Canon Abandons SED TV Hopes 120
angry tapir writes "Canon has decided to liquidate a subsidiary developing a flat-panel display technology called SED, effectively bringing to an end once high hopes that the screens would replace LCD panels and plasma displays in living room TVs. Development of SED (surface-condition electron-emitter display) screens began in 1986 at Canon and was joined in 1999 by Toshiba. SEDs combine elements of both CRT (cathode ray tube) and LCD (liquid crystal display) technologies. As with CRTs, electrons hit a phosphor-coated screen to emit light. But instead of being shot from an electron gun, electrons are drawn out of an emitter through a slit that is only a few nanometers wide. The result is a picture that is as bright as a CRT and does not suffer a time lag sometimes seen on LCD panels with rapidly moving images."
The Man screws us again. (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, that's too bad. I was looking forward to trying out 's/commercial//g'.
At least you'll still get your basic viewing stats with AWK TV.
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gsub(/commercial/,"",$0)
Damn... (Score:4, Informative)
This display sounded good until I read TFA. Bottom line: they cost too much.
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What's stopping this technology from becoming a consumer product later? If those specialist displays work out, they may come down in cost as technology changes....
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Pretty soon OLED technology can do everything SED could do while being cheaper to manufacture and using less power to run. Using SED in consumer products will be like using nixie tubes in digital wrist watches. Highly impractical.
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"pretty soon"?
It seems like that's been said about OLED for many years now, similar to what was said about SED.
The Sony OLED screens are tiny and ridiculously expensive. BTW, there's a tiny OLED screen in my Series 3 TiVo, and I appreciate it a lot, but note that they've taken that screen out of subsequent hardware.
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It seems, focus has shifted to mobile devices with desktop displays as an afterthought.
My Samsung Galaxy has OLED screen which is VERY nice. I only wish I could buy a real notebook with such screen.
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OLED has run into another competitive problem, LED-LCD. Add an additional layer to a LCD display, a LED behind each pixel (technically groups of three) and you get very high contrast and energy efficiency. Plain white LEDs are a lot easier than some of the other light frequencies and the hassles of trying to extend the life of OLEDs. As a benefit you just have to redesign existing production facilities to add fabrication of the additional layers
Nixie tubes in wrist watches. (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nixie_Wozniak.jpg
Practical? No.
Badass? Profoundly.
Re:Damn... (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I believe it was the delay from the license lawsuit that really killed it. The first couple of generations of LCD and Plasma's screens weren't cheap to produce either. But while the SED technology was mired in litigation the LCD and Plasma manufactures sold screens and used the money to develop better and cheaper manufacturing processes. Once the SED litigation was cleared up it was too late. They had missed the ramp up stage. The had an expensive new technology competing against a cheap mature one. The stupid thing is the biggest loser in the whole ordeal is probably Nano Proprietary, the ones who started the litigation in the first place. If they had just let the joint venture build the damn things they would be collecting royalty checks today. Instead they sued their only revenue source out of existence.
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how thick are the TV's? (Score:3, Interesting)
CCFL LCD's are a few inches thick. someone i know just bought a 47" LED LCD TV and it's 1" thick at most. they junked a 150 pound CRT flat screen monster that broke. no one wants a big TV anymore
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no one wants a big TV anymore
I do. The bigger the better. However, I don't want another heavy one; my 42 inch flat screen CRT weighs 214 pounds. At least I know nobody's going to steal it.
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Yes bigger is better - this nostalgia for CRTs is misplaced in my opinion. Very few people have screens large enough to show off 1080p properly at the distances they are used at. I know some claim that they have super eyes etc. but that's not the norm, and as you get older those eyes lose performance.
One of the things on my list of things that pisses me off is that I can't get an reasonable flat panel greater than 65". The only non-projector setups above that size are DLPs now, and while I have room for 80+
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Oh, you can get a plasma TV bigger than 65 inches. Check Panasonic's website. You can expect to pay $15,000 for it, though...
