New Technology TV

One of the main benefits of LCD screens is that they can be made very small. After all, they've been used for watches and calculators for decades. In the past few years though, the cost of color LCD screens has plummeted while their quality has sky rocketed. As a result, full color, active matrix LCD screens are popping up on relatively affordable portable consumer electronics. There's the Video iPod and the PocketDish, as well as portable DVD players.

If you've ever watched HDTV chances are you were impressed by the clear picture, wide screen, and encompassing sound. You may even have felt like you were a part of the action. Recently though, Japanese researchers, along with a Japanese public broadcasting company, have created a television technology designed specifically to make viewers feel like they're sitting there in the scene!

DLP or Digital Light Processing technologies are continuing their successful penetration of the HDTV (High Definition Television) marketplace. And the three chip, high end versions are moving in theaters worldwide. The first DLP sets to hit the stores were big in every direction, but newer, thinner sets are appearing daily. DLP is a form of light projection, and originally, this proved to be a difficult problem for the engineers in designing a set that was any smaller than around 30 inches front to back. Now the sets no longer look like tiny foreign cars parked in your living room. In fact, I saw a DLP set the other day at a discount big-box store that retails for under fifteen hundred dollars—and the set was just around a foot thick from back to front. Not only are the prices dropping, but they are now competitvely sized with the Plasma and LCD competition. While both Plasma and LCD high definition televisions are making great inroads into the mass markets and consciousness of consumers, the sheer power of the DLP picture quality is having a big impact.

In a world of innovative FPD (Flat Panel Displays), where emerging technologies are involved in sizzling competition to top their rivals, one of the new kids on the block is simply called FED. FED stands for Field Emission Display and is yet another promising challenger for high-definition video looking to make its way to the marketplace. Similar to many of the contemporary ways to project light into the eyes of demanding consumers, FED utilizes some of the dependable methods of cathode ray tubes (CRTs) to stimulate phosphors with electrons which in turn, discharge the deeply rich colors to produce the marvelous clarity that is HDTV (High Definition Television). The ingenious FED design has no electron beam navigation circuitry (the proven, but bulky and soon to be outdated electron gun technology) and can be as thin as 10 millimeters, because each pixel has a dedicated electron generator. Ten mm is the equivalent to less than one-half-inch, so the display can be exceedingly slender.

By any standard, the University of Texas at Austin is a large university. The enrollment hovers around the 50,000 mark and it has over ten thousand more students than the large and impressive Pennsylvania State University. The area around Austin has been given the name Silicon Hills, in reference to the high-tech companies blossoming in the area, and in many real ways, it is a Silicon Valley of the Southwest. Dell computer and the computer chip maker AMD are located in or near Austin, and there are many less well known high-tech offshoots there. Now the area is boasting a truly Texas sized new High-Definition Video display in the sports stadium on the University campus.

A Hollywood sensibility runs through our culture, everyone seems to care more about their appearance these days, and there is an interesting phenomenon at the junction of new high-definition display technology and the on-air personalities presented to the public. Every evening, as more subscribers tune into the HDTV (High Definition Television) programs streaming from satellites and the local airwaves into our homes, it provides a new window into the wide world of our increasingly modernized and digitized planet. Flat panel displays, the kind that cover the walls of the big-box retailers, airport lounges, our homes and sports stadiums elicit more than just gee-whiz reactions from passers-by—the design of the new technologies are changing lives on every side of the camera. Take the new Monday Night Football productions for example. They are using at least 19 state of the art HD (high-definition) cameras positioned all around the stadium, but critics have noted that they aren’t letting these cameras get near one of the new color personalities, Tony Kornheiser, because his visage does not exactly play to the strengths of a high-definition examination.

Recently, I speculated that every conceivable three letter acronym will someday be taken to name a new form of high-tech television display and it isn’t far from the truth. The number of three letter acronyms, especially those ending in “ed” are everywhere. NED is one of the newest—a nano emissive display. Motorola, at least a half-dozen Japanese companies and a nanotechnology company in Austin, TX have been involved in the laboratory creating a proof of concept model using carbon nanotubes. They first created a five inch video display that constituted a high-definition 42-inch, 1280 x 720 screen with a sixteen to nine ratio. The original panel was only slightly larger than three millimeters (roughly one-eighth of an inch) thick and used off the shelf CRT phosphor technology. It used the same inexpensive electronics in today’s LCD hi-def televisions and has many of the advantages of the cathode ray tube technology. (A wide viewing angle, broad temperature working variety, fast reaction time, etc.)

Toshiba and Canon have partnered to create a new and promising species of HDTV (High Definition Television). Using Canon’s expertise in electron technology and Toshiba’s vast experience in CRT’s (Cathode Ray Tubes) and semiconductors, they hope to have some of the new flat panel displays on the market by late next year. This innovative idea is based on the reliable cathode ray tube systems that have been the backbone of television for decades. What is radically different now is that the gun responsible for shooting electrons at the screen is replaced by as many electron emitters as the screen has groups of pixels—also known as picture elements. While Plasma HDTV’s and LCD’s are successfully and firmly entrenched technologies and are selling millions of units, SED technology over the next few years has the potential for an enormous impact on the HDTV market.

