THE FRONT LINE: MARCH 10, 2006
LG.Philips’ 100-inch LCD Panel: an Ego Boost?
On Wednesday, March 8, LG.Philips LCD (LGL) showed an unprecedented 100-inch (diagonal) TFT-LCD panel. This leapfrogs the Samsung 82-inch model shown at CeBit last year, and by Sony at CES 2006.
Developed at LG.Philips LCD’s P7 — the world’s largest seventh generation (G7) substrate size (1950 x 2250mm) fabrication line in Paju, South Korea — the 100-inch panel is a wide screen (16:9) LCD TV panel with a screen width and height exceeding 2.2m and 1.2m, respectively.
According to the company press release, this panel uses a proprietary copper-wire interconnect technology for all junctions within the thin-film transistors (TFTs) that switch individual LC pixels on and off. Supposedly, this permits faster switching times over the aluminum alloy and chromium alloy conductors used prior to 2002.
Although no native resolution specification was provided, LG.Philips claims the new panel offers“ … a response speed below 5 milliseconds (ms), 6.22 million-pixels, full HD grade picture quality, and can reproduce 1.07 billion colors.”
Are we likely to see this panel in an HDTV any time soon? Don’t bet on it. Panels these big are very difficult and costly to manufacture right now, and are shown primarily as a way to get PR “buzz” for the manufacturer. Plus, there’s that Hatfield-McCoys plasma and LCD feud thing going on between LGL and Samsung, something I dubbed the “Mine’s Bigger Than Yours” contest a few years back.
What’s more significant is that larger quantities of smaller-size LCD panels for TVs (i.e. 42-inch, 47-inch, and 55-inch) can be made on these new fabrication lines, commercializing them that much faster and helping to drive down the cost of large LCD TVs. It’s all part of the never-ending “clash of the titans” between plasma and LCD manufacturers.
You can understand why the SED faces such daunting odds against its survival in the flat-panel TV marketplace.
