Introduction
An oft-told story... When color TV was first introduced around 1964, the median price was around $400. TV set pricing stayed almost exactly the same until the CRT was replaced by LCD and Plasma. However, after a brief run up, set pricing has been gradually inching its way back down to a median of $400. When color TV was first introduced, programing was limited (3 channels if you lived in an urban area) but it was free. And, your stereo system was completely independent of your TV. This article is about the loss of revenue by the the TV set hardware providers to video content providers and other types of hardware.
Loss of Share of the Consumer Dollar
Cable TV
In the interim, cable TV was introduced. At first it was a way to get content to those that were out of reach of a broadcast signal. The very first cable TV system was implemented solely as a way to sell Television in a market that was not reached by broadcast and therefore had no TV set demand. In addition to providing basic network TV, of course cable eventually enabled much more variety than just the TV network content as well as a way to charge for content.
VCR
The next big development around TV viewing was the development of the VCR. The VCR (or Video Cassette Recorder for those of you unfamiliar with tape media) revolutionized the TV market. It enabled not only charging for content but charging for specific content. Rather than negotiating with the networks, moviemakers could albeit indirectly, sell their content to end users without getting bundled together with other content in a content services agreement. This further enabled smaller producers, too small to have network contracts, to make and distribute content down to individuals that could make, show and share their own content. This created the video rental channel as well as enabling the making and distribution of more exotic content that would not be handled by any large/shareholder owned corporation. The variety of content available became limited only by what could be stocked in the local video store, the opportunity to charge for content was narrowed specific creations, and the range of content providers grew substantially.
Flat TV
The arrival of flat TVs and certainly the transition to HDTV that flat TV enabled was a great boon to the Consumer Electronics industry. It virtually required that everyone replace their TV set. However, it did have one disadvantage in TV sound. In general,consumers will associate the sound quality of their TV viewing experience more closely with picture quality than actual picture quality. The development of the home theater concept capitalized on that as well as the move away from broadcast content to removable media and digital content. The implementation of flat TV meant that TV set speakers got smaller and, in some cases disappeared. This development didn't require that separate speakers be purchased, but it certainly encouraged consumers to consciously split the TV hardware dollars between the screen and the sound system. Further, as most LCD TVs have complex image enhancement schemes that necessitate a sound delay to accommodate the video processing, removing the speakers from the TV add to the complexity of TV setup. In order to have the TV sound synched with the image as the setmaker intended, the sound signal must be taken from the TV rather than other points in the device chain in order to get the proper delay. But complications aside, overall, the move to flat TV encouraged more spending on hardware other than the TV set itself.
The flat technology also enabled mobile video devices. Although watching video on a mobile device is somewhat limiting, these devices do offer a variety of games that obviate the need for a gaming console and TV screen to view it on. A common destination and partial reason for purchase of a new TV is in order to move the livingroom TV to the kids room for watching and games.
Internet Connected TV
The video cassette was replaced improved forms of removable media, in-turn: CDs DVDs, then BluRay. However, all forms of removable media are just means of communications, so it was inevitable that improved high-speed internet availability would replace the need for physical media altogether. The disappearance of physical media further expanded the range of individuals that could produce and distribute content as the need for any intermediary (TV network, video store, etc.) vanished as well. With virtually no content distribution costs, content owners and content bundlers command the vast majority of consumer TV viewing spending.
The Consumer TV Dollar
Though the price of a TV set has been virtually flat since 1964 the price of TV view has risen substantially. The stand-alone TV set has been replaced by a home theater system with multiple components. Traditional home TV viewing is being augment by mobile devices. However the bulk of the consumer TV dollar now goes to content purchases. With the TV set/consumer electronics industry mired in the doldrums of the current weak economy rather than focusing on more features to add to the TV set, it seems that the hardware makers would most benefit by envisioning some way to lower content costs.
