Last week it was Sony, and today it was Hitachi announcing [JP] a flood of new flat-screen TVs for the Japanese market. Hitachi does sell TVs outside this country, too, so chances are the four plasmas and seven LCDs find their way into other markets as well. (Some models will be offered in different colors, which is why you see more than 11 TVs in the picture above.)

The company has divided their new line-up of Woo TVs into three series (XP05, HP05 and H05).

XP05

The flagship XP05 series consists of three plasma TVs, namely a 42- ($2,650), a 46- ($3,100) and a 50-inch model (P50-XP05 for $3,650, pictured above). All of these devices are full HD, support DLNA, feature 4 HDMI ports and come with a 320GB internal HDD. The two LCD TVs in this series, a 32- ($1,900) and a 37-inch model ($2,200), just have a resolution of 1,366×768 (IPSα panel). But a 320GB internal HDD and DLNA support are on board as well.

HP05

The HP05 series includes just two TVs, a plasma (the P42-HP05 with 42 inches for $2,200 is pictured above) and an LCD model (32 inches, $1,600). Buyers will get a resolution of 1,024×768 for the plasma and 1,366×768 for the LCD. Both TVs offer DLNA support and a 250GB internal HDD.

H05

The four LCD TVs of the H05 series are entry-level devices with 1,366×768 resolution. Hitachi offers a 19- ($770), a 22- ($880), a 26- ($990) and a 32-inch model (the L32-H05 for $1,100 is pictured). All of these TVs have an IPS panel (just the 32-incher has an IPSα panel), support DLNA (client only) but lack an internal HDD.

The TVs of all three series will hit Japanese stores on April 17.

What was unthinkable 10 to 20 years ago, has been reality for quite some time now: Not Japanese but Korean electronics companies are dominating the TV hardware market. American market research firm DisplaySearch says regarding shipment value, Samsung has maintained its position as the leader in the global flat-panel TV market last year. And another Korean company is becoming stronger, too.

Samsung now commands a market share of 23.3% (up 0.2 points from last year) in the flat TV segment, which – under DisplaySearch’s analysis – includes LCDs, plasmas and even OLEDs for some reason (the picture shows Samsung’s 40-inch OLED TV prototype).

And for the first time, another Korean electronics company, LG, has managed to climb up the ranking to reach the second position: With 12.4% market share, LG (+2 percentage points) is now on par with Sony (whose share fell 2.9 points). According to DisplaySearch, 2005 was the last year Sony was on top of the TV market.

The research firm says both Samsung and LG have benefited from strong price competitiveness and the weaker won. Apparently, the Korean companies were also more successful in selling LED-backlit TVs last year, an area in which the big Japanese makers (namely Sony, Panasonic and Sharp) are lagging.

Via The Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]

The 3-D image was of a human rib cage, and it rotated in midair. And the holographic rib cage rattled me.

It was my first experience with a Display Of The Future, and it set me on a mission. In the subsequent years, I’ve been hunting down display prototypes, talking with experts, and visiting labs. In short, I’ve been on a quest for the perfect display.

Now You See It

Even though holographic video blew me away when I first saw it, I quickly composed myself. It’s simply not the sort of thing that will be commercially available any time soon.

I talked to Gregg Favalora, 3-D expert and founder of Actuality Systems, about the commercial viability of high-resolution 3-D video. His company broke resolution records with its display-a 100-million-voxel (3-D pixel) device that made images for radiologists and engineers hunting for oil reserves. The details of these 3-D images look eerily realistic, but Actuality had a heck of a time finding the right market for it.

In the end, the company only sold 30 systems at $200,000 each and it has now ceased engineering operations. And that MIT holographic video system I saw in a few years ago is still trapped in the lab. The lesson: no matter how extraordinary your technology, it’s impractical for the people unless you can efficiently manufacture it in large numbers.

