Mon 23 Jul 2007
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.
Technorati Tags: SED TV, SED, surface-conduction electron-emitter display, Toshiba, Canon
July 25th, 2007 at 11:29 am
The story you quote as being “recent” is from February, 2006.
Also, “the year is unlikely to..”, which year,
again, this is from 2006.
Very deceiving for those of us watching the sed story play out.
Same with “Toshiba plans to end crt sales…April this year…” this was for 2006.
I think you need to make a clarification.
Thank you. M. Mullica
July 30th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Thanks M. Mullica,
Some of those lines seemed a little out of date. Unfortunately, the year wasn’t mentioned in the version of the story I found. I’ll have to check more carefully in the future.
July 30th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
I’m a big fan of hires CRTs (mostly Trinitron), but I must admit I was shocked when I read that CRTs were just out of production in Japan! It did sound dated.
I guess this makes us realize just how much we need a replacement to CRTs in terms of picture quality (well, black levels, colors and contrast ratios, if not resolution). SED might be it if it ever sees the light of day. FED is similar enough anyway, so maybe we shouldn’t put all our eggs in the same basket.
Hopefully 5 years is the most we’ll have to wait. (Don’t you just love those “5 years” deadlines? Seems they are all over the place.)
July 31st, 2007 at 10:25 am
Like you, I am very excited about this new technology and I appreciate what you are trying to do with this website. My suggestion is that you clearly indicate the portions of your post you cut and paste verbatim from other websites. Summarizations are one thing but this post made it seem you were passing off another person’s words as your own. Thanks and hopefully the TV reviews can start sometime in the very near future.
August 1st, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Hi Joe,
I should probably “quote” the portions of news stories that I use in the posts. Since I don’t have any kind of inside track into the SED world, the majority of what I post is from other sources.
Thanks for the helpful comment.