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MillimeterIs There a SED in Your Future?
Oct 26, 2005 4:11 PM, John McKeon
Will consumers buy a new television that’s flat as a plasma screen or LCD panel but delivers the bright, sharp images of the “old faithful” Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) TV?
Canon, Inc., and Toshiba Corporation are betting they will buy...and buy in large numbers. That’s why the two companies have invested nearly 20 years of research and an unknown amount of money in bringing a new technology called SED to market.
SED stands for Surface-Conduction Electron-Emitter Display, and its proponents claim it delivers a contrast ratio of up to 100,000:1 along with true High Def images, all while consuming a fraction of the power required by more familiar displays.
SEDs are similar to CRT televisions in that they generate an image by using electrons to excite phosphors on a screen. But traditional CRTs use a moving beam of electrons directed at a screen some distance away -- hence the boxy form of the CRT television.
The SED approach devotes a separate electron emitter to each pixel of phosphor on the screen, and sandwiches the emitter and display components so closely together that the finished assembly has the thinness consumers expect from today’s flat panel displays.
Canon says that “since SEDs apply the same light emission theory as CRTs, they provide dynamic color expression, a sharp picture, and faster video response than LCDs and PDPs. In addition, SEDs do not require electronic beam deflection, making possible screens of more than 40 inches in size that are only several centimeters thick.”
The brightness and color fidelity of the new technology spring from the fact that SED is a light emitting system, rather than reflecting or transmitting light.
Another advantage claimed for SEDs is low power consumption. An SED TV will use about one-third less electricity than a plasma panel and will also be better than LCDs and traditional CRTs, Canon says.
SED TVs have been a while getting to the market. In fact, Canon began research in the field in 1986 and began working with Toshiba in 1999. In October 2004 the two companies formed a new joint venture called SED, Inc. and announced the goals of starting small-lot production in 2005 and ramping up to full-scale production in 2007. The joint venture showed the new TVs at a major recent trade show in Japan along with Canon Expo events in Europe and New York.
The company predicts that by 2010 shipments will have reached 3 million panels with a total value of about 200 billion yen, or roughly US$1.75 billion. The average per-panel shipment value is expected to be about 67,000 Yen or US$585.
Also this year, though, Canon was hit with a lawsuit by Nano-Proprietary, Inc., claiming that Canon’s deal with Toshiba violated the terms of an older contract between NNPP and Canon. The outcome of this litigation remains unclear.
One of the main factors delaying SED on its way to the consumer market was, in fact, achieving the kind of price points that would enable the new technology to deal the kind of blow to PDP and LCD that its creators hoped it would. Canon and Toshiba were working energetically on streamlining their manufacturing and driving their cost-per-panel down -- but all the while, PDP and LCD prices were staging their own highly publicized downward spiral. Every new price level reached by PDPs and LCDs forced SED to reconsider once again.
Finally, Shun’ichi Uzawa, director and group executive at SED Development Headquarters, Canon, Inc., said the joint venture decided to go announce its market plans now because they were confident they had the basis for winning a price competition with PDPs and LCDs.
Uzawa also expects the new display’s image quality to carry the day. He believes consumers still think of CRT as the ideal image, and will embrace a new alternative to LCDs and PDPs if one becomes available.
