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| EMagazine Volume 5 Issue 5 Oct / Nov 2000 |
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Toys Article - October 2000 - [HTI Home Page] |
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Display Solutions for
the 21st Century Companies are beginning to form strategic alliances to reduce their research and development costs, and new players are joining the field. Right now there are only four OEM manufacturers (Fujitsu, NEC, Panasonic, and Pioneer), but in the near future competition from South Korean companies should help drive prices lower. |
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Your grandkids will have to go to a museum to see TVs like the one you're watching today. "Plasma is the future, here now, and scoring a cool quotient off the charts." So declares Pioneer's euphoric website. Marketing hyperbole aside, Frost & Sullivan (Mountain View, CA) research analyst Keith Robinson predicts that world Flat Panel Display (FPD) revenues should go from $10.8 billion in 1998 to $17.4 billion by 2001. Frost & Sullivan is an international marketing consulting and training company that monitors the FPD industry for market trends, measurements, and strategies. Robinson estimates that plasma TVs will account for a relatively paltry chunk of the flat-screen total ($143 million), but will experience a 39 percent annual growth rate over the next five years. If the market for plasma TVs continues to expand at that rate, and sales of smaller LCD monitors increase at the expected 30.4 percent per year, then Pioneer's vision of the ultimate demise of the cathode ray tube may not be so greatly exaggerated after all. "I think that once the price comes down, people will be using plasma screens to replace regular TVs," says Robinson.
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Brad Smith, president of Audio Video Design (Wellesley, MA), agrees that plasma screens are indeed application specific, yet says that there can be many instances where space is at a premium, even in large homes. "Cases where people want to have the TV fold down from the ceiling or raise up from the end of their bed demand a thin screen. They also work well in formal rooms, where you can hide them behind a curtain. One customer even had one mounted over his fireplace behind a motorized painting," he says. Smith concedes, however, that current plasma screens demand a customer with a fairly substantial budget. "The people who are buying plasmas have a lot of money and either have a very specific application, or they love the idea of this thing," he says.
Making flat phat
So what kind of changes are going to need to take place before the flat-screen revolution really takes off? Frost & Sullivan's market study concluded that manufacturers are already making adjustments that should ensure that plasma-screen TVs eventually follow the pricing model of VCRs, home computers, and the countless other pieces of consumer electronic equipment that were prohibitively expensive when they were first introduced. Companies are beginning to form strategic alliances to reduce their research and development costs, and new players are joining the field. Right now there are only four OEM manufacturers (Fujitsu, NEC, Panasonic, and Pioneer), but in the near future competition from South Korean companies should help drive prices lower. Frost & Sullivan's Robinson also points out that plasma display and LCD may be superseded in the coming years by even newer technology, such as field emission displays and organic light-emitting diodes (which Pioneer already uses in color displays for several of its automotive head units). In the meantime, manufacturers are diligently working to lower prices through perfection of current technology. Fujitsu's cheapest plasma TV, the non-HDTV 42-inch Plasmavision 4203, retails for about $6,995. That represents significant progress for flat screens, but 46-inch projection TVs now sell for $1,000 from large chain retailers like Best Buy and Circuit City.
The price of the HDTV-ready Plasmavision 4221 jumps to $15,999, thousands of dollars above the cost of a CRT or projection-based high-resolution set. So although prices are edging down, plasma screens are still selling on the strength of their narrow footprint, multimedia capability, and "cool factor." Marty Zafino, manager of product development at Mitsubishi (Cypress, CA), cites mass- production problems as the stumbling block that seems to be preventing plasma screens from following the typical consumer electronics ski-slope price trajectory. "We developed two plasma sets in the past, but didn't continue because manufacturing them is extremely difficult," says Zafino. However, Mitsubishi has invested in a plasma factory and is working on revising the manufacturing process so that flat-screen TVs can be produced at a reasonable price. Mitsubishi may be entering the market more cautiously than some of its competitors, but Zafino doesn't doubt that plasma screens have a strong future. "We didn't spend all that money on the factory for nothing. We'll eventually be in the flat-panel business."
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CEA Refines The Definition of HDTV The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) has narrowed the definition of HDTV. Literally. The CEA specifications for HDTV sets had included a loophole that allowed Toshiba and Hitachi to market certain TVs with 4:3 screens as high definition, even though a 16:9 screen is needed to fully display a letterbox picture. Last December, the CEA voted to come up with a new definition for the sets in question. According to CEA manager Tim McNamara, "There will be a new category for 4:3 digital TVs. Right now we've got SDTV and HDTV, and these sets don't really fit into either of those categories." The CEA defines HDTVs as having 720p or 1,080i vertical display resolution, a 16:9 screen, and Dolby 5.1 digital surround sound. Toshiba currently labels its digital 4:3 sets as HDTV ready, and says that that won't be changing until the CEA comes out with a new definition. Tom Rose, president of Custom Audio/Video Installations Inc. (Knoxville, TN), feels that the confusion over what constitutes HDTV is setting the industry back and will ultimately frustrate consumers. Rose is a Toshiba dealer/installer, and has sold 4:3 sets labeled HDTV ready. He has not received any complaints yet, but says, "There's too much confusion and ambiguity in the industry. I think that a lot of people are going to be pissed off in a year or so, when they do finally get things nailed down, and their TVs are no longer HDTV." Rose has stopped selling the 4:3 televisions in anticipation of this fallout. He says he is tired of trying to explain to customers that they cannot reproduce a letterbox picture without losing approximately 25 percent of their screen area. "There's no way you're going to get true high definition from a 4:3 screen, no matter what it says on the TV," says Rose. But that's his opinion. According to Rose, "Half the guys in CEDIA have their own definition of HDTV, which they get from the manufacturers." Rose believes that an HDTV set must have more than one million pixels, 1,080 lines of resolution-and a 16:9 aspect ratio. And where did he get this definiton? At a Toshiba seminar. -E.D. |
