Laser TV

By Cyrris

I realised the other day as to just how quickly display technology is moving these days. Ever since I can remember (up until a year or so ago) the main television at my house has been an old 68cm CRT - by now it would easily be 20+ years old. It took until a couple of years ago for it to finally start dying with some image jittering, which is when we finally made the move to Plasma. Until Plasma prices fell and LCD popularity went through the roof over the past few years, people have pretty much been relying on the same TV technology for decades - the trusty old CRT. Now however it’s moving faster than I can really keep up with. It seems like just yesterday that Plasma and LCD was introduced - and neither technology has been perfected yet. Plasma still has it’s topography/gradient colour issues, and that risk of burn-in always lingers, worryingly, in the back of my head. LCD is only just starting to get models with respectable contrast and response times, and the price isn’t quite yet reasonable for large panels. Of course, the manufacturers claim that these problems will all go away with future manufacturing perfections and tweaks, but already, there are new technologies ready to supersede them altogether.

SED TV has been the main contender to replace both Plasma and LCD, and it’s been known about for some time. Technology-wise, it’s actually much closer to a CRT in how it operates. Rather the just one big electron gun though, it has thousands of them, for all the pixels on the display. The advantages of SED technology can be summed up as follows:

• Thin, like Plasmas and LCDs
• No burn-in like on Plasmas
• Good contrast unlike LCDs
• Consume far less power than Plasmas (even less than LCDs too)
• No response time issues, ghosting, or viewing angle issues like on LCDs
• No colour issues that Plasmas succumb to (dark shadows, topography lines)

Now, when you think about it, what SED is bringing to the table is basically what Plasma and LCD have been aiming for but constantly falling short of - CRT quality in a thinner package. When you think about it that way, it makes me wonder why anyone ever thought that the first few generations of Plasma and LCD televisions were a good idea - their image quality issues were all quite horrendous, and considering there were perfectly good CRTs around at the time I can only assume it was the “hey! New technology!” factor which made them sell. SED finally appears to be the technology that is going to take us forward with quality pictures in a thin (but large) package, with the added bonus of low power consumption. The price point is expected to be about the same as Plasmas and LCDs are, to ensure competitiveness. Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

Well, if recent news is anything to go by, it gets better.

“Laser TV” as it has been dubbed, was announced just over the last week. Despite the announcement coming out of the blue (compared to SED which has been known of for a while), both technologies are expected to hit the market at around the same time - late ‘07, early ‘08. From what I have seen on the technology so far, it appears to offer every one of the benefits that SED offers, with the addition of the following:

• Laser TV is brighter even than Plasma, something SED is not capable of (yet)
• It is not only thin but very light, which should be useful for wall mounting
• The manufacturing process is cheaper, meaning Laser TV could undercut SED prices on release

Now, whereas SED aimed to essentially be a thin CRT, this laser technology appears to go above and beyond. The laser projector used inside will also apparently be useful for projecting images on walls with similarly good clarity, which does indeed look promising - and it’s not the sort of thing that LCD and Plasma manufacturers can tweak their manufacturing processes for to catch up.

Now, of course the jury will be out until they are on the market, but does Laser TV appear to be the end-all-be-all of display technology, or have I just succumbed to the hype machine?