Category: The Front Line
ISE 2013: Oh, It’s ON!
- Published on Friday, 01 February 2013 12:03
- Pete Putman
- 0 Comments
ISE is a joint venture between InfoComm and CEDIA – and drew a sizable crowd, even with cold, wet weather.
Much has been made of the rapid price drops in the LCD TV market; specifically, LCD TVs that measure 65 inches and up. Ever since Sharp rolled out its 70-inch and 80-inch 1080p LCD TV products in 2011, consultants and systems integrators have been switching over to these projection screen-sized displays instead of traditional front projectors and separate screens.
There are many reasons for this trend, not the least of which is the low prices on the 70-inch, 80-inch, and 90-inch Sharp products – about $2,000, $3700, and $8000, respectively. When compared to a ceiling-mounted projector and motorized screen, it’s just not a fair fight. Add in the additional labor and wiring of power and class 2 control and video signals, and the big LCDs come out clearly ahead.
There are other reasons why investment banks and universities are making the switch away from projection. One in particular is the need to replace lamps every few thousand hours (if they last that long). Another is the need with certain projectors to clean dust out and replace air filters. Neither of these maintenance issues are factors with large LCD TVs, which also come with extended warranties if installed by an authorized dealer/integrator.
And of course, there’s the ambient lighting issue. Clients can legitimately ask, “What is the point of a nice conference room with plenty of windows if you have to keep closing them every time you make a presentation?” With LCD displays, you don’t need to, unless you have a glare problem.
From my perspective, the market for 2000- to 3000-lumens projectors that are ceiling-mounted in classrooms and meeting rooms has turned irreversibly towards self-contained flat screen displays. This trend will only accelerate as these screens continue to drop in price and more competitors jostle for a share of the pie.
But projector manufacturers aren’t ready to fold up shop and cry, “uncle!” At ISE 2013, more than a few “lampless” projectors made their debut, and they’re aimed at stemming the tide of mongo LCDs.
I can’t tell what’s more amazing: That Sony harnessed a laser light engine to a 3LCD projector, or that they started with 4000 lumens and 1920×1200 resolution.
Perhaps the most intriguing product was found in the Sony booth, where an installation-sized 3LCD chassis was up and running. This product, which doesn’t have a model number or price yet, uses a 100% laser light illumination engine to project Wide UXGA (1920×1200) images.
It wasn’t a static demo, either. The projector was sequencing through a series of full-color graphics and photos (no video, though) and the color was impressive. What was even more impressive was the use of WUXGA 3LCD panels (not LCoS or DLP). This is the first publicly-shown 3LCD projector to use lasers – even Epson, who is the dominant player in HTPS LCD fabrication and one of the top brands of LCD projectors – hasn’t shown one yet.
Sony’s prototype, which will be officially launched at InfoComm this coming June, is rated at 4000 lumens of brightness, both in white and color light output. It has interchangeable lenses and supports image warping and soft-edge blending.
When it came to discuss the workings of the laser light engine, “mum” was the word. I suspect the laser light engine is being used to stimulate phosphors to get red, green, and blue light. The only thing that has me wondering is the light output, which is on the high side for a laser/phosphor system. Well, all will be revealed in about five months…
Mitsubishi’s also mixing it up with three models of LaserVue projectors.
Not far away, Mitsubishi took the wraps off a new line of LaserVue DLP projectors. These “hybrid” models build on the same projection technology that Mits developed for its erstwhile LaserVUE rear projection TV sets; employing a red LED, numerous blue laser diodes, and a single-segment green phosphor color wheel.
Unlike Sony, Mits opted to go with three different models for its coming-out party. The NW31U-EST WXGA (1280 x 800 resolution, 2500 lumens) extreme short throw model will arrive in April, followed shortly by two standard throw models: the NW30U WXGA (1280 x 800, 3000 lumens) and the NF32U (1920×1080, 3000 lumens).