I See Practicality

At the opposite end of the price spectrum is LCD. It’s cheap as dirt thanks to the billions of dollars of factories built over the past two decades. I wanted to get a look at the way LCDs are made and try to find clues for how a more interesting or useful display-like a reflective e-reader or an OLED screen-could scale up and become cheap.

So I took a trip down to Applied Materials in Santa Clara, California, a company that supplies 90 percent of the LCD industry with manufacturing equipment. What I saw was impressive: the newest fabs are built around sheets of glass—backplanes of LCDs—that are the size of a garage door. They’re only as thick as six sheets of paper, and each one can yield eight large screen TVs.

The machines that deposit electronics on the glass are behemoths-taller than I can reach and with an area slightly larger than a garage door. In a fab, six of these machines are arrange circularly, and from above they look like a giant mechanized flower. The sheets of glass slide in like a floppy disk into a drive, and come out coated with thin film transistors.

The bigger the glass, the more displays can be pumped out of a factory, and the cheaper all sizes of LCD displays become. According to Sid Rosenblatt, the CFO of Universal Display Corporation, a big fab can make six 50-inch LCDs every three to four minutes. At that volume, how can anything else compete with LCD?

Fitting In

Well, instead of beating them, startup Pixel Qi decided to join them. The company’s screens are all LCD—built on the same lines and with the same materials as any other liquid crystal display—but with an additional mode in which the power-hungry backlight is off, and the display reflects ambient light.

I’ve seen Pixel Qi’s displays and visited with Mary Lou Jepsen, the startup’s founder and the former CTO of the One Laptop Per Child project. Jepsen spends most of her time in Taipei, the capital of Displayland, but on a sunny day last fall, I caught her at her houseboat in Sausalito. It was the perfect time and place to try out an LCD that is most impressive in bright light.

In its reflective mode, the display is black and white, similar to a Kindle or Sony Reader except it’s faster-capable of video, albeit in monochrome. The first batch of Pixel Qi screens is scheduled to come off the line this month. Jepsen says more designs that further reduce power consumption are on the way. In one, she explains that the screen, when not needing to refresh, should be able to shut down the central processing unit(and wake it up within milliseconds when it’s in use).

As for a color reflective mode, Jepsen says it could be possible in a couple of years. The concept, which involves a particular arrangement of liquid crystals, is based on her PhD thesis, but it’s admittedly a more complex design than the first Pixel Qi screens. Her first priority, she says, is making sure that Pixel Qi can ship its first products quickly and successfully.

Bright and Beautiful

While Pixel Qi might be making cheap displays that are easy on the eyes and energy efficient, they can’t compare to the beauty and simplicity of OLED screens, in which each pixel emits its own light. The whites are whiter, the blacks are blacker, and the overall image is just gorgeous.

Even better, the manufacturing process is as simple as it gets. It’s layer of organic material that can be printed between two layers of electrodes. This means that OLED displays have the potential to fold, roll, and be built over large areas.

Concepts I’ve seen: a paper-thin, flexible display slammed by a hammer without breaking, a display that’s see-through when the power’s off, and large area OLED coating that act as a window, a wall, or a display, depending on its mode.

In terms of touch, I’m keeping an eye on a new type of technology that’s being integrated into the electronic foundation of OLED displays and LCDs too. It’s called in-cell technology, and there are a number of variants, but one type incorporates photodetectors into the pixels of a screen. It’s ideal for OLED displays, because it can be added without adding thickness, allowing them to maintain their sleek good looks.

If there were ever a perfect display, OLED is it.

The Holdup

In a conversation with Vladimir Bulovic, a professor at MIT (and star of the famous light-emitting pickle video) we waxed poetic on the possibilities of OLEDs. Bulovic believes that it’s only a matter of time before OLEDs take their rightful place at the head of the display industry. The reason we have to wait is simply bad timing. “If back in the 1970s, we had OLEDs, no one would even know what an LCD is today,” he said.

