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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Still crazy after all these years

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I noticed this bit of technology reportage by the television reviewer of the Times (London) the other day;

“I was talking to a television engineer over the weekend – I won’t say from which company – and he confirmed to me what I long suspected: the picture quality on LCD flat screens is a joke within the industry. The future, apparently, is not even plasma but something called SED (surface conduction electron-emitter display) which uses a combination of flat panel and cathode ray tube to deliver better quality than either LCD or plasma. Expect to see the first sets this spring.”

Ah, SED. Sitting in the file next to FED. Generally filed under, “Display technologies of the future and likely to remain so.”
Not that anything of what the TV reviewer says is wrong – except, perhaps, the bit about “this spring” – I hope he’s not holding his breath.
SED, if you can’t call to mind the details, is a pixel-driven CRT technology. Rather than the single steered-beam electron gun of a conventional crt, each pixel - which has crt-type phosphors - has a corresponding individual electron emitter: the electrons are accelerated across a small (in vacuo) gap and do the usual excitation thing. Result; crt-like colour rendition and brightness, from flat-panel geometry. FED (field-emissive….) differs mainly in the mechanism used to generate the free electrons, which with FED are excited from a very fine point or collection of points by a voltage field. Recent efforts use carbon nanotubes as the points, which elevates FED to being up there with all that’s cool in techie circles.
So why no SED sets out there (yet)? For one thing, the industry has done what it does so well – having invented a promising technology, it got itself embroiled in a damaging legal dispute over IP that has only recently been resolved (participants include Canon and Toshiba – if you want that bit of the story, Google will provide). Which is part of the reason that the sets our TV reviewer has been told to expect, have been similarly promised as “just around the corner” for at least the last two years.
Also, development resources have been spread around – the same companies that might bring SED to market are also hedging their bets by working on OLED TV. Is that ready? – yes, sort of, if you are prepared to pay enough for limited supplies of an 11-inch model (Sony).
I would not decry any of these technologies, they are probably all capable of producing beautiful results. I also don’t know anyone in the business who would not acknowledge the limitations of LCD (though “joke” is a bit excessive); limited colour gamut, poor energy efficiency, limited contrast and, as a subtractive technology, an enduring problem with black levels. But the question is not where it falls short, but, is it good enough? And for the purpose – TV, that is – the answer appears to be “yes”. It’s only television after all, it doesn’t have to do a precision-colour reproduction of the Sistine Chapel. TV is only an illusion to begin with - given a decent-resolution image with no disastrous artefacts, in approximately the right colours, our own, very clever, eye-brain combination will readily complete the illusion for us.
The real problem for any new technology in the sector is the internal-combustion-engine-effect. While new technologies struggle to get to market, LCD becomes more entrenched as the high-volume standard, its manufacturing costs get pushed down even further, and it becomes that bit more difficult for any new arrival to compete with. (Just as with vehicle engines; are there better ways of powering a car than with reciprocating pistons burning volatile hydrocarbons? – of course there are, but the incumbent technology has a century’s head start in development.)
You reach the point where the question is not, “is this technology (SED, FED, OLED, or whatever) better than LCD?”, but “is this technology better by a sufficient margin, given the (inevitably) higher price point at which it will enter the market, to displace LCD?” That’s not a displays phenomenon, it’s true of any innovation in any market – but it’s particularly acute in this one because the key attributes are all – well, on display.

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