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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.