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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."
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.
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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
For example, a Feb-16 article in Engadget...
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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