Toshiba plans to launch a television based on a new flat-panel display technology called SED, or Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display, in 2005, a company executive said Friday.
Toshiba plans to launch a television based on a new flat-panel display technology called SED, or Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display, in 2005, a company executive said Friday.
The technology has been under development by Toshiba and Canon since the 1990s. Televisions using this technology are said by developers to produce pictures that are as bright as a conventional cathode ray tube (CRT) pictures but without the slight time-delay sometimes seen with other flat-panel technologies such as LCDs and plasma display panels (PDP).
Toshiba’s first SED television will be launched during the 2005 calendar year, said Takeshi Nakagawa, CEO of the company’s electronic devices and components group, in an interview Friday in Tokyo. Initial production will be set at a small quantity and the TVs are likely to be expensive, he said.
Plans for commercialization in 2005 match a production schedule for SED panels disclosed in September by Toshiba and Canon, which are investing ¥200 billion ($2 billion) in a joint-venture called SED Inc. The plans call for SED Inc. to begin manufacturing around 3,000 55-inch panels from August next year. Those plans remain unchanged, a Toshiba spokesman said Monday.
The two companies had prototype SED panels on show at the Ceatec exhibition in Japan in October. The technology attracted long queues for a seat at each demonstration.
Toshiba is eyeing SED as a replacement technology for PDP panels, particularly for use in panels of around 40-inches or larger. The company has already begun laying plans to phase out production of PDP televisions in 2007. It plans to keep LCD panels in small and mid-size sets and use SED for larger sets.
SED is one of several emerging display technologies that, according to their respective backers, do a better job than either LCD or PDP.
One such competitor, organic light emitting diode (OLED), is already used commercially for small screens in products such as cell phones but its development has yet to reach the stage where it can be used for televisions. Sony and others have been working for several years on another technology called Field Emission Display (FED) but that too has yet to reach commercialization.
