaling it up in size, its simply a matter of cost.
Cheap but consistent mediocrity is usually an engineering win. If it can be marketed as "high end", it spells big margins. Think SUV.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The problem with the extended colour gamut of the new system is that existing source material is based on the sRGB colour space, which encompasses roughly 35% of the eye's gamut. Anything shorter wavelength than blue, such as spectral violet; many saturated greens and oranges, and most cyans are not available, and the nearest colour is used.
We're all used to this, so when a violet flower is shown as purple (red + blue) on our displays, we don't question it. But try putting a vase of violets next to your TV and you'll see the difference.
Some proper digital photography setups try to improve on the situation using colour profiles, which is simply a lookup table to transform the RGB colours in the file to absolute colour values.
Digital cameras can record colours outside sRGB, so if you ensure your workflow never enforces that constraint, you can end up with a file that can be printed using colours your monitor can't see.
Typically, the input file (usually a raw camera file) is transformed via a device profile (representing the camera's actual spectral response) into a working space (a device-independent space for editing). Whilst editing, the image is viewed using a transform to sRGB (or your display's output profile, if you've calibrated it), but this restriction is for viewing only and doesn't change the file. Then, when you print, the image is converted via a device profile for your printer to print to the extremes of its capabilities - which may exceed sRGB in some colours (e.g. cyan), and be even worse in others (e.g. pure blue).
To make use of this new TV system, we'd need something similar - wide-gamut source material, and device profiles for each set (or simply assume sRGB as default, for backwards-compatibility). Otherwise, it's like listening to music mixed for cheap portable radios (i.e. most current CDs) on a real hi-fi system.
Ydco co
Current displays including LCD, plasma, and CRT are all based on each pixel creating coloured light by mixing light from three separate colour sources. The generic problem with colour mixtures is that for any given triple of colour light sources, there are always certain colours that cannot be created by any mixture of the three light sources.
The new laser tv display is different because each pixel is created by light from a tunable laser . The tunable laser can emit light at any wavelength in the spectrum of visible light. Each pixel gets precisely the correct wavelength for the particular colour that is required at that pixel, thus avoiding the problem of the limited set of colours that can be created by light mixtures of three different sources
Scroogle
Yeah, I think it's to do with purity of the component colour frequencies. Maybe current technologies produce, for example, a red which would look like a bell curve on a frequency graph instead of a sharp peak, meaning less faithful representations of those component colours. Maybe the grass really is greener on the other screen :P
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
The new laser tv display is different because each pixel is created by light from a tunable laser
I was wondering about that! It didn't seem feasible to me (given my limited knowledge on the technology) that they would've been able to "tune" a laser's frequency rapidly enough to scan the entire display. That's many millions of different "frequencies" per second! That's exactly what I was hoping for until I read TFA, which didn't seem to mentioned that at all.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Plasma is way overrated. It's expensive for the cost/year factor over the lifetime of the unit and it's temerature sensitive and pressure sensitive. Where I live, that matters.
I live in a mountainous state and if I wanted to buy a plasma to take into the mountains to a relative that lives there, it ain't happening. I have to buy a different rated plasma for the altitude (So says Best Buy, Circuit City, and Frys Electronics in the metropolitan area that has dealt with returns because of people doing exactly that)
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
For example, a Feb-16 article in Engadget...
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Traditional displays can't properly emulate shiny objects... It has to do with color reproduction no amount of resolution will help it... hence why TFA makes mention of traditional displays only capable of display 30 to 35% of the colors our eyes are capable of seeing while the laser display is capable of closer to 90%. Plasmas are better then most in this department which is why it was chosen for comparison.
Collector's Edition
But this particular product is a television, not a computer display. The colour of each pixel on a television is controlled by chrominance signals. Chrominance spans the entire u,v (for PAL TV) or i,q (for NTSC TV) colour spaces. This is one reason why chrominance is a useful way of representing colour.
Scroogle
I know you're being sarcastic, but this actually is what I want in a monitor. All the current drivers for LCD's have DAC's w/ only 8bpc, which makes them pretty much unsuitable for doing critical color-correction work.
As for frame rate, I'm happy with 24 - though response time of the screen is a serious issue with LCDs -- not so much for my professional work, but as a comsumer the lag really bothers me.
As for content -- I agree, but I think that discussion is orthoganal to this one.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
Actually, there's up to four frequencies eye cones can be tuned to: the fourth one is tuned to orange (see here), and appears in about 32% of the population. If you add up the rods being tuned to yet another frequency (between blue and green), five frequencies would probably be needed to present colours that cover efficiently the eye range.
I'd rate them as not vapor.
Yes, some entrepeneurs will push the envelope when trying to introduce something new. I used to work at Mitel Corp, which made business telephone systems. After much pre-announcement, we were supposed to roll out our SX-200 at a major trade show. Unfortunately, the software wasn't fully debugged, and so the thing didn't work properly. So Terry Matthews (that's Sir Terry now, of course) went out, bought a NorTel SL-1, and installed it at the back of the booth behind a curtain. They ran cables out to the SX-200, which was to all intents and purposes an empty shell. Everyone thought the SX-200 was fantastic, we got a lot of pre-orders, and when the software was debugged just a few months later, the SX-200 became one of the most successful PBX's of all time.
So there's certainly precedent for the idea of presenting something as a "done deal" while it's still in development. The question is, will the Laser TV actually appear in the market, as the SX-200 did?
And will we need goggles to watch it? The goggles.. they do nothing!
What was once true, is no longer so
It's actually the fact that, at a constant intensity, the color gamut (visible hues) isn't triangular - it's only approximately so, and curved. With any number of colors, all you can get is a linear combination, which, at a constant intensity, ends up being a convex polygon. So with three, you can impose a triangle of color over the sort-of-triangular gamut. The more colors you can combine to make the vertices of the polygon, the better coverage you get.
I'm not sure what this has to do with a laser display, though. They may be able to get further from the center (more toward the rounded corners) of the gamut with their lasers, which would increase coverage.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
http://img.timeinc.net/popsci/images/wn/wn0805proj TV_730xslide1.jpg
I was actually at the launch at the Hilton Hotel on Tuesday night.
The technology is amazing - the demo (ie, not production) version they had there was incredible, even without comparing it to any other screens or technology.
Whether they can get it out by Christmas 2007 at the price point they claim is something I will believe when I see. However, the tech is real and quite remarkable.