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I didn't know anyone was nostalguc for CRTs. They're too thick and too heavy.
as you get older those eyes lose performance
When you hit your 40s your focusing lenses get hard, but most older folks can see distances as well as they did when they were young; you need reading glasses because the eye won't focus. Your night vision deteriorates some, but that won't affect TV viewing.
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It's a flat panel technology like everything else that's being worked on.
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Some demos units were as thick as plasma or LCDs from the era when they were being shown [absoluteastronomy.com] off as if they still had a future.
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And I guess that means there is still the possibility they'll find a way to make them viable for the consumer market.
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you COMPLETELY missed the point of SED screens// i recommend reading up on them..
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The LED LCD TVs along with Corning's new Gorilla glass (so there is no border/bezel around the edge of the TV, the picture can fill the entire screen size) are going to be awesome. Sturdy, extremely-scratch resistant, and light weight.
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Shame that all those of us with a decent set of eyes will have to suffer the same laggy, blurry nausea inducing inferior display technology only now it's wrapped in a tougher shell. At least I can finally go back to cleaning it normally.
Whatever happened to a mere 22" doing 2048x1536 @85hz with no lag? What happened to the days when anything over 17" could do resolutions that left that 1080P bullshit in the dust?
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Good news: the 3d tidal wave is forcing all of the LCD makers to switch to 120 or 240 hz.
And after that, the next differentiator is going to be resolution again, e.g., you'll get sets with 2160P advertised as 'twice as smooth as HD' etc.
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I'm not sure 2160p will offer too many benefits over 1080p. It'll be a while before source media is anything greater than 1080p since the bandwidth/disc capacity to broadcast/distribute that isn't there yet. TVs can upscale, but 1080p BluRay already looks crystal clear at a reasonable viewing distance, so you don't get the same level of benefit that upscaled DVD gets.
The things that I see becoming differentiators are:
- AMOLED (3D is supposedly actually watchable on these screens)
- wireless connections (LG a
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2160 will offer huge advantages to PCs, where the source material is generated, and to marketing, where it's 'twice as good!'. And since it is relatively cheap to do, you'll likely see it before a lot of those other things.
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So, the resolution and frame rate will be comparable to what high end displays had over a decade ago, yet the image quality, color accuracy, black levels, etc. will still be shit?
And I'll still have to deal with dead pixels?
And I'll still have to deal with shitty shitty shitty processing delays?
And I'll still be unable to physically drive my display at various resolutions?
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And I'll still be unable to physically drive my display at various resolutions?
If I understand SED properly... that's no different. There's still a matrix of emitters, but they are driving less screen space... like 1 emitter per pixel.
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SED was basically a CRT with something smaller than a linear tube.
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And I'll still have to deal with dead pixels?
As opposed to ghosts from screen burn in? Or how about the huge power draw of a CRT? Or what about buying a new $400 lamp for your "big screen" every 2000 hours?
And I'll still have to deal with shitty shitty shitty processing delays?
When is the last time you used an LCD? 1995? That hasn't been a problem in a very long time. I guess you probably think that viewing angles are still an issue with LCDs too?
And I'll still be unable to physically drive my display at various resolutions?
And be unable to physically damage your display by using non standard modes. Here's a brilliant idea that I'm sure nobody's thought of before, why don't you run the LCD at native
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That's a shitty idea - how many people have a flat black wall behind their TV?
The bezel is very fucking useful to anyone who wants to view the screen. There's a reason we put pictures in frames. A solid border around an image makes it much more viewable.
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I'm not sure if you mean that there's a new VARIETY of Gorilla Glass, but the glass was invented in 1962. I don't see when that trademarked name was taken out, however.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla_glass#Gorilla_Glass [wikipedia.org]
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
California energy regulations (Score:1)
I would bet that California put the nail in the coffin.
Crap (Score:4, Insightful)
Let us pray that big OLED screens with enough longevity become a reality in a couple of years, because the LCD tech just isn't that good.
This is bad news... Very, very bad news.
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It might not be great, but it's good enough for most people.
You can say the same thing about MP3s and DVDs. Not great, but good enough.
