14 DAY TRIAL // Canon, Inc. has announced that they will buy Toshiba's surface-conduction electron-emitter (SED) television contract. Canon will buy all of Toshiba's shares in the joined venture and SED Inc. will become a subsidiary of Canon. While this announcement comes with a bang, it is not totally unexpected.
The decision was actually awaited since it was the only possible course of action that could suppress Nano-Proprietary's lawsuit regarding the SED technology. Nano-Proprietary filed a suit against the Toshiba-Canon group back in 2005, in which they claimed that they have only licensed their technology for Canon's use and not to Toshiba-Canon. As a result, in March 2007 Nano-Proprietary and Toshiba-Canon were going to start the actual trial procedures.
Canon said that SED, Inc. president Kazunori Fukuma will resign his position in the company, but will continue to work under the Canon brand. All employees will also keep their jobs, but a new agreement between them and Canon will be signed. The new SED division which currently incorporates about 550 people will start its existence in January the 29th as a part of Canon.
However, don't think that they're out of the woods. As some of you might know, SED panels are pretty impressive when it comes to contrast ratio and color filling, but the manufacturing costs of such panels are very high. Coupled with the fact that LCDs and OLEDs are starting to offer comparable contrast ratios and higher color specter you can understand why such a business can be pretty risky.
In fact, Canon has already postponed the release of its first SED TV for the 4th quarter of 2007 and we're not sure it will come out at that moment. And I guess that they are not sure either because - at the moment - Canon is undecided whether to build a 180 billion yen ($1.49 billion USD) plant in Japan or not. Of course, the future plant will be used to manufacture SEDs, but as I've said, they really don't know what to do next.