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Canon-Toshiba Joint Venture On SED Collapses
An anonymous reader writes "SED (Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display) displays were supposed to be the brightest, most energy-efficient TVs to hit the market, so Canon and Toshiba created a joint venture in 2004 to capitalize on the emerging technology. The resulting entity, SED Inc., was sued in 2005 by Nano-Proprietary, the company that licensed SED technology to Canon in 1999. Nano-Proprietary says that the deal it signed with Canon doesn't extend to Toshiba. Rather than continue to fight the lawsuit and delay SED even further, Canon has now decided to buy out Toshiba's stake in SED Inc." Canon says that SED TVs will be delivered on time in Q4 of this year, but volume manufacturing (which Toshiba was supposed to handle) is being rethought.
Has anyone seen one of these? How do they compare to the top of the line LCD and Plasma screens? Is the picture hugely better, or are the main benefits in the power saving?
It looks like a good idea (the TVs.) Unfortunately, legal "mumbo jumbo" has, as always, gotten in the way. I don't see why Cannon had to give up, they could have probably dealt with it in court. Now the world can't replace their 2-day old, state-of-the-art 50in. plasma high-def sets. (sniffle) I don't like the idea of this split, and hopefully they'll find some way to make it work out. But Toshiba will probably hate Cannon temporarily, especially with the "Canon had planned to exploit Toshiba for its 'mass-production technologies,'" remark. (They'll get over it, because Cannon will try to pay big $$$ for them to produce something else:) I simply don't get it. Toshiba will come up with an alternative within a year, all the switching engineers will quit ASAP, and Cannon will find a way to produce the sets, but will be in debt forevermore. I hate deals like this, and I doubt it will be nearly perfect in the long-run. Oh well.
If ya cant beat 'em, Buy 'em!
How the hell did I get such bad karma? I blame the meds...
Well, guess this just means that we'll need to wait even longer for SED sets that anybody other than Bill Gates can afford.
This display seems like a very interesting step forward. Huge Contrast ratios (in the tens of thousands), fast response time, and a very nice viewing angle. I just wonder how long after they hit the consumer market that they will be in the common living room. Besides the hardcore enthusiasts, people will not be anxious to give up their brand new LCD flat panel TV and replace it with one of these. Oh, and one thing they should test for in QA is how hard of a throw it can withstand by someone who lets go of their Wii Remote.
This is a great example of non-news being used in an attempt to stir up some Patents Suck shit here. Nano-Proprietary owns some technology that Toshiba doesn't wish to pay the price for. This get's in the way of the SED venture, so Canon buys 'em out. Earth-shaking. Down with patents, blah, blah, blah...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
SED's were supposed to be in mass production and shipping in Japan in early 2006. I can see now why they haven't been actively marketed, and have even been pulled from US trade shows.
And here I thought that SED stood for "Smoke Emitting Diode." I don't think those would make very good displays, though.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
But Toshiba will probably hate Cannon temporarily, especially with the "Canon had planned to exploit Toshiba for its 'mass-production technologies,'" remark.
Exploit is a transitive verb with two meanings/usages. "To make productive use of", and "to use unfairly to one's advantage."
Please help metamoderate.
A few months ago, I was wondering what happened to this tech, so I went searching. Turns out it has been in development for about 20 years, and it was first estimated to be out in the late 90's.
l ectron-emitter_display#History
I'm too lazy to look for a link..
Well, Wikipedia should say something about it...
Yep!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-conduction_e
So the deal was per unit per company involved? So if Canon had hired a catering company to help feed the workers then that company would of had to pay licencing fees too?
Canon is betting that Nano-Proprietary will capitulate now that their revenue stream is cut to zero for the time being. I suspect that we will see Canon and Toshiba back together in the near future once Nano-Proprietary caves in.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I believe LCD panels with LED backlight unit is going to wipe out all opponents in the market. Such a combination is by no mean superior to OLED or SED. However, both technologies of LCD an LED are owned by Taiwanese companies. Some of them are even ready to produce LCD panels with LED backlight units. Although the price of LED backlight unit is currently much more expensive that of traditional CCFL, it may be lowered to a relatively low level in the next few year. As a result, LCD will knock out all rivals in the world and dominate the market of flat display panel.
What's interesting to me is the bottom part of TFA titled "Legal Mumbo Jumbo". I haven't been following this, but it sure sounds like the case has been awfully contentious.
Most important though, the complaint is (1) that Toshiba wasn't licensed and (2) that there is a breech of the agreement with Canon over "excluded products" (among a bunch of other stuff). That might mean that - Toshiba or not - Canon's not going to be free of the lawsuit, and not going to be releasing SED products either. Curiously, Nano's site doesn't mention any other licensees of their technology. So...one has to wonder if Toshiba and Canon together can't get these things to market and make them competitive, then who are they hoping to find that can do it?
