FRED MANTEGHIAN BLOG

Well, I finally saw Toshiba and Canon's joint venture: Surface-Conduction Electronic-Emitter Display. You need all those hyphens or the acronym becomes a very uncatchy SCEED. The fairly large flat panels I saw were showing high contrast, bright colored video and, yes, SED looked great. I didn't understand much in the demo except when key words that make your ears perk up. Things that sound like "contrast" but are followed by things that don't sound like any numbers with which I'm familar.

I did get to ask some more questions after the very large (and very long when you don't speak the mother tongue) demo concluded. 50,000:1 contrast. When? 4th quarter 2007. Price? Not yet. 24P upsampling? No comment.

Walk around enough and you'll find tongues that wag. One wag said that the price will be $10,000. The theory is that SED is so much better than plasma, people will see it as a high end product and clamor for it.

Second wagging tounge - the first year's production will go to China for the 2008 Olympics. Good luck getting the Chinese to spend $10,000 for a TV when they sell their own plasmas for a 1/10th of that.

What I saw was too green. According to an official spokesman for Toshiba, that's to suite the Japanese market. They want their greens extra green. That goes a long way towards explaining plasma then.

The blues were incredible. The best blues I've seen in any set ever. Of course thats without reference, as I have no idea what shade of blue were the objects I saw on video. But hey, it was beautiful.

Tudo Azul, Caro!