14 DAY TRIAL // Dreaming of a huge HDTV with LCD or Plasma technology? Wake up! It's laser TV time! While the market begins to see LCD and Plasma devices saturation, a small group of companies are pretty close to finalizing a technology that will make even the newest LCD and Plasma technologies seem obsolete and dim.
The Australians from Arasor and the US company Novalux demonstrated the world's first Laser TV display. The companies state that incorporating lasers into TV displays brings interesting benefits such as production costs reduced to half, doubled color range, three-quarters less power consumption and improved brightness and contrast rates compared to LCDs and Plasmas. People attending the demonstration compared the Mitsubishi laser TV prototype with a 50" Plasma screen: everybody was impressed with the brightness and the overall image quality of the Laser TV. And all this at just 1080i resolutions. The audience was assured that 1080p compliant displays should be available just in time for the Laser TV's launch date in late 2007.
"If you look at any screen today, the color content is roughly about 30-35 per cent of what the eye can see," said Novalux chief executive Jean-Michel Pelaprat. "But for the very first time with a Laser TV we'll be able to see 90 per cent of what the eye can see... All of a sudden what you see is a lifelike image on display."
No drawbacks? Well, there seems to be a minor one: Laser TV is more suited for projection rather than flat-panel. Laser TV takes DLP projection to a higher level of accuracy and it is able to easily surpass the plasma technology. Accordingly, Laser TVs will tend to be a little thicker than LCDs and Plasmas.