The widely understood problem with OLED displays, however, is that the technology doesn’t exist to mass manufacture them on large sheets of glass like those I saw at Applied Material. Therefore, their beauty is relegated to smaller screens like cell phone displays, Sony’s 11-inch (expensive) TV, and concept demos.

Engineers are working on the problem, of course. Bulovic told me about a former student of his, named Conor Madigan, who has an OLED-printing startup in Menlo Park called Kateeva. I got a hold of Madigan who said his company, which uses a hybrid approach to printing large-scale OLED display, is well funded (even in these difficult economic times) and the display industry is really starting to push large-scale OLED technology.

While it’s true that big display makers are promising big OLED screens in the next couple of years, I’m not holding my breath. Even when the technology for printing large-scale OLED displays arrives, it will still take significant investments to scale up manufacturing. It’s difficult for companies to justify investing too much money in OLED displays while LCD sales are still doing well and continue to get cheaper. Besides, these large-screen OLEDs will still be made on glass, just like LCD, which keeps things rigid, fragile, and heavy.

Past Glass

In order to have a light, flexible, rugged OLED display, it’s obvious that display makers must go with plastic instead of glass. Plastic Logic, is promising the world’s first plastic-backed screens with printed organic transistors, by early next year.

I’ve handled a proto-version of Que, Plastic Logic’s e-reader, at the company’s Mountain View headquarters and was impressed by the form factor. While it’s still rigid, it’s light as a thin stack of papers. And because it’s made of plastic, it’s robust. I felt like flinging it across the boardroom where I sat with the head of marketing and a public relations handler. I didn’t.

Here’s the bad news for Plastic Logic: it all comes back to scalability. At the recent Printed Electronics conference in San Jose, I had lunchtime conversations with people who just shake their head at Plastic Logic’s challenges. A number of them expressed skepticism that the manufacturing process could scale.

Printed organic transistors currently can’t compete in speed with amorphous silicon transistors used in LCDs and OLED displays. And the company’s printing technology is done in a single fab in Dresden, which could make it difficult to produce the e-reader in large volume. In other words, it won’t be cheap or widespread, at least in the near future.

Roll With It

However, the folks at HP Labs think they have a scalable way to make plastic-backed displays with fast silicon transistors. On a recent tour of HP Labs I saw the proof: sheets of plastic, tens of meters long, are rolled onto tubes and are loaded and locked into a system that imprints silicon transistors onto the material.

Carl Taussig, the director of HP’s information surfaces lab, walked me through the process of the so-called Self Aligned Imprint Lithography. Plastic, with a shiny coating, spins on a series of cylinders, where it is exposed to chemicals, ultra-violet light, etching solutions, and ionized gasses. The roll-to-roll setups are compact, and they don’t require clean-room level purity that other display processes do.

Taussig, who is also responsible for inventing the DVD-RW, showed me prototypes, built with HP’s silicon-on-plastic transistors. One of these plastic backplanes controlled an E Ink display. Some of the pixels that were supposed to be black appeared gray, but these prototypes help the researchers find the problems in the roll-to-roll process. If they see a blown-out pixel, they retrace their steps to find where in the process the problem arose. 


In another demonstration, I saw a new type of reflective display developed at HP that was about the size of a smart phone screen. It has color and video and is one of the best-looking reflective screen I’ve seen. Technical details were sparse (they will come out early next year), but Taussig told me that part of the trick is to make a pixel out of three layers of color dyes that take incoming white light and reflect specific colors of it back at you, something like the way that butterfly wings reflect light.

Within Two Years

While Taussig doesn’t think roll-to-roll will replace LCD processes anytime soon, he hopes it can help plastic become the foundation for reflective displays as well as emissive displays like those made of OLEDs. HP has licensed its roll-to-roll technology to PowerFilm, a thin film solar manufacturer. And recently, PowerFilm’s subsidiary Phicot has started to commercially developing the process for electronics. The first products will be displays for soldiers that may be integrated into clothing or wrap around their arms.

