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Statesman.com: Just when you thought you had the world of big-screen LCD and plasma TVs figured out, here comes something new: laser TV.

Laser TV is a form of rear-projection television that uses a mixture of red, blue and green lasers instead of traditional mercury lamps as a light source. The purity of laser light allows for images with far more color.

That is the top selling point for proponents of the long-awaited technology, who note that current high-definition LCD and plasma televisions display only about 40 percent of the color that the human eye can see. Laser TVs promise to show twice as much, resulting in richer images.

The first laser TVs from Mitsubishi’s electronics division are expected to go on sale this year.

“Laser TV technology creates a portal to an intensely real and vivid world, beyond ordinary flat TV,” said Frank DeMartin, Mitsubishi’s marketing vice president. He spoke in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where the company unveiled a 65-inch laser set.

Mitsubishi has been secretive about its laser sets, revealing few details other than that they will use less power than other TV technologies and should go on sale in 2008.

The sets will likely hit stores before the holiday shopping season, said Matthew Brennesholtz, an Insight Media analyst and projection technology expert.

Rear-projection sets typically have screens of 50 inches or more and are cheaper than comparable LCDs and plasmas.

Many hurdles await new rear-projection technologies in a market dominated by increasingly bigger and cheaper LCD and plasma sets.

Against that onslaught, the rear-projection market has been fading fast, said Paul Gagnon, director of North American TV research for DisplaySearch.

In 2006, rear-projection TVs accounted for more than 56 percent of shipments for 50-inch to 54-inch sets, according to DisplaySearch. That plummeted to about 19 percent last year and is expected to reach 4 percent in 2008.

However, rear-projection sets still rule among the biggest sizes.

They are expected to account for 77 percent of sets 55 inches and larger shipped this year, Gagnon said.

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I4U News:  It has been reported that Mitsubishi will show their Laser TV at the 2008 CES Show in Vegas, USA.

At the last CES, SED and Laser TVs had been no shows. In an NY Times article Rank DeMartin, vice president for marketing and product development at Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America, said that Mitsubishi will show a large-screen laser TV.

Mitsubishi announced the first Laser projection TV back in 2006 and said they would bring Laser TVs to market in 2007. Now we know for sure that this will not happen; It will be 2008.

The advantages of Laser TVs are bright and deep images on large, thin, lightweight screens. Laser TVs are also supposedly cheaper to make than Plasma screens. There are other companies like Coherent and Arasor that work on Laser TV technology. Coherent demonstrated a Laser TV on Kron 4 earlier this year.

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DailyTech: Plasma and LCD represent the two main technologies of choice for today’s high definition televisions, but by this time next year a third technology called laser TV will emerge in hopes of bringing the best picture quality yet.

Novalux Inc. is one of the main developers of the upcoming laser TV technology, and promises that its products will deliver appreciable benefits over plasma, LCD and CRT televisions. When compared to plasma and LCD, laser TV technology boasts half the production cost, double the color range, and three-quarters less power consumption.

Laser TV technology is suited for projection (either front or rear), and is likely to become the replacement for the UHP lamp currently used in today’s projection displays.

Novalux unveiled its technology last fall by demonstrating a Mitsubishi 50-inch rear-projection with lasers side-by-side with another Mitsubishi plasma television, with the special-made laser TV producing a richer image.

While Mitsubishi products were used as a part of the demonstration, the Japanese electronics company played no part in Novalux’s event. Rather, the use of a standard consumer Mitsubishi television was to prove that lasers could be fitted into existing rear projection cabinets.

Novalux is currently in discussions with various OEMs for bringing TVs to market using its lasers and remains confident that its technology will hit consumers within a year’s time.

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One of our readers pointed out this interesting article on Mitsubishi’s Laser TV.

(…) Mitsubishi, which last year demonstrated the first HDTV that uses red, green and blue semiconductor lasers instead of a lamp in a rear-projection DLP set, now says the first sets featuring the new technology will be available by the end of the year. (DLP technology uses thousands of tiny pivoting mirrors and a spinning color wheel.)