The Mits projectors are also notable in that they are part of the new “cloud” lineup – these projectors can connect quickly and easily to the Internet to download and stream files. (We’ve come a long way from those slow, tedious and unreliable “wireless projector” demos of the late 1990s!) And they can mirror any Android or iOS tablet that would be used to control that remote computer or server.
So – how long are the lasers supposed to last in these new projectors? The stock response is 20,000 to 30,000 hours. In reality, it’s the power supply that often craps out before the lasers, a problem that popped up more than a few times with the LaserVUE TVs. I’d assume that both Sony and Mitsubishi have since gathered much useful data on power supply lifetimes and de-rating to ensure reliable service.
BenQ expanded their line of laser DLP projectors…
…while Panasonic made their hybrids the centerpiece of a nice energy conservation demo.
BenQ also showed laser-engined DLP projectors at the show, while nearby, Casio had a full line of LED/laser hybrids. The color on most models I saw was considerably better than the first crop that came out in 2010 and 2011 – obviously, engineers are taming the excessively-saturated shades of red and blue that LEDs and lasers create. (BenQ uses lasers exclusively; Casio uses both lasers and LEDs.)
Although Epson didn’t show a laser 3LCD product, I’m quite sure one is in the works at the Matsumoto labs. And you can be sure that other projector manufacturers will have lampless models of their own to show in Orlando later this year.
Samsung’s got a 95-inch LCD (and a 75-inch version, too) to make the projector guys uncomfortable.
Is the use of a laser, LED, or hybrid light engine enough to stem the tide to big LCDs? Only a handful of projector marketing guys I spoke to at the show were optimistic that the onrush of LCDs could be stopped or delayed.
While lasers and LEDs make replacement lamps go away, the issues with ambient light and the costs of installing a separate screen and projector mount remain. And the soon-to-be-available crop of 4K LCD displays in sizes from 50 to 100 inches will just raise the stakes even higher.
Still; it’s good to see that projector manufacturers are fighting back and innovating some cool designs along the way. (And if they still need motivation, all they had to do was check out the 75-inch and 95-inch edge-lit LCD displays in the Samsung booth…)
Panasonic Delivers Big OLED Surprise at CES
- Published on Thursday, 31 January 2013 11:51
- Ken Werner
- 0 Comments
The OLED-TV story was in a rut for months: Samsung and LG had beautiful 55-inch prototypes, but repeatedly missed their promised product introduction dates. But things are changing.
The big CES surprise came from Panasonic, which showed a very impressive technology demonstration of the “World’s Largest 4K OLED.” At 56 inches, it does beat LG and Samsung by one inch, but what is more important is that it’s 4K. And what is considerably more important than that is that the panel was “created by printing technology.”
Panasonic’s big CES surprise was this 56-inch 4Kx2K OLED-TV with front plane made with printing technology. (Photo: Ken Werner)
It is widely agreed that if large-screen OLED-TV is to become cost-competitive with LCD, it will do so through solution processing, which almost certainly means some kind of printing, and this is the first large, solution-processed panel to appear in public. Part of the surprise is that although Panasonic has said in the recent past that it was interested in OLED development, there has been no public hint that the company was working on solution processing or that they had come this far so fast. It is known that Samsung has been working with DaiNippon Screen (DNS) and DuPont Displays on the nozzle printing technology developed by those companies, and that Samsung bought a development Gen 5 nozzle printer from DNS, so it might have been assumed that Samsung would be first to demonstrate a solution-processed OLED-TV. Not so, and that added even more snap to Panasonic’s surprise.
The printed OLED hadn’t been mentioned at Panasonic’s press event, and nobody in the Panasonic booth knew much about it, saying they had not received advanced information about the display and really don’t know it was coming until they opened the crate. So they didn’t know and I don’t know if the printing is by nozzle, ink-jet, offset, or some other technique. Still this is a major step in OLED-TV development, and we will be digging for additional information.
Samsung show this curved OLED-TV at CES. (Photo: Ken Werner)
Another surprise, although not nearly as significant as Panasonic’s, was the exhibition of curved OLED-TVs by both Samsung and LG. Both claimed their curved OLED to be the “world’s first,” and Samsung personnel will clearly shocked to learn from my colleague Pete Putman that LG also had the curved panels. The Samsung folks were even more chagrinned to find that LG had three of the curved panels in its booth while Samsung had only one.