Combining HP’s roll-to-roll manufacturing with OLEDs and a reflective reading technology is the closest thing to the perfect display that I’ve seen. So I ask Taussig how long it’s going to take to make the process reliable. He’s optimistic that Phicot can iron out the problems soon. “To be successful we need to roll this out within two years,” he says, since the first plastic displays will hit the market in 2010.

In talking with Taussig, it’s clear to me that even though he’s a researcher, he’s focused on making plastic displays practical. He knows the only way to do that is with solid, cost-effective manufacturing. Once the manufacturing problems are solved, he says, plastic displays become inevitable. “My grandkids will never believe that we made displays with glass,” he says. “Everything will be on plastic.”

I can’t wait. The perfect screen will be lightweight, energy-efficient, and able to take various forms—flexible, transparent, and with touch or some other form of gesture recognition. I want colors so vibrant that images look real enough to grab. Still, I want to read on it without feeling like I’m staring at a flashlight. And it’s got to be cheap.

So far, the displays I’ve seen come close. And while nothing yet gets it all right, there are some up-and-coming technologies-and, crucially, emerging manufacturing processes-that give me confidence that the perfect display is on the way.

Kate Greene spends most of her day staring at the screens of her MacBook Pro and iPhone. She became a journalist by way of physics, where she worked in a basement lab with lasers and a lot of liquid nitrogen. Currently, she writes for publications like The Economist and Technology Review and goes on display hunts for Gizmodo. She can be found on the Internet at kategreene.net and on twitter

Ever since Area 51 and the grassy knoll, we’ve all known the government was hiding something. What, exactly? Was it that Spain is really France? That hemp makes great rope? No. It’s that motion blur in LCDs isn’t that big a deal. And it’s time to blow this cover-up wide open.

Dr. Raymond Soneira at DisplayMate has blown the lid off this whole thing by writing a detail and somniferant look at LCD motion blur. His conclusions will surprise you: it doesn’t exist and all that talk of megahertz and poodlefurtz was all smoke and mirrors. We are down the rabbit hole, people.

Wham. Taste this science:

LCDs have their own gorilla: limited response time, which causes motion blur. As with plasmas and burn-in, this was a significant problem many years ago, and it too is no longer an issue now. But unlike plasma manufacturers, makers of LCDs have turned this into a brilliant marketing strategy, offering increasingly sophisticated and enhanced motion processing and ever higher 120- and 240-Hz screen refresh rates to repeatedly oversell a solution to a problem that is no longer a problem.

Why is some dude from a monitor calibration company doing going against the party line? Well, either the LCD manufacturers tried to kill him or this goes deeper. Maybe he’s sick of people talking about 240-Hz refresh rates, sick of people talking about lies and lies and more lies.

The sad part? Most people won’t read this story because it’s really long and about LCD refresh rates. But I’m here to tell you this goes all the way up… and all the way down.

So there you are, standing in front of Best Buy’s wall o’ HDTVs. Which one do you buy? There are just so many different factors and terms: LCD, LED, plasma, 3D, DLP, 1080p. No worries. Follow these five rules and you’ll end up with the perfect HDTV for you.

Rule 1 – Buy for your room

Forget the LCD vs plasma debate for just a moment. It might not matter. Your room might choose your HDTV for you.

LCDs generally counter glare better than plasmas because of their matte finish. Most plasmas have a glossy screen protector over the screen, which while a great defense against flying Wii remotes and children, reflect everything like a mirror. However, if glare isn’t an issue at all and in fact, the room is a little on the dark side, buy a plasma. They thrive in darker environments where their rich colors and contrasts can really show off.

Also consider how close you sit to the TV. It’s often the rule of thumb to buy the biggest TV you can afford or that will fit in a certain area, but standard definition content like basic cable look terrible on larger HDTVs and it’s very obvious when you’re sitting close. Large TVs can also overpower a room and cause headaches and eye strain.Remember your home probably has a lot lower ceiling than retail stores like Best Buy and Walmart so the actual size of the TV might be deceiving at when you’re shopping.