Seems to me the best move would've been to let Canon/Toshiba take them to market and then go after all the competitors (Sony, Phillips, Hitachi, etc) for a license when they try to enter the market. But I guess that's why I don't own a multi-billion dollar electronics company.
This sig intentionally left blank.
Just another shining example of people and patents getting in the way of innovation and the future. People need to realize that money isnt everything, and that the growth of our species is more important then someones wallet.
Support your local school shooter, give them your firearms.
Will SED technology be making it to the projector market? I mainly just watch movies, so projectors are really where my interest lies.
I'm wondering how small they'll eventually be able to get these. I wonder if they'll ever get to the point where they can fit one of these in a laptop. SEDs should only consume power proportional to the brightness of the display, so I could see light lettering on a dark background coming back; display less stuff, use less power.
Add an SED to a laptop with solid-state storage (which, by the time this is feasible, will be at least where laptop hard drives are today), and the continuing work on processors that can shut themselves down nicely, and we may get some truly efficient laptops out of the deal, that only use power when actually doing something. Imagine instead of "suspending", just setting a "blank the screen" screensaver, and ending up with about the same power usage as a suspended laptop of today, only your torrent is still going...
A man can dream.
Last displayed models had contrast in the millions, not tens of thousands... The reason, black is pretty much true black, i.e. no light emitted, only extremely limited bleed from pixels directly next to them due to the way the technology creates the light in the first place. LCD's have a backlight that can never really be gotten rid of until a per pixel backlight is created (or a per pixel block, i.e. every block of 4 or 16 pixels have their own controllable backlight).
The color space I believe is 24 bits, not the 10 bits that the best LCD have. This will really show itself when displaying colors in the magenta range.
I should be possible to place a refresh rate of 120Hz, but I do not know if they will do this. I think the limiting factor will be that they want to use the power savings of the set as a selling point, and having a refresh rate 2x the speed of the competition would mean you need to use almost 2x the power since that would mean sending 2x as many electrons through the nanotube guns of the emitters.
Viewing angles I believe are the same as for CRT based displays. It is essentially the same idea as a CRT, with the difference being that instead of a single gun that has magnets shape the electron gun waveform output to scan across the entire screen, the SED displays have 3 guns for each pixel (one for each of the sub-pixel colors). They still use an electron to excite a phosphor to emit a photon. The only difference is that the electrons are now being channeled and aimed using a nano-tube structure.
So it is truly the best of all worlds in terms of TV display technology, thin as a plasma, weight as a LCD, contrast and color space of the best CRTs, viewing angles of CRTs, resolution of LCDs/CRTs, and better power usage then any of them. Technically, it has the potential to blow away everything. But we all know that technology alone will not win the war. Cost considerations, usability, and reliability will all play a major role (as well as the ability to manufacture).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Legal bullshit being detrimental to consumers AND profits. Nothing new here.
This technology won't become profitable until after all the relevant and important patents expire. When that happens, it'll be other companies that profit from the technology, and not the companies that patented the ideas.
Since when has the US been run by lawyers? We didn't elect them so why do they have so much power over us? Companies are so quick to sue that there obviously is a problem here. Maybe the better system is to force a binding arbitration so both sides would rather settle than go to the court system. Most of these lawsuits seem to be about one group trying to extort money out of another group. We need to accept intent as being part of a contract. If they obviously had the best intentions then there should be no grounds and no lawsuit. The parties were trying to make a deal to get a product to market when the original party realized the contract didn't specifically cover this approach. Common sense needs to be applied. Too many lawsuits are about letter of the law than intent to defraud. We pay for this. Time to say stop your bickering and accept that a contract or patent/copyright can't possibly cover every condition that will ever arise. At the very least the looser should pay all court costs plus 10%. Rediculous that such things are causing legal gridlock and we have to pay the bulk of the expenses. It's bizzare that one word in a contract carries more weight than the intent of all parties.
In fact, it's N-P hard.
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
Why would the power increase that much? Maybe I'm not understanding part of the technology, but I would think that the electron stream would remain constant if there was no change in the color through a period of two cycles at the higher refresh rate. There may be a marginal increase in electricity use during a change in brightness level as an intermediary step may require more than would be used at the lower refresh rate, but I doubt that the overall use would be that much greater.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
colour space is not bit depth, and bit depth does not affect gamut.
referenced bit depth is of 10 bits per channel [RGB]; 24 is silly number.
power usage is not per frame. other errors too drunk to continue.
clueless poster posting at length again. cheers.
everything is closer than you think.