Re:Crap (Score:5, Insightful)
It's only good enough for most people because they haven't seen better. Case in point: TN panels. If you've never seen an IPS, you have no idea that vertical gamma shift and low colour reproduction aren't normal. If you've never seen a CRT or a plasma, as is the case with newer generations, you have no idea that the gray background, instead of black, isn't normal.
Thankfully, IPS panels have come down in price so they are affordable, but the black level is still waaaaaaaaay over what classic phosphor display tech gives you. I've had my LCD for a year, and I still get pissed off by the damn thing glowing grey when the screen saver kicks in.
mp3 usually *is* good enough, and most of the time you can't discern it from the original if it has a high bitrate, but that isn't the case with something like LCD vs. SED; it would be more like 64 kbps compared to lossless audio.
OLED is our only hope for quality displays now, and it's not progressing as fast as it should.
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I still miss my old 22" CRT in terms of display acuracy... I've yet to see any LCD that compares to it in that regard.
See this is exactly what the GP was talking about. 99% of displays on the market won't out perform it do to cheap technology. Go have a look at NEC's spectraview series of monitors, or the high end monitors from Eizo and you'll never miss your old CRT again. These monitors have wide gamuts, perfect viewing angles, and internal colour lookup tables to ensure the data displayed is simply right.
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Go have a look at NEC's spectraview series of monitors, or the high end monitors from Eizo and you'll never miss your old CRT again. These monitors have wide gamuts, perfect viewing angles, and internal colour lookup tables to ensure the data displayed is simply right.
Wide gamut is BAD. You DO NOT WANT wide gamut, as it fucks up the colours really bad and lowers the dynamic range.
This is yet another victory for marketing. Somehow they've managed to convince people that wide gamut is a good thing, when it's just about the worst thing ever to have happened to display tech...
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You don't understand how it works.
Wide gamut would be great *IF* there were more than 8 bits per channel, but there aren't.
Imagine that you have a monitor that covers 4975396134% of NTSC. Pure red on such a monitor is eye-scorchingly red; in fact, it's so red that Satan himself enjoys it. 0 is lack of red, 255 is unbelievably red, as mentioned.
To get what's currently pure red on a sRGB monitor, you need to pick the value of 1. Everything above 1 is "too red".
So, you're stuck with 0 on your 10984081% gamut m
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1. If you need a screen that absolutely perfectly can display every single visible colour within bounds that it is capable of displaying producing absolutely zero banding on any of the channels than great more power to you. Yet the majority of the world has proven that quite frankly unless you're examining xrays, MRIs or doing research in the field of colou
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Oh yes, wide gamut TN panels do exist... They should be classified as an atrocity against mankind :(
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They should be classified as an atrocity against mankind :(
Amen to that!
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10bit is doable with display port and proper graphics cards. But this is more or less only on high end machines.
And Joe average won't see the difference anyway.
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I've had my LCD for a year, and I still get pissed off by the damn thing glowing grey when the screen saver kicks in.
I just bought a 22" LED-backlit panel and the blacks are very black. The glow of the black screen is not completely imperceptible in a darkened room, but it is hard to detect. As with all technologies, things improve over time.
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I just bought a 22" LED-backlit panel and the blacks are very black.
Only because your monitor is cheating and turning off the edge LEDs completely when it detects a black screen.
Try this: open your image editing program, create a fully black images, and add a couple of white pixels to it. Then display it full screen and see what happens. There are two possible scenarios:
1) You find out that your blacks aren't as black as you thought
2) The monitor decides to disregard those white pixels and turn off the LEDs anyway
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Only because your monitor is cheating and turning off the edge LEDs completely when it detects a black screen.
Either that, or the blacks are very black.
I love how you're going to sit there and tell me I'm wrong about the screen I'm typing on this very minute. But hey -- hate your monitor all you want.
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Are you too scared to try what I said? ;)
Or maybe your other monitor is a piece of crap?
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I know my monitor isn't turning off the LEDs completely because it has two dead pixels.
I still think it's hilarious that you can sit there and tell me what my monitor looks like.
It seems to me there are two basic concepts at work here: A.) Your belief that all LCD monitors look like shit; and B.) My general enjoyment of the reasonable color and rich blacks of my LCD monitor. Who's likely to convince whom? Like I said, hate your monitor all you want. I hated my old one.
