Slashdot Mirror
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".
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.
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
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.
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
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
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?
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.
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