Note: a reader has commented that this story is from 2006. Sorry if I raised any expectations of SED TV production this year.

Toshiba is still mentioning SED TV in a recent story from www.arnnet.com

I’m pretty confident we won’t see any SED televisions from Toshiba at all this year.

Toshiba plans to end sales of CRT (cathode ray tube) and analog-tuner equipped LCD (liquid crystal display) televisions in Japan from April this year, it said Tuesday.

The company will instead concentrate its efforts on rebranding and promoting its digital LCD televisions, said Satoshi Niikura, executive vice president of Toshiba’s digital media network company, at a Tokyo news conference. The digital TV market is growing fast in Japan after the launch of terrestrial digital TV broadcasting in late 2004.

Overall LCD TV sales were 4.4 million units last year and surpassed sales of CRT sets for the first time. For this year Toshiba anticipates LCD TV sales will grow to 6 million units, and further to 7 million units in 2007. In contrast, the CRT TV market is seen contracting from 3.5 million sets in 2005 to 900,000 sets in 2007. The company expects to sell 650,000 PDP (plasma display panel) TV sets in 2007.

The year is unlikely to see any significant sales of SED (surface-conduction electron-emitter display) panel sets, Niikura said. Toshiba and Canon Inc. have been developing the technology for some time and have a joint production line in the Tokyo suburbs but commercial products are yet to be seen. Toshiba had originally promised SED televisions last year and is currently targeting them in small volumes during the “spring” of this year but a decision on whether the technology is ready for use in a commercial product is yet to be made.

Following the lead of several of its largest competitors, Toshiba plans to unify branding of its flat-panel television sets worldwide under a single name, the company also announced.

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