A digression... my first experience with anything that was internet-like was viewing Mini-Tel in France. Mini-Tel was an internet like service provide by France Telecom. It had a lot, but limited, information such as what was showing at the local movie house and show times. On my viewing of Mini-Tel, I thought that it was a nice service but I could not see the leap between that and the life altering implications of the internet. Mini-Tel was a centralized service with limited content. The internet is a similar service but with virtually unlimited content. The big difference is the decentralization and the opportunity for user generated content as well as that from established big business. Although you pay something for an internet connection and you can obviously pay as much as you want for whatever you purchase over the internet, be it product, services or content, the internet essentially provided free and unlimited data content. If there were a service that provided free and unlimited entertainment content, suitable for a standard US coach potato, then that would have as big an impact as anything else mentioned here. And If that service were embodied in hardware, there would be quite a bit of value there.
The Smart TV Alliance is something of a move in that direction. It enables apps to be written that work across a variety of TV brands. It enables the grass roots type of content development that made the internet what it is. It provides an operating system that makes the TV a platform rather than just an output device. Ultimate, I expect that it will encourage input component integration (microphone, camera, maybe even touch) on the TV itself much as has happened with the notebook PC and cell phone. It maybe even will bring the excitement back to the category that other platforms have enjoyed over the past few years.
Norm
Monday, June 25, 2012
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Wither Pixel Qi (pronounced "Chi")
Introduction
Yesterday, Microsoft announced its belated response to the IPad(r) with the Microsoft Surface(r). The Surface seems targeted to those that have been considering a tablet but who still like the convenience of a keyboard. Microsoft seems to have learned something from Apple's marketing in that the announcement itself was done with a lot more flash. However, the Microsoft announcement was more engineer oriented (mentioning a vapor deposited magnesium case) whereas announcements from Apple tend to be purely consumer oriented focusing on the visual aspects of the device.
Recently, there has been much discussion about the next version of the Apple Retina screen, possibly going to an IGZO (indium/gallium/zinc-oxide) with increased resolution, lower power and greatly increased response time. Having used a tablet myself, although LCD technology can still benefit from these improvements, I find it surprising that neither Microsoft nor Apple seems to be going after the big problem with mobile device screens, sunlight viewability.
For us old codgers (meaning anyone over 30) the benefits of increased resolution start to peter-out above 200 dpi. And, the response time benefit, while important for viewing video, does not matter for those of us that rarely use our mobile devices to watch video. (Though, admittedly, mobile video is gaining in importance and my own user habits may be stuck in the old model.) However, a good part of my own mobile use, an a good part of mobile use generally, is outside usage. For that, the big deficit in LCD screen performance is the loss of contrast in direct sunlight. Indeed, I was recently using a tablet to take some photos outdoors, after pressing the button to turn on the device, it appeared to have not turned on. Shading the device with my hand, I could see that it was, in fact on, but the screen was completely useless in that location. This was reminiscent of one of the first mobile computers, the Data General One, that came with a screen that was of such low contrast, it was difficult to tell when it was on.
Pixel Qi
Sunlight, or even bright room, visibility has always been a problem with LCDs. This issue came to the fore with the development of notebook PCs for third world audiences and e-readers for the developed world. While an expedient solution for the e-reader market, where video speeds were not required, was to go to an e-paper screen, for the third world PC solution, transflective technology was developed that could be incorporated into conventional LCD manufacture.
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to see the Pixel Qi screen. Pixel Qi is a company that was formed to commercialize the screen technology that was developed for the "One Laptop Per Child" project. The screen was incredible; easily viewable in direct sunlight. When I saw it, I expected that I would start seeing this technology on notebooks within the year. Since then, although there have been a number of sample and customer announcements from Pixel Qi, the industry, in general is focusing on other areas of screen improvement with, I think, decreasing relevance to the new usage models the mobile device industry is intending to create. Again, the Pixel Qi technology has been around for some time and to my own tastes, it would have been universally implemented the very next design cycle.
