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Canon-Toshiba Joint Venture On SED Collapses

Posted by kdawson on from the future-so-bright dept.

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.

6 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Explains a lot by scdeimos · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Explains a lot by donaldm · · Score: 3, Informative

      I was hoping that SED would be the driving force in bringing down the costs of LCD and Plasma and competing competitively with them especially after all the hype.

      There is a new/old (started early 1970's) technology called FED (Field Emission Display) which is being developed by Sony and they already are demoing 26in and 30in versions at 1080p, although they do need to demo much larger ones to be taken seriously.

      However FED like SED may not be acceptable if the overall costs are not significantly cheaper than LCD and Plasma. Still this technology may force further cuts in the flat panel market, which IMHO can only be good for the consumer. If you don't have a HDTV yet and are contemplating buying one, a six months wait may save you a considerable amount of money.

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  2. I want one now but... by e144539 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    I'm too lazy to look for a link..
    Well, Wikipedia should say something about it...

    Yep!

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-conduction_el ectron-emitter_display#History

  3. Re:Anyone seen one? by nacturation · · Score: 5, Informative

    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? I think the power savings is a side-effect. Check out this glowing review:

    http://gear.ign.com/articles/679/679235p1.html

    Contrast ratios were 10,000:1 for the prototype and they claim it'll be 100,000:1 in the production version. And at a supposed 1 ms response time. Even if the contrast claim is off by a factor of 5, it's still way more than any display on the market today.
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  4. Re:Anyone seen one? by eis271828 · · Score: 4, Informative

    CRTs have more resolutions because of their analog nature. They naturally have smooth blurring at many resolutions. LCDs and other fixed-pixel technologies control each pixel exactly. All smoothing would have to be done algorithmically (see various image processing topics such as Gaussian blurring/smoothing), which increases expense and isn't always the best solution - think text display. I would say a better solution to reducing resolution would be to increase text size or use the accessibility tools such as the magnifying glass.

  5. Side-by-side showdown by D4C5CE · · Score: 3, Informative
    Check out this glowing review: http://gear.ign.com/articles/679/679235p1.html
    ...and this side-by-side comparison against plasma and LCD, along with images explaining how this is actually a kind of "flat-screen CRT with millions of ray-guns": http://www.behardware.com/art/imprimer/593/