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Editorial
Contact
Dian Mecca
Tel: (203) 853-7069
Fax: (203) 855-9769
email: dmecca@sid.org |
For Immediate Release
|
Upbeat SID Show
Grows 20 Percent
The numbers were way up, and so was the buzz, as exciting
technologies made it to market - or came a lot closer.
San Jose, California, June 8 - The trade-show portion of SID 2001, this year's edition of The Society for Information Display's annual International Conference, Symposium, and Exhibition, ended in San Jose, California yesterday with 7900 attendees having spent three days investigating the wares at 523 exhibitor booths. That attendance represents a growth of 19.7 percent from last year's 6600 attendees, and the number of booths is 21.1 percent more than last year's 432, when the show was held in Long Beach. Last year's numbers were themselves records at the time.
Attendees were buzzing because the large and visually exciting show provided plentiful evidence of new display technologies appearing in new products. There were many prototypes for organic light-emitting-diode (OLED) displays - alternatively called organic light-emitting displays (also OLEDs) and organic electroluminescent (OEL) displays. The folks in Totoku Pioneer's booth were quick to point out that they were the only people actually selling OLED products, but that will clearly change over the next 12 months. King of the OLED prototypes this year, display-watchers agreed, was Sony's impressive 13-inch, SVGA display that put out 300
cd/m2. A crowd was still clustered around the display half an hour before the show closed yesterday.
What may have a major effect on consumer products sooner than OLEDs, though, are the many LCDs fast enough and bright enough to be attractive as television displays. Most of the major manufacturers had significant offerings. Sharp's was the fastest from full off to full on and back again at 15 milliseconds (ms), while Mitsubishi claimed fastest time between gray levels at 20 ms -- which many designers say is an even more important spec for smear-free video. The largest LCD TV display was from LG Philips at 29 inches, with 1280x768 pixels in wide format, 450
cd/m2 luminance, 450:1 contrast ratio, and 25 ms response time. The rapid drop in prices for LCD panels is a critical element that will soon make LCD TV sets - as well as computer monitors - affordable, although they will still be premium products.
Plasma display panels (PDPs) are still wearing their high prices like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner wore his albatross, but that didn't keep them from being nearly ubiquitous on the show floor. (PDPs sell well for applications where price is not critical, such as trade-floor and in-store advertising, and for public information screens.) As Plasmaco/Panasonic's Larry Weber said, "It's gratifying to see how many PDPs are being used to advertise other display technologies!"
But price was on everybody's mind. In his keynote address, Fujitsu Hitachi Plasma (FHP) Display's Yoshito Tsunoda, presented his company's strategy of producing smaller - 32- and 37-inch - high-definition PDPs that would permit the manufacture of more affordable TV sets for the Japanese and European markets. However, at a projected price of $4500 in Japan later this year, some doubted that the price was low enough.
No plan survives the first battle. Plasmaco's Weber pointed out in his well-attended PDP seminar this morning that installed PDP production capacity at the end of June will be 150,000 units per month, compared to no more than 20,000 a year ago. The manufacturers can't sit on that much glass, he said, nor can they afford to have their expensive new factories stand idle. So, the manufacturers will drop prices as much as they must to move the glass they have to make. Weber also questioned the FHP strategy of going small, noting the direct competition from very good and much less expensive CRTs, as well as from large LCDs such as LG.P's 29-inch unit. The bottom line, according to Weber, is that PDPs will get much cheaper, whether the plasma companies are planning on it or not.
But costs and prices aside, the PDPs on display at SID 2001 were impressive. In addition to 60-, 50-, and 42-inch units with extremely high contrast from Plasmaco/Panasonic; a handsome 61-inch unit from NEC, and the smaller-sized "three sisters" from FHP, there was a 50-inch from Samsung of Korea and a 42-inch from Acer of Taiwan. The Samsung unit presented an appealing image, free of serious motion artifacts - an impressive improvement over the units seen last September in Seoul at IDMC, said Ken Werner, editor of
Information Display magazine.
And a new generation of microdisplays for near-the-eye applications from InViso, eMagin, Zight (the new name for Colorado Microdisplay), Displaytech, and Kopin were looking better than ever and frequently consuming much less power. Microdisplays for rear projection (RP) were the other story, with a Samsung HDTV using three Displaytech chips looking much better than last year and ready for sale this summer in an electronics store near you.
But there's general agreement that to get RP HDTV cheap enough to really take off, designers have to use RP engines with a single LCOS imager producing field-sequential color (FSC). The problem is that chips able to produce good-quality images in an FSC configuration have either been non-existent or in very short supply. Philips may have solved the problem with its
engaze™ chip and clever scrolling-color projection-engine design. The engines were being shown in 64- and 36-inch HDTV sets, and looked good.
JVC, with its D-ILA chip - an LCOS variant that can tolerate high optical input power - announced
that it's facing off against TI's DMD chip for high-brightness, high-end projection applications. JVC's 2048x1536 chip has full compatibility with 1080 lines of high-end HDTV, the company said, and JVC is taking aim at digital-cinema applications - until now the undisputed province of DMD.
There was a lot of activity at this largest-ever SID 2001. Next year's show will be held in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center from May 19 to 24, 2002. The 575 booths available at Hynes have already been booked by this year's exhibitors - but show management usually finds a way to squeeze out a few booths beyond the theoretical maximum.
The Society for Information Display is an international society devoted to the advancement of display technology, manufacturing, and applications, with headquarters at 610 South 2nd Street, San Jose, California 95112. Website
www.sid.org.