Additionally, beyond the mobile market, there is an emerging Public Information Display (PID or "Digital Signage") that can make good use of the technology. PID is increasingly an outdoor technology and one of the great difficulties in engineering an LCD for outdoor usage is rejection of solar radiation. This is across the entire spectrum, UV, visible, and IR all cause problems for an outdoor LCD. Further, to make up for the washout caused by the visible light, Outdoor PIDs must be run at at-least 1000 nits and even then can have low contrast. (A Nit is a level of brightness. A conventional notebook screen probably runs at a level between 120 and 200 nits.) The LCD pictured here runs at 1000 nits and is being used to provide weather, advertising, and other information at a bus stop in Las Vegas. The display, facing north and sheltered, is readable but could be greatly improved.
The additional heat and energy required for a 1000 nit display further complicate outdoor PID design. A display that operates on reflective technology should be a natural here. So in addition to relatively small mobile displays, I would expect the Pixel Qi technology to appear in much larger PIDs. Again, I am surprised that the industry has not jumped on this technology.
Yesterday, Microsoft announced its belated response to the IPad(r) with the Microsoft Surface(r). The Surface seems targeted to those that have been considering a tablet but who still like the convenience of a keyboard. Microsoft seems to have learned something from Apple's marketing in that the announcement itself was done with a lot more flash. However, the Microsoft announcement was more engineer oriented (mentioning a vapor deposited magnesium case) whereas announcements from Apple tend to be purely consumer oriented focusing on the visual aspects of the device.
Recently, there has been much discussion about the next version of the Apple Retina screen, possibly going to an IGZO (indium/gallium/zinc-oxide) with increased resolution, lower power and greatly increased response time. Having used a tablet myself, although LCD technology can still benefit from these improvements, I find it surprising that neither Microsoft nor Apple seems to be going after the big problem with mobile device screens, sunlight viewability.
For us old codgers (meaning anyone over 30) the benefits of increased resolution start to peter-out above 200 dpi. And, the response time benefit, while important for viewing video, does not matter for those of us that rarely use our mobile devices to watch video. (Though, admittedly, mobile video is gaining in importance and my own user habits may be stuck in the old model.) However, a good part of my own mobile use, an a good part of mobile use generally, is outside usage. For that, the big deficit in LCD screen performance is the loss of contrast in direct sunlight. Indeed, I was recently using a tablet to take some photos outdoors, after pressing the button to turn on the device, it appeared to have not turned on. Shading the device with my hand, I could see that it was, in fact on, but the screen was completely useless in that location. This was reminiscent of one of the first mobile computers, the Data General One, that came with a screen that was of such low contrast, it was difficult to tell when it was on.
Pixel Qi
Sunlight, or even bright room, visibility has always been a problem with LCDs. This issue came to the fore with the development of notebook PCs for third world audiences and e-readers for the developed world. While an expedient solution for the e-reader market, where video speeds were not required, was to go to an e-paper screen, for the third world PC solution, transflective technology was developed that could be incorporated into conventional LCD manufacture.
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to see the Pixel Qi screen. Pixel Qi is a company that was formed to commercialize the screen technology that was developed for the "One Laptop Per Child" project. The screen was incredible; easily viewable in direct sunlight. When I saw it, I expected that I would start seeing this technology on notebooks within the year. Since then, although there have been a number of sample and customer announcements from Pixel Qi, the industry, in general is focusing on other areas of screen improvement with, I think, decreasing relevance to the new usage models the mobile device industry is intending to create. Again, the Pixel Qi technology has been around for some time and to my own tastes, it would have been universally implemented the very next design cycle.
Additionally, beyond the mobile market, there is an emerging Public Information Display (PID or "Digital Signage") that can make good use of the technology. PID is increasingly an outdoor technology and one of the great difficulties in engineering an LCD for outdoor usage is rejection of solar radiation. This is across the entire spectrum, UV, visible, and IR all cause problems for an outdoor LCD. Further, to make up for the washout caused by the visible light, Outdoor PIDs must be run at at-least 1000 nits and even then can have low contrast. (A Nit is a level of brightness. A conventional notebook screen probably runs at a level between 120 and 200 nits.) The LCD pictured here runs at 1000 nits and is being used to provide weather, advertising, and other information at a bus stop in Las Vegas. The display, facing north and sheltered, is readable but could be greatly improved.The additional heat and energy required for a 1000 nit display further complicate outdoor PID design. A display that operates on reflective technology should be a natural here. So in addition to relatively small mobile displays, I would expect the Pixel Qi technology to appear in much larger PIDs. Again, I am surprised that the industry has not jumped on this technology.
