DISPLAY TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
PETE PUTMAN president of ROAM Consulting LLC. http://www.hdtvexpert.com
See Pete's Infocomm 2007 review at the hdtvexpert site.

Q4 2006 saw LCD sales up, Plasma down. Margins are low, manufacturers are losing money.

Luxim has a projector lamp that last 20,000 hours, ten times longer than the lamps we have now. See this writeup from the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, click and scroll to "Pop it in the oven".

Laser displays? Novalux is targeting December 2007 for their laser powered projector light engine.

Giant displays. Manufacturers are building some giant flat panel displays. Why? Sharp has an LCD panel with a 108 inch diagonal display. The mother glass dimensions are 7.1' by 7.8' by 0.28". Imagine trying to work with a piece of glass as large as an office floor and just 1/4 inch thick!

Plasma displays. They are known for their high power comsumption, on the order of 4 watts per lumen. Look for panels in the future that are 1.5 watts per lumen. Did you know that the plasma display was invented in 1964?

OLED (Organic LED) is coming along. Right now they are mostly used in small sizes such as phones. At the 2007 CES Sony showed an 11 inch display.

Digital Presence or Telepresence. A fancy name for video teleconference. Cisco is doing a lot of marketing and hype. Surround sound can give the illusion of sound source direction. Another presenter at Super Monday had more to say on this topic.

WHAT IS DRIVING THE DISPLAY MARKET? It's not necessarily high resolution displays, or expensive fancy displays.
• demand for higher resolution
• web downloaded content (often viewed on a small, low resolution display)
• affordable HD camcorders
• time shifting broadcast content
• inexpensive high capacity storage media
• the gatekeepers of traditional media are losing control of their content (think Napster and mp3)
• a big driving factor? Local News in HD! Broadcasters are doing a lot of marketing and bragging about all the HD and DTV equipment they purchased.
• Mobile Digital TV? Currently over the air digital television is not reliable, in fact, it is pretty bad. LG and Harris have created MPH [Mobile-Pedestrian-Handheld], a SD (standard definition, not HD) picture that is transmitted in-band along with the regular DTV broadcast. Pete reported that the performance was almost perfect. The only time there were any glitches was when the vehicle he was riding in went through an underpass. MPH isn't a done deal, currently it is in an experimantal stage. It needs approval before it's available.
• HD Camcorders such as the JVC Everio GZHD7 a camcorder with internal 60 GB hard drive.
• blue laser next generation DVD machines.
This is not an exhaustive list, just some things to consider.

Blu-Ray or HD DVD, which will win?
Note that the see the benefits of either HD DVD or Blu-Ray, you have to be viewing a picture that is 50 inches or larger.
Warner Bros announced in January that they will make dual Blu-Ray/HD DVD discs.
Amazon is selling slightly more Blu-Ray than HD DVD.
Blu-Ray players were in the $1000 and up range. They are now below $500. Sony has said that players will be $299 by the end of 2007.
BestBuy is selling a Toshiba HD DVD player for $299.
LG has a $1200 player that will play both formats.

Recording off-air TV in HD will require a lot of storage, on the order of 9 GB per hour.
USB Flash? A quick search of PC Connection shows a few 64 GB flash USB drives.
Desktop? How about a Terabyte for under $300?

Imagine being away from home in a hotel and you want to watch "the game" that isn't available on the hotel cable, but you know it's on at home. If you had a Slingbox you could watch it! Think of a Slingbox as a tuner you hook up at home to your cable, or antenna, or satellite. You control (tune / change channels) the Slingbox through ethernet, from anywhere. The audio and video are delivered through the internet, to your hotel room. I see a problem with this: your ISP probably won't like you serving up a video stream and could cut off your internet connection.

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