Ok, so Ned isn’t yet a new acronym for cutting edge HDTV (High Definition Television) Technology. I just threw that one in to keep everyone sharp. Over the last few years, acronyms to identify new ways of bringing hi-def television signals to the masses have been spawning faster than kudzu in a North Georgia cornfield. SED, FED, and OLED are new semiconductor-based technologies that could one day form the basis of all of our High Definition television displays. They could lead the way to Hi-Def displays that are large, almost paper thin, and portable. While everyone is fully cognizant of the more common terms, such as LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) and Plasma; which fortunately is not an acronym, but a rather a descriptive term of the weird, futuristic, fourth state of matter science going on behind the flat panel, there continue to be new sets of letters, and the latest seem to end in “ed”. Since the attack of the “eds” is all good news for lovers of state-of-the-art technology, I will attempt to elucidate some of the important points in an easy to understand way beginning with OLED.

While Sony is abandoning their line of Hi-Definition Plasma Televisions, Toshiba and Panasonic are investing more than a billion and half dollars into a Matsushita Electric plant in Japan designed to continue pushing the creation of new product lines of their already hot models of Plasma HDTV (High Definition Television) units. Rumors may continue to circulate that the Plasma technology has problems with burn-in and fading of the screen color brightness over time, but this is more the stuff of rumor than anything substantial. There is no reason to think that Plasmas are going to wear out faster than any of the competing HD formats. The already superb technology is increasing in sophistication all of the time and this new facility will house the latest generation of plasma. In proving their commitment to Plasma, Panasonic and Toshiba continue to refine the plasma high definition technology and this substantial investment will be their fifth large production facility for flat-panel manufacture. Sony is concentrating on the High Definition LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) and their rear projection technology (SXRD).

TiVo, after many years of lackluster sales, is starting a new push to get Cable subscribers to begin using its services. With the recent news of TiVo's unveiling of a soon-to-be-available cable-compatible HDTV player and the announcement by Cox Communications that they will be adding TiVo's DVR service to their offerings beginning next year, the company seems poised to gain a large market following.

High definition television is definitely the current buzzword in the television industry. While the technology for HDTV has been around for a while, high prices and lack of access to anything to watch had kept it from achieving a noticeable market-share. But, as HDTV television set prices have declined, and television service providers have hustled to create a broad array of HDTV programming, sales of HDTV television sets have been booming. Sales of HD televisions last year were an impressive 25 percent of all televisions sold, but this year the number has really taken off with HD TVs comprising 41 percent of the sales so far. And the amount of sales in terms of dollars is even more impressive- over 80% of all money spent for television sets was spent on HD televisions. Of course, considering the higher price of HD televisions, this number makes sense.

For years television networks, computer manufacturers, and software companies have been banking on a fusion between home computers and home entertainment centers. Adapters for putting the contents of a computer screen onto a television screen have been available for years, as have wireless keyboards and pointing devices that work just as well sitting on the couch as in the home office.

We're all familiar with wireless technologies. Wireless hot spots abound in coffee shops, libraries, private homes, airports, and even some cities have widespread wireless coverage. Now some television manufacturers have developed ways to use in home wireless networks to transmit television signals from satellite tuners and DVD Players to televisions. The result is a television with a single cord for power.

Right now an estimated twenty million American households are enjoying High Definition Television. Combine that with the popularity of DVD's and it's no surprise that there's a huge demand for video on High Definition DVD's.

High Definition Television is becoming more common with sales of HDTV sets expected to increase sharply in the next few years and television providers constantly adding more channels of high definition programming. With the increased demand for program content in this realistic high resolution format, new types of video discs capable of storing high definition programming are coming on the market along with players capable of playing them.

Widely available consumer technology capable of generating three dimensional images has been anticipated by science fiction for decades. After the introduction of two dimensional color television, a three dimensional version seemed like the next logical step. Actually developing technology that could actually do it has turned out to be a much more difficult proposition. That is, until recently. Now with new ways of generating pictures that go beyond the old fashioned cathode ray tube, combined with modern computer hardware and software, many companies have developed some promising technologies.

One of the main benefits of Digital Video Recording technology for television viewers- and a major thorn in the side of advertisers- is the ability to skip commercials. For the uninitiated, Digital Video Recorders (DVR's for short) can be easily programmed to record television programming onto a hard drive for later playback. During the playback, the programs can be fast forwarded which allows viewers to skip the commercials.

Many of us have dreamed of making our own movies. Not just of family vacations, birthday parties, or bringing home a new puppy, but serious films with scripts, props, and real acting. The first camcorders allowed us to create approximations of serious movies, but the quality of the sound a pictures were seriously lacking in quality. Then digital camcorders came along and offered much crisper images, but still recorded only in the standard 4:3 aspect ratio that was a dead giveaway that it was a home recording. High definition video camcorders have been introduced to the market over the past few years, and with the ability to record in the wide screen 16:9 aspect ratio common to HDTV and cinema, this new technology seemed to be the answer for aspiring cinematographers. But price tags upwards of three thousand dollars were a serious deterrent to the amateur film maker.

A recent survey indicated that many consumers are confused by all of the choices surrounding the television technology available to them. This is due largely to the increasingly advanced technologies used for television and all of the jargon used to describe them. It used to be that televisions were just cathode ray tubes, or CRT's for short. Now you can walk into a store and buy CRT's, LCD's, and Plasma TV's. And if that isn't confusing enough, you can get both LCD's and Plasma TV's in EDTV and HDTV formats. This article should help to cut through all the jargon and acronyms to help you make a more informed decision about your next television purchase.