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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.
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.
The picture is hugely better than LCD and roughly as good as a really good plasma (e.g. Pioneer PureVision).
Except in this case it isn't taking over your enemy, it's ditching your friend. Canon didn't beat 'em, they capitulated, but made it good to their patner instead of dragging them down a hole.
KFG
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.
Plasmas don't have a backlight and they don't have problems with viewing angle. The light is produced by an excited phosphor, just like in a CRT or SED.
Yeah, well. They don't call it Nano-Proprietary for nothing, I guess. Now, if they'd called themselves Nano-GiveAwayTheCandyStore that would be different.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
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
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.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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.
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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.
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.
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"
Your information is out of date. Modern plasma sets do not suffer from burn-in. I used to be paranoid about what I had on my TV, but now I realise that I do not have to worry.
I leave DVD menus on for hours (accidentally), play games, watch 4x3 shows galore, leave it paused for ages and there is no sign of any image retention. I have even left very bright setup menus from my PVR on overnight on several occasions. Every so often I put a few test images on screen to check that the colours are consistent across the screen. There has never been the slightest problem found.
I have a mid-range Panasonic, so can't vouch for the quality at the cheapie end of the market.
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.