Friday, November 11, 2011
The Gorilla Glass Story
This story appears in the recent biography of Steve Jobs, "For the iPhone, the original plan was for it to have a plastic screen, like the iPod. But Jobs decided it would feel much more elegant and substantive if the screens were glass. So he set about finding a glass that would be strong and resistant to scratches. The natural place to look was Asia, where the glass for the stores was being made.
But Jobs’s friend John Seeley Brown, who was on the board of Corning Glass in Upstate New York, told him that he should talk to that company’s young and dynamic CEO, Wendell Weeks. So he dialed the main Corning switchboard number and asked to be put through to Weeks. He got an assistant, who offered to pass along the message.
“No, I’m Steve Jobs," he replied.
“Put me through.
” The assistant refused.
Jobs called Brown and complained that he had been subjected to “typical East Coast bullshit.
” When Weeks heard that, he called the main Apple switchboard and asked to speak to Jobs.
He was told to put his request in writing and send it in by fax. When Jobs was told what happened, he took a liking to Weeks and invited him to Cupertino."
The story is incorrect. I introduced Wendell Weeks to Steve Jobs,the original reason for the introduction was not gorilla glass and was at Wendell's initiative not Steve's. Wendell and I had had a discussion about another program at Corning. As a result of the discussion Wendell asked that I contact Steve and ask for a discussion. When Steve could not get through to Wendell he emailed me the "east coast bullshit" memo at Intel which I forwarded to Wendell. Wendell and I composed a response which he emailed to Steve requesting a dinner meeting at Kueletto's. Later, a friend of mine who worked at Apple wrote a short brief for Wendell before the meeting so he knew what to expect from Steve.
In truth, Corning had been reaching out to Apple for some time. In the early 1990's, Wendell's predecessor as CEO, John Loose, had sent me and two others out to Apple to brief them on the functioning of the display market. At the time, Apple's understanding of the display supply chain was very limited. Apple was still building a majority of their notebooks with monochrome displays when most of the competition had already switched to color. The returns to scale had already tipped in favor of color and monochrome's big discount was rapidly vanishing.
The story is telling in one sense, in that it was very easy for me to contact Steve Jobs while it was impossible for Steve Jobs to get through the Corning switchboard to talk to Wendell (east coast vs. west coast open communications). When I was fund-raising for Toprover, I reached out to Steve again and was able to get him to look at their web presentation on TV/home automation software. (Interestingly, the Toprover site and any presence it had in the internet archives has since vanished.) I also had the impression that he read some of the things I wrote for Visus et Veritas, or at least that we thought alike. A few years ago, before the retina display, I wrote an article stating that the screens for mobile devices had too few pixels to do justice to the apps that were being proffered. One of the things that Steve told Wendell was that if Corning was going to be a high tech player, they needed to have a presence in Silicon Valley. I had told Wendell 20 years earlier (before he was CEO) that Corning needed a lab in the valley.
(added) When IBM went looking for an operating system for its original PC, they investigated Digital Research's Disk Operating System (DR DOS). However, when the IBM people came to meet with the ownere of Digital Research, he was having too much fun sailing his boat around and missed the meeting. IBM decided that he was not serious about their business and went to Microsoft for their version of DOS and the owner of Digital Research eventually drank himself to death knowing that he could have been Bill Gates. Not being able to get anyone on the phone, Mr. Jobs would probably have ben even less inclined to call Corning back than IBM was for Digital Research. Reaching out first was key.
Norman Hairston
But Jobs’s friend John Seeley Brown, who was on the board of Corning Glass in Upstate New York, told him that he should talk to that company’s young and dynamic CEO, Wendell Weeks. So he dialed the main Corning switchboard number and asked to be put through to Weeks. He got an assistant, who offered to pass along the message.
