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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."
"The developing company, Arasor International, is said to be listing on the Australian stock exchange shortly."
I'll believe that it's the 'death of plasma' when I see it, not when the company touting the technology is just trying to pump up their pending IPO.
Do not stare into laser with remaining eye!
:(
Oh, errrrr damn but I'll miss battlestar
liqbase
I must say I'm not too impressed with the picture quality of the plasma- and LCD TV's we can buy here in the Netherlands. Especially if you take the price into account. I'm glad I've bought one of the last CRT widescreen TV's a few years back. My old CRT IIyama monitor is also better than most LCD flat monitors you can buy today. Hopefully this new technology will deliver the colours and the viewing angles we have become accustomed to from CRT's!
-- Cheers!
the brilliance of the light emitted has little to do with the range of colours the TV can produce. Seeing more shades of red isnt going to blind you.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Ah, a true geek. Considering "almost like stepping outside from a dark room" to be "quite dangerous".
Where's the white paper explaining how this works? Did I miss that article on ArsTechnica?
moox. for a new generation.
CRTs are traditionally analogue, and as such are capable of reproducing many more shades of certain colours than are perceptible by the human eye. LCD/Plasma displays traditionally have at *least* 18-bit DACs which is not enough to avoid visible colour banding - granted. And that's got nothing to do with the display technology (LCD/Plasma/CRT/etc) - as I understand it, that is simply a limitation of the DAC. I don't know what current standards are but I would be surprised to find that current DACs are generally capable of less than 8 bits per colour channel.
I am still quite certain they're talking about intensity range, not granularity.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Why not try forming an opinion on it based on things they've actually confirmed and denied?
Half the weight and size of a plasma TV. Uses a quarter of the power to the same effect. Increases the range of colours displayed from 30% of what we are able to conceive to 90%. Costs half the price of a plasma screen.
"Oh, but they never said whether or not they support these three completely random display connectors so obviously it's a waste of time."
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut
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
Yep, that's what I've always felt was lacking in TVs.
Not higher frame rates, so it doesn't turn into a blur whenever something moves.
Not more pixels, so it doesn't look like a blur whenever something doesn't move.
Not better content, so I'd actually watch it.
No, what I've always wanted, is more bits per pixel.
Price and formfactor is what matters.
Even though Plasma looks far better than LCD, the average consumer cannot really distinguish image quality (many consumers prefer a overly color saturated SD display over a well-calibrated HD display).
They plan for this next year, SED has been planning to enter the market for several years, too.
The problem for all of them is that some companies like Panasonic are able through mass-production and new factories to really push the price down for Plasma displays.
If they can make screens even flatter and brighter and at a low price, it might have a chance to succeed.
If it is just an expensive, better looking device, it can only survive in a fringe market.
Good link. The main bit of relevant information in there is that lasers are able to produce more saturated (read: pure) colours.
:)
Would it seem rather that the near 3-fold increase they are are talking about is the ratio of the areas of the two shapes in this graph? So it's not all about brightness then...
I'd expect that many people, like me, are so used to subconsciously compensating for the inadequacies of normal displays that they hardly see the deficiencies compared to real life. I'm looking forward to seeing one of these now
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
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
This is going to be a huge-ass TV set.
Unless they somehow find a way to shrink the laser-wielding shark.
One of the major problems with using lasers for displays is speckle, the random interference patterns that develop as the highly coherent laser beam hits the display screen (whose surface is far from smooth when compared to the wavelengths of laser used). This greatly diminishes the quality of display and more importantly, anyone sitting in front of this for extended period is likely to get headache and temporary vision problems.
Extended field trails on psychophysical effects are needed before such technology is approved by FDA or equivalent regulatory organizaiton.
And out of all those colors it can display, the one that will be seen the most is green...as in the big piles of green you have to hand over to buy one when they first come out.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
I think they are indeed talking about color range (frequency range) rather than intensity. Classic screens only produce 3 very discrete colors (red, green and blue), in varying intensities. The sensitivity of the receptors in the eye has a wider band. (that's why you can see laser light that doesn't exactly meet the peak sensitivity of your receptors).
Maybe This new technology produces light with bandwidths that match the sensitivity of the eye's receptors better?
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
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
"Half the weight and size of a plasma TV. Uses a quarter of the power to the same effect. Increases the range of colours displayed from 30% of what we are able to conceive to 90%. Costs half the price of a plasma screen."
What, and you believe that?