LG showed three curved OLED-TVs, with 3D. (Photo: Ken Werner)
Should anybody care about curved OLED-TVs? I doubt it. You can make a case that a viewer whose eyeballs are near the center of the screen’s curvature will have a more constant viewing angle to all portions of the screen, and will therefore see the image across the entire screen with less geometrical distortion and with more consistent contrast and color. But viewing angle is not a problem with OLED in any case, and who complains about geometric distortion on any kind of flat-panel display? In addition, if you don’t watch TV alone, how many eyeballs can be near the center of curvature? I suggest that this is another example of technological bravura for its own sake, but for both Samsung and LG it was an attention-getter.
Of more practical interest was LG’s announcement that its 55-inch OLED-TV – the flat one – was available for purchase in Korea, and would be available in the U.S. in March. This is, by my count, the fourth release date for the 55-inch announced by LG. If they don’t make this one, either, we will know that there is serious trouble in River City.
LG has scheduled U.S. commercial introduction of its flat 55-inch OLED-TVs for March, after missing its last three scheduled dates. (Photo: Ken Werner)
Ken Werner is Principal of Nutmeg Consultants, specializing in the display industry, display manufacturing, display technology, and display applications. You can reach him at ken@hdtvexpert.com.
Even on a Sea of Red Ink, Sharp Innovation Sails Impressively On
- Published on Wednesday, 30 January 2013 11:47
- Ken Werner
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At its big media event on CES’s Press Day, Sharp’s new CEO Toshi Osawa introduced TFT backplanes made from indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) as being the “most exciting technology ever,” a sentiment echoed by corporate EVP Kozo Takahashi.
At CES, Sharp heavily promoted its IGZO TFT technology and showed several shipping products that incorporate IGZO panels. (Photo: Ken Werner)
It is unusual at these CES events, with their gadget and product orientation, to focus on an electronic material, but Sharp is the first company to apparently master the use of IGZO with liquid-crystal displays. Available products with IGZO include Sharp’s 32-inch 4K monitor, the AQUOS Zeta smart phone with 4.9-inch IGZO display that delivers a battery life of nearly two days, and the AQUOS IGZO Tablet with 7-inch WXGA display, which has been released by KDDI in Japan.
In a guest appearance at the event, James Clappin, President of the Corning Glass Technologies Group, commented that Corning’s Lotus glass had been optimized for IGZO. Previously, Corning executives told me that IGZO requires longer heat exposure than amorphous silicon, so the glass must be able to tolerate that without reaching the temperature at which it loses its dimensional stability.
John Herrington, President of Sharp Electronics Marketing Company of America, stated that Sharp has been the fastest growing brand in the U.S. for the last two years, but did not say that this growth was from the single-digital market share to which the company had fallen. Herrington proudly spoke of Sharp’s leadership in the 60-inch-and-over TV segment, and announced that for 2013 the company would have 21 models 60 inches and over across three series, including Quattron and 4K models.
Herrington also described “Moth Eye Technology,” which uses a nanoscale cone structure on the screen surface to eliminate glare and reflection.
On the show floor, Sharp showed its 85-inch 8Kx4K (yes, 32-megapixel) liquid-crystal display. On an image showing an expansive field of sunflowers, a viewer who nearly touched his nose to the screen could see individual pollen grains on a sunflower petal.
But the most interesting innovation that will appear in a near term product, and which was very poorly explained in the press conference, is Sharp’s clever approach to generating a real 4Kx1K image a from a Quattron screen having only 1920×1080 pixels. As technical source within Sharp explained it to me, this works because Quattron’s 4-subpixel pixels can create white light in two different ways: the traditional way, by mixing appropriate amounts of red, green, and blue; and by mixing blue and yellow. This allows two luminance peaks to be formed and arrayed horizontally in each RGBY-stripe pixel, and a FHD screen can produce 3840 luminance peaks horizontally. It is possible to play this trick vertically as well as horizontally by changing the pixel architecture, and Sharp is working on that for the future.