“No, I’m Steve Jobs," he replied.
“Put me through.
” The assistant refused.
Jobs called Brown and complained that he had been subjected to “typical East Coast bullshit.
” When Weeks heard that, he called the main Apple switchboard and asked to speak to Jobs.
He was told to put his request in writing and send it in by fax. When Jobs was told what happened, he took a liking to Weeks and invited him to Cupertino."
The story is incorrect. I introduced Wendell Weeks to Steve Jobs,the original reason for the introduction was not gorilla glass and was at Wendell's initiative not Steve's. Wendell and I had had a discussion about another program at Corning. As a result of the discussion Wendell asked that I contact Steve and ask for a discussion. When Steve could not get through to Wendell he emailed me the "east coast bullshit" memo at Intel which I forwarded to Wendell. Wendell and I composed a response which he emailed to Steve requesting a dinner meeting at Kueletto's. Later, a friend of mine who worked at Apple wrote a short brief for Wendell before the meeting so he knew what to expect from Steve.
In truth, Corning had been reaching out to Apple for some time. In the early 1990's, Wendell's predecessor as CEO, John Loose, had sent me and two others out to Apple to brief them on the functioning of the display market. At the time, Apple's understanding of the display supply chain was very limited. Apple was still building a majority of their notebooks with monochrome displays when most of the competition had already switched to color. The returns to scale had already tipped in favor of color and monochrome's big discount was rapidly vanishing.
The story is telling in one sense, in that it was very easy for me to contact Steve Jobs while it was impossible for Steve Jobs to get through the Corning switchboard to talk to Wendell (east coast vs. west coast open communications). When I was fund-raising for Toprover, I reached out to Steve again and was able to get him to look at their web presentation on TV/home automation software. (Interestingly, the Toprover site and any presence it had in the internet archives has since vanished.) I also had the impression that he read some of the things I wrote for Visus et Veritas, or at least that we thought alike. A few years ago, before the retina display, I wrote an article stating that the screens for mobile devices had too few pixels to do justice to the apps that were being proffered. One of the things that Steve told Wendell was that if Corning was going to be a high tech player, they needed to have a presence in Silicon Valley. I had told Wendell 20 years earlier (before he was CEO) that Corning needed a lab in the valley.
(added) When IBM went looking for an operating system for its original PC, they investigated Digital Research's Disk Operating System (DR DOS). However, when the IBM people came to meet with the ownere of Digital Research, he was having too much fun sailing his boat around and missed the meeting. IBM decided that he was not serious about their business and went to Microsoft for their version of DOS and the owner of Digital Research eventually drank himself to death knowing that he could have been Bill Gates. Not being able to get anyone on the phone, Mr. Jobs would probably have ben even less inclined to call Corning back than IBM was for Digital Research. Reaching out first was key.
Norman Hairston
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
SID 2011
What is SID?
The Society for Information Display (SID) holds its annual meeting once per year in May. This year it was held in Los Angeles, at the LA Convention Center. The annual meeting, also known as SID, is the place where the companies that actually make the displays (rather than the TV set makers or marketers) show off their latest and greatest technology. In-spite of the fact that virtually all of the displays are made in Asia, SID still has significance in that the US is viewed as a pioneering market, where new applications are developed. Consequently many of the major producers from overseas participate in the show. The show consists of many sessions of both technical and business whitepaper presentations as well as an exhibit of actual devices.
The Touch Show
This year's SID was predominantly a touch show. Many of the booths of both larger and smaller companies featured either the latest touch technology or touchpanel controller chips. With respect to the touchpanels themselves, If you are not familiar with the term, the IPhone and IPad used a technology called “Projected Capacitive” touch. Of all of the touch panels that have been shipped, this technology represents the vast majority of shipments. However there were other technologies represented including various optical techniques. Optical technologies have advantages over capacitive in some markets in that they can do larger sizes and are potentially extensible into areas such as gesture recognition. Barring any technology breakthroughs, the touch technology for the livingroom TV set appears that it will be optical.