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Give me the model name of your monitor, and I'll find out what its black point is when calibrated to the standard 120 cd/m2.
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Besides that, pictures are not normally completely black. My screen has high contrast and deep blacks, but I have to tweak it a bit before watching "the dark knight" - the picture becomes rather indiscernible.
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No, he's right about that one. Most LED displays are edge-lit, at least so far. Monitors don't generally use the area-dimming technology you see in some high-end TVs.
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You assume that it's because they haven't seen better. I'd like to suggest that perhaps it's simply because most people just don't care that much about these things, even if they had seen better and that "good enough" really is good enough.
That movie I just watched and that game that I just played looked fine. I was too busy enjoying them to be sitting around nitpicking at how black the blacks were.
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If you have your computer actually power down the screen, you'll save energy AND hopefully lower your blood pressure at the same time.
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Re:Crap (Score:5, Insightful)
And before those, cassette tapes and VHS were "good enough". Black-and-white TV was "good enough". Phonographs were "good enough". Believe it or not, people once lived perfectly happy lives with just books and whatever music they could sing and play themselves!
I would argue that "good enough" is not good enough. If you settle for "good enough", you are rejecting the very concept of progress. If on the other hand you believe that progress is both possible and desirable, then there can be no such thing as "good enough"; there is only "the best we've managed so far", and that is only tolerable until we figure out how to do better.
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But, just like with MP3s, some of these "good enough" issues deal with issues *besides* the absolute best picture/sound quality. For example, being able to carry around far more music (or podcasts, in my case) at one time on the same sized device outweighs the degradation in quality. Also, like others have mentioned, many people *can't* tell the difference. So for them, the "higher quality" isn't higher, it's just more wasteful.
While I definitely appreciate the higher video qu
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Why not LED? (Score:2, Interesting)
Have you seen an LED screen recently?
I bought a laptop with an LED screen and I have to be very clear - it's obviously a sharper, better, higher contrast screen. The white is very white and very bright, and the blacks are deep and dark. Sitting next to the LCD screen (I run dual head) the difference is glaring.
LCD is sharper (to me) than CRT, and LED is brighter/more contrast than LCD. Best of both worlds?
Re:Why not LED? (Score:4, Informative)
There is no such thing as a "LED screen". What you are talking about is LED-backlit LCD panels. They pretty much do nothing important compared to regular CCFL backlighting, apart from having somewhat lower power consumption and more correct colour temperature. Everything else is more or less the same, including the black level and the contrast.
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Not entirely true. LED backlights are controllable and switch off in banks. This is significant because the backlighting can turn off in areas where there is very dark "black", increasing the contrast ratio quite a bit. With a CCFL backlight it is always on, so you have a backlight bleeding through the dark areas on-screen.
Yes and no.
As far as I know, there isn't a single computer monitor that allows local area dimming, as LEDs are scattered around the edge of the panel and a diffuser takes care of distributing the brightness around the entire surface of the panel (which, coincidentally, allows for just as bad "backlight bleeding" as is the case with CCFLs).
There likely won't be such monitors, either, for two reasons:
1) The LEDs come on small panels which are attached together. They might come from different batches, which al
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Parent wrote: "As far as I know, there isn't a single computer monitor that allows local area dimming"
Shows what you know. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrightSide_Technologies_Inc [wikipedia.org].
While Brightside's showcase product at SIGGRAPH etc. was a large screen TV, the original prototype addressable LED backlit HDR display (developed in the comp. sci. graphics dept. at UBC so I got to play around with it) was a computer monitor.
As for blooming, it turned out to be a minor issue because, while the human eye has a ver
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That's a prototype, it doesn't count ;)
Also, it used an entirely different (and commercially non-viable) method of backlighting. You get serious blooming issues when you can only turn off a quadrant of many LED panels instead of individual ones.
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Very small correction: there are certainly no consumer LED screens, but the large, annoying, things that burn your eyes out with Snickers commercials when you go e.g. to the Sziget festival are certainly LED screens.