Thankfully most retail stores have liberal return policies. Just be prepared to pay a restocking fee or pick-up charge if you simply return the HDTV and not buy another one.

Rule 2 – Buy the picture that looks the best to you

There is one huge advantage brick and mortar stores have over Internet retailers: demos. Walk into a Best Buy and you can see how different TVs look compared to others. This is important.

Everyone’s eyes are different. Perception is different. You can not solely rely on Internet TV reviews when buying an HDTV. You need to see it in person. Stand there. Let your eyes wonder and pick out a TV that looks good to you. Here’s what you need to look for:

• Black blacks
• White whites
• Not vivid colors, but realistic
• No motion blur when objects are moving fast
• The glare factor

Let a salesman point certain things out to you but you’re the one that’s ultimately going to have to live with the TV. Buy the one you like, but keep an open mind.

Rule 3 – Buy a familiar brand

It doesn’t matter what you’ve heard, all TVs have problems. Generally speaking, a Sony HDTV will hold up just as well as a Panasonic, Samsung, or Vizio. Modern HDTVs do not have any moving parts and most use the same display panels and components anyway.

You need to accept that there’s a possibility that any number of items might go wrong with your new HDTV no matter whose logo is on the front. A good rule of thumb in the TV world is that if you haven’t heard of the brand and it’s less expensive than other options, it’s probably that store’s house brand and something you might want to avoid. If you’re really concerned about your new investment, buy an extended service plan.

Rule 4 – Don’t be afraid to buy online

Brick and mortar stores have the demo advantage, but online retailers will beat them every day in the price game. Go to Best Buy and pick out the TV you want and then shop online for it. As long as the online retailer has cheap shipping and a good return policy, you have nothing to fear. But also don’t be afraid to ask the Best Buy to match or come close to the online price. You might be surprised.

Rule 5 – The TV is only as good as the source

You’re buying an HDTV so it needs high-def content. Your standard cable will look like poo on it and yes, it will cost more each month from your content provider. Consider this extra cost when you’re shopping for the TV. It’s not a bad idea to call up your cable or satellite company before hand to find out the extra cost.

Cable subscribers generally have it the easiest, especially if they already have a digital cable box. Likely all they will need is a different box. But if you have a satellite, you may need all new equipment including a different dish. The install cost might be nominal though.

Don’t be afraid to shop around either. You might find a better deal.

The TH-85PF12U is the size of four 42-inch displays put together.

(Credit: Panasonic)

Large plasmas are coming down in price, but if you want to go big–and I mean really big–you still have to pay dearly. Set to hit next month, the $30,000 TH-85PF12U is billed by Panasonic as …

Faint diagonal lines are a thing of the past on new Panasonic TC-P50X1 plasmas.

(Credit: Sarah Tew)

When I reviewed Panasonic’s entry-level 2009 50-inch plasma TV back in April, the TC-P50X1, I mostly liked what I saw aside from one strange issue. The screen showed faint diagonal lines seemingly embedded in the screen. See the bottom of this post if you’re interested in the full description from the review.

Fast-forward to late July, more than halfway through the product’s lifespan, and it seems Panasonic has fixed the problem. The company sent yet a third TC-P50X1, and it didn’t exhibit the diagonal lines.

That’s all well and good, and Panasonic deserves credit for finally addressing the problem. But questions remain, and Panasonic has not been forthcoming.

On August 12 I asked the company a series of follow-up questions, including “Exactly when did the change get implemented? Did the 42-inch model have the same problem? If so, was the same change implemented? Is there any way for a consumer shopping to an X1 plasma to tell whether the panel is an old one or a new one, aside from looking directly for the diagonal lines? Is there any sort of serial number cutoff? Can current owners who have the old, flawed panel exchange it for a new one? If so, how?,” and “Please provide an explanation of what the lines were and why they’re present on the old one and not the new one.”

What I’ve received in response after a week of waiting for a reply was pretty unsatisfying.

…