Although there will be continuing innovation in the TV set itself, much of the innovation going forward will be in how you interact with the set and for what purposes. New input technologies and new services delivered through the TV is the future. The optical touch technology is extensible into gesture recognition and ultimately into facial recognition and more human interaction
In addition to the panels themselves, there were many Silicon companies at SID showing improved touch panel controllers. Everyone had a different figure of merit, the yardstick by which they prefer to be judged. To my own thinking, energy efficiency is always the ultimate in mobile devices.
LCD Developments
With respect to the displays themselves, LG introduced their FPR technology which eliminates two of the major drawbacks to current 3D technology, expensive glasses, and problems viewing them with your head tilted or inclined. FPR uses circularly polarized passive glasses that can be worn as a clip on for those of us that already wear glasses. The picture was excellent; no flicker at all.
Several companies showed Autosteroscopic (Glasses Free) 3D. The displays were generally effective but had very narrow viewing cones and most of the displays placed footprints on the carpet to tell you exactly where to stand. All of the exhibits used lenticular coatings or some sort of shutter to present different views to each eye. Barring some significant invention, this approach may inherently be for single users only.
Samsung showed a field sequential color (FSC) display. The display does not entirely get rid of the color filter, but FSC does hold the promise of greatly increased energy efficiency. The old joke about LCDs is rather than generating an image they throw away light and throw away more light until you get down to the image that you want. With Field sequential color, you are potentially more than double the light that you keep. 3M showed a diffuser tape for the edge of the waveguide (the thing in back of the LCD that provides the light). The diffuser tape enables fewer LEDs to be used in an edge lit LED design. Finally, on the improved energy theme, Nanosys showed vastly improved “Quantum Dot Phosphors” for LEDs that had both better brilliance and more saturated colors. The difference in performance over normal phosphors was shocking considering how long and how slowly display technology develops. The Quantum dot phosphors have the potential to be as big an innovation as black matrix did for CRTs. Nanosys won a “Best of Show” award for their demo.
Other Display Technologies
For a technology that is touted as overtaking LCD in the next few years, there were surprisingly few demos of Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLEDs). OLEDs were supposed to be the technology of the future, just as Field Emission Displays (FEDs) were a decade ago, offering better viewing angles and better optical efficiency. However, LCDs got better to the point where further development of FED technology no longer made sense. As per the above, LCDs are still getting better and OLEDs have a limited time window before LCDs are too far down the cost curve and up the performance curve for OLEDs to compete.
Pixtronix showed their Mems (Micro-elecrto-mechanical) shutter display wich looked fantastic and has the potential to be extremely low power. Qualcom was there with their Mems mirror display as well. Given a nearly 50 year head start, it will be hard for any of these technologies to displace the LCD from non-mobility markets. However it is not a given that it will be OLED technology that becomes the new king of displays.
Upshot for TV
The impact of the technologies that were shown at SID will be that the livingroom TV will continue to get more energy efficient which can enable higher resolutions, brighter sets and more saturated colors. 3DTV, still in its infancy, will get much better and the expensive shutter glasses will be going away. Over the Top (OTT) applications will be enabled by improved optical efficiencies of both LCDs and newer technologies such as Mems and OLED and sunlight readability will improve. I have been to SIDs in the past where there was not much that was new. This one, for someone in the industry, offered a lot of genuinely new and useful innovation much of which I expect to see in the market almost immediately.
Norm
The Society for Information Display (SID) holds its annual meeting once per year in May. This year it was held in Los Angeles, at the LA Convention Center. The annual meeting, also known as SID, is the place where the companies that actually make the displays (rather than the TV set makers or marketers) show off their latest and greatest technology. In-spite of the fact that virtually all of the displays are made in Asia, SID still has significance in that the US is viewed as a pioneering market, where new applications are developed. Consequently many of the major producers from overseas participate in the show. The show consists of many sessions of both technical and business whitepaper presentations as well as an exhibit of actual devices.
