The article below was from a show in Japan In October 2004 from
[Link: ultimateavmag.com]“But another display showed a new flat panel technology that may well prove to be revolutionary. It's called SED, for Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display. SED as demonstrated at CEATEC is a joint development of Toshiba and Canon, though judging from what I saw I have little doubt that other manufacturers are looking at similar concepts in their R&D labs. If not, they'd better be. We don't have a lot of details on how it operates yet, but the short of it is that the technology involves the collision of a beam of electrons with phosphors coated on a screen. Sound familiar? It should; that's how a CRT works. The big difference here is that there is a separate beam emitter for each pixel in the display, each of them fired as required by the source. An SED display is therefore a digital display, unlike analog CRT technology.
The advantage here, of course, is that like a CRT, the emitter beam in an SED display may be shut off when reproducing black. In fact, a contrast ratio of 8600:1 is claimed for the 36-inch prototype shown at CEATEC. And it's not just hype. The prototype was shown in a darkened room, side-by-side with an equivalently-sized plasma and LCD. While there was no way to determine if the plasma and LCD were properly set up, or if they were among the best examples of their respective technologies (they were masked off so you could see only the screen) the SED was dramatically better than important ways. It had no visible image lag, and blacks and shadow detail were, as close as could be determined without a CRT at hand (an unfortunate omission), as good as from a CRT. I saw no false contouring. And those who saw this demonstration didn't have to draw these conclusions by extrapolating from bright scenes; much of the demonstration material had dim lighting and deep shadows.
The photo above is a screen shot taken directly from the SED display in available light by an 8 megapixel digital camera. It's presented here to show the type of program material used in the demo (some of which was darker than this and thus impossible to photograph on-the-fly) and a very rough idea of the quality of the black levels and shadow detail presented by the SED display. Keep in mind the obvious fact that there are several generations of processing—hand-held photography, jpeg compression, internet transmission, display on your monitor—between what you see here and the original display.
SED also appears to be easy on the electric bill. Individual power monitors for the three displays indicated that it was far less power hungry than either the plasma or LCD. The technology appears to be roughly 2 years away from the market, and of course we don't know if there are major obstacles yet to be overcome in its development (such as panel life). But both Canon and Toshiba are apparently pouring big bucks into making it happen. They hope to make the price competitive with equivalently-sized plasmas, and hints were dropped that the first commercially available model for the U.S. would be 50-inches. While SED is an incorporated company whose ownership is roughly divided between Canon and Toshiba, we'd be surprised if products were marketed under an SED brand. Instead, Toshiba and Canon could separately market similar SED-based designs”
Was the display at CES a 36-inch? It seems no one saw it.
This message was edited by Mr Griffiths on 02/27/05 13:18 ET.
