LG and Philips, the Beginning of a Beautiful Partnership

Who said that setting trends should only concern the fashion industry? Everybody is used to seeing fashion trends getting started by pop icons and the likes and then, the next day, everybody is wearing their idea of what "cool" means. Well, the computer industry is undergoing a series of changes by morphing into something similar to a new stage in jargon development.

Some examples to back up my theory regard the creation of Gigabyte United, a joint venture of Taiwan based companies ASUStek and Gigabyte Technology, Hitachi-LG Data Storage, and one of the more proud examples, also called DAAMIT, where AMD purchased ATI and, of course, kept the AMD name.

The newcomers are LG Electronics (LGE), previously known as Lucky Goldstar, and Royal Philips Electronics which have announced to change their previous name they chose when forming this joint venture from LG.Philips Displays to LP Displays. It has been stated that the name change will be official starting April 1st. I know, everybody thinks that's "April fools day", but this is no joke.

The joint venture of these two companies took place in order to get ahead of Samsung Electronics as the number one supplier of liquid crystals displays. Both companies have been said to own 22% of the shares for this market. Another domain into which the LP Displays have ventured into represents the continuously growing market of OLED displays.

This technology, although bringing a lot of good things related to visual appearance and power saving features, has the disadvantage of aging at a fast rate. A short life expectancy is the biggest downfall of an, otherwise competitive technology. LEDs are making a strong comeback and LP Display has also been showcasing LCDs built with LED backlighting and, if I recall there was this model measuring 47-inches with a 1.000.000:1 contrast ratio. Now, if LEDs are going to represent the future or if something even bigger will come along remains to be seen.