The Touch Show
This year's SID was predominantly a touch show. Many of the booths of both larger and smaller companies featured either the latest touch technology or touchpanel controller chips. With respect to the touchpanels themselves, If you are not familiar with the term, the IPhone and IPad used a technology called “Projected Capacitive” touch. Of all of the touch panels that have been shipped, this technology represents the vast majority of shipments. However there were other technologies represented including various optical techniques. Optical technologies have advantages over capacitive in some markets in that they can do larger sizes and are potentially extensible into areas such as gesture recognition. Barring any technology breakthroughs, the touch technology for the livingroom TV set appears that it will be optical.
Although there will be continuing innovation in the TV set itself, much of the innovation going forward will be in how you interact with the set and for what purposes. New input technologies and new services delivered through the TV is the future. The optical touch technology is extensible into gesture recognition and ultimately into facial recognition and more human interaction
In addition to the panels themselves, there were many Silicon companies at SID showing improved touch panel controllers. Everyone had a different figure of merit, the yardstick by which they prefer to be judged. To my own thinking, energy efficiency is always the ultimate in mobile devices.
LCD Developments
With respect to the displays themselves, LG introduced their FPR technology which eliminates two of the major drawbacks to current 3D technology, expensive glasses, and problems viewing them with your head tilted or inclined. FPR uses circularly polarized passive glasses that can be worn as a clip on for those of us that already wear glasses. The picture was excellent; no flicker at all.
Several companies showed Autosteroscopic (Glasses Free) 3D. The displays were generally effective but had very narrow viewing cones and most of the displays placed footprints on the carpet to tell you exactly where to stand. All of the exhibits used lenticular coatings or some sort of shutter to present different views to each eye. Barring some significant invention, this approach may inherently be for single users only.
Samsung showed a field sequential color (FSC) display. The display does not entirely get rid of the color filter, but FSC does hold the promise of greatly increased energy efficiency. The old joke about LCDs is rather than generating an image they throw away light and throw away more light until you get down to the image that you want. With Field sequential color, you are potentially more than double the light that you keep. 3M showed a diffuser tape for the edge of the waveguide (the thing in back of the LCD that provides the light). The diffuser tape enables fewer LEDs to be used in an edge lit LED design. Finally, on the improved energy theme, Nanosys showed vastly improved “Quantum Dot Phosphors” for LEDs that had both better brilliance and more saturated colors. The difference in performance over normal phosphors was shocking considering how long and how slowly display technology develops. The Quantum dot phosphors have the potential to be as big an innovation as black matrix did for CRTs. Nanosys won a “Best of Show” award for their demo.
Other Display Technologies
For a technology that is touted as overtaking LCD in the next few years, there were surprisingly few demos of Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLEDs). OLEDs were supposed to be the technology of the future, just as Field Emission Displays (FEDs) were a decade ago, offering better viewing angles and better optical efficiency. However, LCDs got better to the point where further development of FED technology no longer made sense. As per the above, LCDs are still getting better and OLEDs have a limited time window before LCDs are too far down the cost curve and up the performance curve for OLEDs to compete.
Pixtronix showed their Mems (Micro-elecrto-mechanical) shutter display wich looked fantastic and has the potential to be extremely low power. Qualcom was there with their Mems mirror display as well. Given a nearly 50 year head start, it will be hard for any of these technologies to displace the LCD from non-mobility markets. However it is not a given that it will be OLED technology that becomes the new king of displays.
Upshot for TV
The impact of the technologies that were shown at SID will be that the livingroom TV will continue to get more energy efficient which can enable higher resolutions, brighter sets and more saturated colors. 3DTV, still in its infancy, will get much better and the expensive shutter glasses will be going away. Over the Top (OTT) applications will be enabled by improved optical efficiencies of both LCDs and newer technologies such as Mems and OLED and sunlight readability will improve. I have been to SIDs in the past where there was not much that was new. This one, for someone in the industry, offered a lot of genuinely new and useful innovation much of which I expect to see in the market almost immediately.
Norm
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