February 2007

news archive

Ongoing Litigation Leads to Canon's Purchase of Toshiba Stake in Joint SED Venture

TOKYO - Canon Inc. has announced it will purchase all shares of joint venture SED Inc. from partner Toshiba Corp., making the company developing the long-awaited surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) television a wholly owned subsidiary of Canon. The sale stems from ongoing litigation in the United States with Texas-based Nano-Proprietary Inc., which in 2005 filed a lawsuit claiming SED Inc., as a joint venture, was not legally allowed to use key SED technology licensed to Canon by Nano-Proprietary in 1999.

According to a statement from Canon, the decision to buy Toshiba's stake in the company was reached following discussions between the partners based on the assumption of prolonged litigation.

"As a result of these discussions, it was decided that Canon will carry out the SED panel business independently in order to facilitate the earliest possible launch of a commercial SED television business," Canon stated in a press release. "While the decision… represents a major change in the relationship between Canon and Toshiba, each company is expected to make every effort for the smooth launch of its television business based on the high image quality achieved by SED technology."

Although Canon and Toshiba both showed a 37-in. prototype of their SED TV at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in 2006, Toshiba announced in late December it would not be showing its 55-in. demo at CES 2007 as it had originally planned. Despite this, Canon says the new TV sets will still be introduced in Japan in the fourth quarter of 2007 as scheduled, although the company will reassess its future mass-production plans for SED panels.

Effective January 29, 2007, Kazunori Fukuma, the Toshiba-appointed current president of SED Inc., will resign from Toshiba but will continue to serve as president of SED Inc. as a Canon employee. Plans also call for Toshiba to "lend" engineers to SED Inc., in accordance with the terms of a new agreement to be entered into between SED Inc. and Toshiba, to continue their assignments for the transition period during which Canon will independently establish the SED panel business.

Advanced PDP Development Center Develops New Method for Analyzing Moving Picture Resolution

TOKYO - The Advanced PDP Development Center Corp. (APDC), jointly established by Hitachi Ltd., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. (Panasonic) and Pioneer Corp. to promote the development of advanced engineering and manufacturing technologies for plasma displays, has developed a Moving Picture Resolution Measurement System. According to a statement released by the Center, the system makes it possible to precisely measure moving picture resolution.

Currently, the claim of 1080p resolution in many HDTVs is based on the number of picture elements, or pixels, visible when a still picture is displayed on the screen, which is not the same as the HDTV's moving picture resolution, the APDC explained in a press release.

The new system to measure moving picture resolution includes a digital camera, signal generator, a controller PC and image data processing software. In the three-step process,

(1) A specified test image is scrolled on the display to simulate a moving picture,

(2) The movement of the camera is adjusted to the movement of the image so that it can be captured,

(3) The image is then captured by the digital camera, analyzed and expressed mathematically to indicate the precise moving picture resolution.

Since the APDC measurement method simulates the way the human eye works, reconstructing the image reflected on the retina, the result of the quantitative analysis is very close to the way people see images, according to the release.

Until now, the resolution of HDTV displays has been commonly expressed by the number of pixels in a still picture shown on the display, but there were no clear criteria to measure the moving picture resolution of an HDTV. Since the major application for television is to show moving pictures, the newly developed measurement system will help consumers better understand the issue of resolution and what they can expect from their flat-panel or other HDTVs, the APDC said.

The new measuring system is applicable to any display, including both Plasma and LCD TVs. The APDC said it plans to propose the use of this measurement system to all display and TV manufacturers as it will enable the improvement of performance of flat-panel TV displays through the objective and quantitative measurement of their moving picture resolution.

The APDC also said it plans to collaborate with measuring equipment manufacturers to launch the newly developed system in the market.