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-1, Wrong
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED [wikipedia.org]
They're rare and expensive for anything more than portable devices, but LED displays certainly do exist, and the contrast is much better than with LCDs.
Shame (Score:2)
'Tis a shame...I remember reading about this tech back in the mid to late '90s...seemed promising. Oh well -_-;;
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Don't worry - OLED will be better, much better.
High end monitors (Score:3, Interesting)
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I think Barco would have a better shot at it than Eizo. The last time I checked they were in much better financial shape, and are much more diversified than Eizo.
Couldn't release it as high end consumer product? (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, if they did all that work to turn it into a TV at all they could have released it to compete against Plasma TVs. If I could get CRT quality in LCD weight and size I'd be all over that. $5000 for a 36" TV that does that? Yes please.
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Fire Hazard (Score:3, Funny)
I though 'SED' stood for smoke emitting diode [mondofacto.com]. Probably would give a nice bright image I guess, but not for very long.
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Market law (Score:2)
Dura lex SED lex
I wonder if patent EXPIRATION was involved, too? (Score:2)
It was a patent troll that shot down this technology.
I wonder if patent expiration might have been involved, too. The project started 24 years ago. Perhaps, after all the delays, all the fundamental patents would be toast by the time production ramped. So the PHBs might think that even if they got it competitive now they'd be vulnerable to instant generic clones.
Well cry me a river... (Score:3, Insightful)
Honestly, this isn't as nearly as sad as it appears, because its 'rival', OLED surpasses SED in almost every area. In fact, it could well be in EVERY area. Does anyone have any information on how SED could have been even slightly better?
OLED, when it comes of age, really is the panacea/holy grail/goal/best of all worlds when it comes to display tech (and possibly most types of lighting too).
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Does anyone have any information on how SED could have been even slightly better?
High acceleration voltage to produce secondary electrons up the column. Per-pixel logic. via multiple control elements or even discrete SCEE-based vacuum amplifiers. (Don't recall if those were built in already.)
Of course the former isn't necessary with (O)LED-based screens and the latter can be done with the same semiconductor technology at a more convenient voltage. LEDs can be fantastically efficient and work at low volta
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Think of the potential reliability of a purely glass-and-metal structure in a hard vacuum...
I would tend to think that thin, flexible OLEDs would have better reliability still (once they get the blue OLED lifetime issues sorted). They're also solid state, which has to count for something. Glass/metal/vacuum sounds heavy/bulky too...?
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There is no such thing as panacea etc. when it comes to something as complex as display tech. I don't see it being used for eBook readers, just to think of just one example. It is about finding the right number of ingredients for the use of a display. Of course, when it comes off age, it will probably remove most if not all of the other active matrix technologies - TV's - in the museum. I still remember the small TV screens from Sony on the display stand - they blew everything away except for the display si
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Displays aren't like music which can offer many orders of magnitude of quality. OLEDs may not be a panacea, but further improvements are diminishing returns. They're so close, and will be almost perfect in say 10-20 years.
Personally I cannot wait to *remove* more screen brightness from my computer monitor
When I updated the light in our living room from 20w to 1000w halogen floodlight (to imitate daylight), the brightness of the screen is better brighter. It's just when there's a dark background that the bright screen appears overly bright. In any case, OLEDs offer far more than just bright
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Stop that. (Score:2)
Why are you trying to upsell me to something that you don't have stock?
pity (Score:1, Interesting)
Having seen a SED TV working up close, it's a pity they have not got this out as even LCD, OLED, plamsa etc all did not have the accurate color representation of CRT - In fact reference monitors were the initial target
But seeing one up close, the colors and resolution was just amazing - most people don't realise how "compressed" the color space is on most content and displays
But hey just like Token Ring, FDDI, ATM etc being technically better than ethernet, cost and being good enough often wins out
Shame (Score:1)
A shame this, as a lot of the earlier reviews of the SED technology picture quality had it just about equalling CRT, but it was firmly beating Plasma, and obviously LCD was a distant 4th.
Oh well, maybe OLED can be ramped up in size and down in cost, as that doesn't do too bad in the PQ stakes.