Sharp’s new-generation Quattron with technology that allows an FHD panel to produce a true 4,000 luminance peaks horizontally presented a much sharper image than a conventional FHD Quattron. (Photo: Ken Werner)
On the show floor, a 4Kx1K “Next Generation Quattron” prototype, looked significantly sharper than a current FHD (2Kx1K) model in a side-by-side comparison. And a 70-inch 4Kx2K TV with Moth Eye looked very good indeed, although it will take comparison testing under controlled conditions to accurately assess how good it is.
Sharp has not lost its ability to impress with significant LCD and TV innovations, and incorporate them in shipping (or soon-to-ship) products. That must mean that despite all the red ink, Sharp corporate is still investing in R&D. And, unlike at some companies, the researchers have avoided the “engineering disease” are producing the kind of innovations that make more attractive products.
Ken Werner is Principal of Nutmeg Consultants, specializing in the display industry, display manufacturing, display technology, and display applications. You can reach him at kwerner@nutmegconsultants.com.
The Revival of RCA Television
- Published on Wednesday, 30 January 2013 11:40
- Ken Werner
- 0 Comments
At CES there was an extensive and exuberant RCA TV booth, the likes of which have not been seen for many years. RCA created all-electronic color TV, invented the liquid-crystal display, and – within the memories of people who aren’t all that old – dominated the consumer television industry. But, eventually, RCA existed only as a brand whose application to cheap radios and accessories sold in poly bags hanging from hooks tarnished the gold on that once-legendary name.
RCA TV returned to CES with a large booth and lots of enthusiasm. (Photo: Ken Werner)
The incestuous relationship between the Radio Corporation of American and General Electric began in 1892 when GE was formed by the merger of Edison General Electric (yes, that Edison) and the Thomson-Houston Electric Company. (The Thomson of Thomson-Houston was the famous inventor and industrialist Elihu Thomson, who once served as the acting president of MIT.) In 1919, RCA was formed by GE, AT&T, Westinghouse, and the U.S. government, among others, to jointly develop technologies for wireless communication, with David Sarnoff as General Manager. Thirteen years later GE and Westinghouse sold RCA.
In the 1960s RCA, with management passing from “General” Sarnoff to his son Robert and a group of “modern” managers, succumbed to the then-fashionable management model of acquiring a portfolio of diversified companies. In addition to acquiring Banquet Foods and Hertz rent-a-car, the company developed mainframe computers to compete with IBM. This disastrous initiative produced the second largest write-off in corporate history up to that time. (The largest was for Corfam, DuPont’s artificial shoe-leather replacement.) RCA was adrift, and continued to drift even after the younger Sarnoff was dumped as Chairman and CEO in 1975.
In 1985, GE saw an opportunity and bought RCA – primarily to gain control NBC. GE sold off the unrelated companies, and sold several technology divisions to groups led by division managers. In 1987, RCA’s consumer electronics business was sold to Thomson, a descendant of the French division of Thomson-Houston. (Thanks to Robert Betts and his delightfully quirky bobsamerica.com for some of the historical information in the preceding paragraphs.)
In January 2010, shareholders approved a major restructuring plan for Thomson. As part of that plan the company renamed itself Technicolor, the famous film- and video-processing company that Thomson had purchased in 2000 from UK media company Carlton Communications.
Now, Technicolor is taking a newly creative and entrepreneurial approach to licensing its various brands, which include Thomson, Proscan, NordMende, Ferguson, SABA, and the iconic Victor (“His Master’s Voice”), in addition to RCA, said Edward Thompson, Technicolor’s VP in charge of licensing.