Events like these are among the most tragic in the business world as all they're doing is being destructive to their own areas of business. :-(
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I wonder if Cannon has bought an exclusive license to the tech. If so, they can hurt the patent trolls by sitting on the tech and not wasting any more money on it. From Cannon's POV they have to treat the licensing cost as lost money but if they needed Toshiba to manage volume production they are unlikely to make any profit from sales for years (because economies of scale won't help so they have to wait until tech advances enough to make MAKING the stuff cheaper).
'course they can't SAY they will do this because the trolls may come back with a damages claim, so you'd have to say "we will continue but won't be able to come to market with a sellable product because we've lost our manufacturing partner".
This blows,...... as one of the last remaining videophiles who won't snip his testicles off to use an LCD / Plasma or DLP I'm crushed.
This can only mean bad or highly priced things for SED.
All I damn well want is exactly the same quality picture as my beautiful CRT's only larger and lighter, hell you can even keep the cost somewhat (reasonably) higher. I can't deal with Plasma or LCD the picture is just "washy" and nasty - really nasty even sometimes when I begin to weaken and think "hell maybe this isn't so bad" in a store room - upon closer inspection I wonder - then I get home, check out my HD-CRT and breathe a sigh of releif and anguish....... it's just not big enough but damnit I'm not forgoing this quality for something bigger.
I hear the SXRD's are good from Sony, (green blob rumours aside) - guess I'll just keep on waiting.
http://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=26219
"Restructuring of Canon's ownership position does not resolve the pending litigation which goes to trial in a few weeks," said Tom Bijou, Chief Executive Officer of Nano-Proprietary, Inc. "We have terminated Canon's license as a result of breach of contract. Moreover, our complaint against Canon includes other counts, including fraud unrelated to the ownership of SED. We are, however, willing to enter into a new license agreement with Canon on reasonable terms."
From all I have found, the fraud appears to be related to the inclusion of Toshiba without Nano-P knowledge, now that it is a wholly owned Canon venture that has yet to deliver a product, that seems rather scurrilous. It looks like an attempt to renegotiate (extort) for more money now that Canon is getting close to a real product. SED may wither on the vine if this keeps up. With years of development, I would be certain Canon has it's own IP portfolio that would pretty much eliminate anyone else going forward. This is already going to be in a niche product over the price point of most. Don't hold your breath on these. I am thinking Toshiba was happy to get out.
Fast response times and high contrast ratios are all fine and good, but if SEDs burn my retinas after extended hours of use like CRTs do, then you can have my LCD when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
Actually color space and bit depth are intertwined. You can't fully display a certain color space without having the bit depth needed to reproduce all the color shades associated with the color space. I agree that 10 bit is very sufficient for TV use, but in the future, TV's and large monitors may very well converge, just as the convergence for media PC's is already happening now. This display technology is not limited to just TV's. It can and possibly will be used for other things such as graphics work and medical imaging.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
this also is not quite correct. hopefully i can be helpful:
:)
a colour space is mathematically defined (continuous, infinitely precise), defined for output-dependent (ie, component) standards by the chromaticity of the primaries. in other words, the ideal. the gamut is the radiometric limit from 0 to 100% intensity within that space. in other words, the real/measurable. the gamut can have concavities and even holes in it.
you could have a very accurate (to 4-bits) 4-bit display of sRGB or even Wide Gamut colour space; it's just not very useful. bit depth for a component colour space defines the granularity with which that space is quantised, whether by data or by display hardware. in one sense you are correct - perceptable error threshold (delta-E) is the main criteria when judging colour accuracy to a standard; there will always be some amount of error trying to match a mathematically-defined colour space. so you need both high (data) bit-depth and accurate (radiometrically) display of that data to achieve perceptual "fidelity".
the main ugly thing about LCDs is that the fluoro backlight is very spectrally spiky, leading to gross error (delta-E) when filtered through the LCD elements, even at a piddling 8-bit depth. also they have a raised black level due to leakage and hence chromaticity at low intensities is hugely compromised (ie - saturated darks of any colour are much closer to grey than they should be) LEDs also have a weird albeit more smooth spectral curve, but we only need to match the eye effectively, perfect black-body radiation, so it should be interesting to see what shows up to market with them.
disclaimer(?): i do colour science for a living. i can tell you that trying to adequately match/proof cinema film display with only LCDs and 8-bit display (DVI limit) is a real bitch.
everything is closer than you think.
Does this post make any sense??
Is their joint venture on AWK still alive?