It costs half the price of a plasma? Yeah, I'll believe that when I see it. You really think if this tech actually works they'll sell it that level? No. Better picture - more expensive. Smaller/lighter - more expensive. Combine the two.. get ready to mortgage your house for small one. Manufacturing cost has nothing to do with it - things are *not* sold for what they cost to produce. They are sold for what people are prepared to pay.
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
Probably they use 3 laser diodes here in primary colors in to create an RGB image on a white phosphor screen. The lasers can be modulated in an analogue way, so it will have better intensity dynamics than LCD.
Also, the pixels will be sharper, because you don't need 3 phosphor colors and a mask (one pixel instead of RGB pixels). Using mirrors, they can fold the path of the screen and create thin TVs.
They sound crazy to me. I
n the first place, I seriously doubt that there's any meaningful way of measuring the "percentage coverage" of a gamut of colors, since the mapping of colors into a plane is somewhat arbitrary and there are two very different systems in wide use. I notice that this comparison of Adobe RGB vs. sRGB doesn't try to estimate any "percentages."
Neither does Poynton's invaluable Color FAQ.
Second, if we're talking about something like "area included in the CIE xy plane by thus and such system of reproduction" as a percentage of "area included by the entire spectrum," I seriously doubt that you can get a number anything like 90% with only three primaries. You're still trying to approximate a blobby blunt shape with an inscribed triangle.
The article is so vague on details that it's not clear how many primary colors are used. If it uses six primaries instead of three, I'm prepared to believe it could give meaningfully better color than traditional systems. How important that is remains to be seen. HDTV gives obviously, dramatically better picture quality (in terms of resolution) than traditional TV, but it doesn't seem to be setting the world on fire.
The big question, of course, is where one would find program material encoded with more than three primaries; it would need to be specially recorded for this system (requiring new video, broadcast, and optical disk standards).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Does it have any fricken sharks in it?
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.
This TV will use most of the same technology that already exists. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lcos and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLP. I haven't seen a major revolt against DLP due to lorry traffic yet. All they are changing is the light source from a lamp to a laser. Now, you can assume that in order to generate the same image brightness then the same amount of energy has to hit the screen with a laser and a lamp. However, ALL of the laser's energy is used on the screen as opposed to a regular lamp which loses a lot of energy to heat through radiation in directions other than towards the screen. With all that, I'd argue that a laser based TV would generate a lot less heat than one with a lamp.
Probably they use 3 laser diodes here in primary colors in to create an RGB image on a white phosphor screen. The lasers can be modulated in an analogue way, so it will have better intensity dynamics than LCD.
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Nice guess, but it's really just illuminating a "standard" Texas Instruments DLP chip with three lasers instead of a hot mercury lamp and a spinning color wheel.
It should be a huge improvement, but it'll still be DLP projection.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/03/business/03hdtv
Manufacturing cost has nothing to do with it - things are *not* sold for what they cost to produce. They are sold for what people are prepared to pay.
Incorrect. Things are sold at a price to maximize profits. As price goes up, you'll attract less people to buy your product. These guys don't have a monopoly on televisions, so people will just buy something else if it's too expensive. I just bought a new TV and didn't even consider the HDTV sets because it was just too expensive. I could have afforded it if I _really_ wanted to, but it just wasn't worth twice the price for HDTV. I might have considered the HDTV if it was $500 vs the $400 I paid for the SDTV though.
AccountKiller
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.
Laser TV has existed for a long time using Argon (blue, green) and Krypton (red) lasers as a white light source (either mixed gas or two lasers) The color is chosen using an AOM or a PCAOM (see a patent for laser TV at: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6426781.html ).
The new breakthrough is that we have solid state Diode Pumped Solid State lasers (specifically high power DPSS), you should be familiar with the 532nm green laser pointers. The green is achived through frequency doubling 1064nm infared DPSS lasers. Red lasers need not be frequency doubled because they can manufacture Diode lasers to that frequency and is available in higher power ranges. Blue DPSS lasers were developed, usign 808nm infared lasers frequency doubled, the power available is still really low, (and I can't wait to rip apart a blue ray drive to get the laser out!) and the lasers are extremely expensive. Hopefully with greater production of blue lasers the prices will go down.
The next issue to deal with in the U.S. (I don't know austrailian law) lasers are regulated by the FDA and any laser over the power of 5mw that exposes radiation to the public has to have an FDA varience to legally operate. I am wondering how this TV would be classified. I really would prefer a solid state DPSS laser projector to replace easily broken, expensive to maintain, LCD projectors. If you need more information about this technology sam's laser faq, and the guys at alt.lasers are nice and answer questions.
Peace,
Adam
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.