At CES, RCA showed a 55-inch smart TV based on Android 4.0, the M-GO app, and an M-Star system-on-chip that integrates the smart-TV functions. (Photo: Ken Werner)
Adjacent to Technicolor’s CES booth in the Las Vegas Convention Center’s Central Hall was the large RCA booth, showing a broad range of large and small TVs made by ON Corporation of Seongnam, Korea, which is the television licensee for the RCA brand. “While some consumers are looking for all the bells and whistles, we are focused on reaching the customer who wants a beautiful television that delivers great images at an affordable price,” said ON Corp. Executive VP of Marketing Jonathan Zupnik in a press release. “In today’s tough economic times, we are committed to serving the mass market. Consumers have embraced our current line of televisions, and our retail partners reported strong sales in 2012.”
In the booth, I insistently asked an RCA representative to tell me which company RCA was particularly targeting in its fight for market share. He stoically refused to answer, but did acknowledge that RCA was positioning itself as a high-quality value brand, and would be pricing its products slightly higher than Westinghouse Digital.
The most interesting large TV in the booth was the LED55C55R120QS 55-inch smart TV, which uses the M-GO smart TV app running on Android 4.0. M-go is a joint venture between Technicolor and Dreamworks, and M-GO is a free app intended to make content “easily accessible across devices.” In part, that means that all of a consumer’s media – including movies, music, apps, live TV, etc. – will show up in a single location that is, M-GO says, easy to navigate. And partners are buying what M-GO selling. Intel, Samsung, Vizio, LG, Starz Digital, NBC Universal, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, and, of course, RCA have all signed on in one way or another. Intel and the device makers are including the app in their products.
“His master’s voice.” Technicolor, owner and licensor of the RCA brand, reminded passers-by of the other brands in its portfolio, including Victor. Have a Nipper, anyone? (Photo: Ken Werner)
Other features of the smart RCA 55-inch are 120Hz frame rate and the M-Star system-on-chip processor that incorporates the M-GO smart-TV functions. That means the smart in smart TV comes at very low incremental cost. This is similar to the approach recently announced by Vizio, but Vizio is using the MediaTek chip. (These two Taiwanese fabless chip makers had planned to merge, but the merger date has been delayed because China and South Korea have raised anti-trust concerns, according to Focus Taiwan.)
The large RCA sets use a “rear-lit LED” backlight unit designed by ON Corp. According to ON, this differs from a direct-lit LED backlight in that DLEDs are premium units that use large numbers of LEDs, while rear-lit (RLED?) uses a relatively small number of LEDs in horizontal rows. This might actually be a useful distinction, but the rest of the industry uses DLED for both kinds of rear-LED backlight units, and some version of RLED is being used widely by makers of value-priced TVs. RCA’s RLED uses three or four rows of LEDs, depending on panel size and supplier, along with a diffuser provide an even luminance distribution. Luminance for the 55-inch is 350 nits.
While I was in the RCA booth, a meeting was going on to decide the pricing of the smart 55-inch. The MSRP will be somewhere between $999 and $1049. Other TVs shown included a “dumb” version of the 55-inch, along with 52-, 46-, and 42-inch models, all with 1920×1080 resolution, and a 32-inch with 1360×768.
There were two other TV categories that RCA was pushing hard. The first was portable TVs in sizes from 3.5 to 8 inches. The most interesting of these was an 8-inch, 1024×768, Android 4.0 tablet that incorporated both ATSC and Dyle mobile TV tuners. Yes, you say, but isn’t that an obvious combination? Perhaps it should have been, but only RCA is doing it so far.
The other category is DVD combos – TVs with DVDs built in for those who have forgotten. This category has been largely abandoned by other manufacturers, but RCA says they are doing very well with it for college students and people who want to have a simple TV installation for their kitchen, guest room, or bedroom. And, yes, people still do use DVDs. A recent study indicated that the average U.S. family has well over 100 DVDs. Even if they never buy another, they still need a way of playing the ones they have.
I was impressed by the energy exhibited by ON and Technicolor in reviving the RCA brand. And, said an RCA rep, “we’re making money.”
Ken Werner is Principal of Nutmeg Consultants, specializing in the display industry, display manufacturing, display technology, and display applications. You can reach him at kwerner@nutmegconsultants.com.