Mitsubishi says the sets will have a greater color range and better color depth than LCD and plasma sets. Other benefits: The sets will be thin, like LCD and plasma sets, but weigh half as much, cost less, use a quarter of the power and have a 50,000-hour life. (Lamps in current DLP sets typically last about 2,500 hours, with replacements costing $200 to $300.)

(…)

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ZDNet: Mitsubishi and others are promoting a technical standard that’s expected to greatly expand the color palette on televisions.

The standard–elegantly called xvYCC–is meant to update the televised color spectrum for the Digital Age. The current standard, BT.709-5, defines the ranges of reds, greens and blues that TVs can display. The new standard will broaden the range of colors, adding shades of cyan or bright green, which should lead to more natural-looking colors.

“You’ll be able to see richer and more colors,” Vik Murty, senior manager of product marketing at Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America, said during a presentation Wednesday at audio and entertainment tech specialist Dolby Laboratories in San Francisco. “This opens a new set of colors that no one has ever seen on a TV before.”

The existing standard works for most TVs, but it constrains the capabilities of LCD televisions with light-emitting diode (LED) backlights and rear-projection TVs with digital light-processing technology, Murty said.

Mitsubishi plans to incorporate the standard into TVs beginning in April. Broadcasters are also starting to build xvYCC-compliant systems so they can deliver programming that takes advantage of the standard. Others are working on it too: Sony showed off small screens with the technology earlier this year.

Mitsubishi also plans to come out with a TV that uses lasers, rather than lightbulbs or LEDs, as a light source in late 2007, he added.

The new standard will further be enhanced by Deep Color, an existing technology that smoothes out the fine gradients between shades of colors. In some older digital TVs, viewers can see faint bands in a color field as the colors get lighter or darker. In a TV with Deep Color, the bands disappear, and images in shadows become clearer.

The acronym xvYCC is a rough equivalent for the standard more formally called Extended YCC Colorimetry for Video Applications. The standard is governed by the International Electrotechnical Commission.

Next year should be a big one for improving the picture quality on digital TVs. Several companies are expected to come out with LCD televisions that will get rid of ghosting and the blurriness often associated with the devices.

Toshiba will also try to ship the first SED (surface conduction electron emitter display) televisions, which use a new standard the company says will provide a better picture than plasma or liquid crystal displays

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I bought it. And so did many of our readers. Heck, even top people at Mitsubishi’s believed the Laser TV was for real.
Should we have been more suspicious? Perhaps. But then again, if we were to question everything, we’d be missing a lot of incredible stuff on the CE market.
But next time… if a man called Calculus drops by, pretending he invented the Supercolor-Tryphonar, we won’t post it on About-electronics. Promise!

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Smarthouse: We were intrigued at first, but it turns out that Aussie company Arasor’s claims about Laser TV supplanting plasma TVs were a publicity stunt prior to them floating on the ASX stock exchange.  Serveral US technology organisations have now also said they intend to sue Arasor for over $17.9 million dollars, relating to alleged loss of future profits and breach of the Trade Practices Act.

Arasor claimed recently that they are working with several major CE manufacturers including Mitsubishi whose Laser TV screen they demonstrated at the Sydney launch, however, many CE Companies are struggling to recall Arasor or the Laser TV technology. 

Mitsubishi Australia claim that it was not invited to the Arasor Laser TV launch despite a Mitsubishi screen being used to demonstrate the Laser TV technology.

“The first we heard of the laser TV concept was when we read about it online in the Australian national media. One would have expected that the Managing Director of Mitsubishi would have been invited especially as the directors of Novalux and Arasor were in Australia announcing a TV breakthrough that involved Mitsubishi,” said Paul Caldarera, the national sales and marketing manager at Mitsubishi.

“We don’t know where they got the Mitsubishi screen from and no one in Mitsubishi seems to know anything about Laser TV,” he continued.

Arasor representatives when confronted with this claim did send us a copy of a Mitsubishi of North America press release that highlighted the inclusion of a Laser TV screen at a US event. It did not say that Mitsubishi would be manufacturing the Laser TV screen by 2007 as alleged by Arasor executives in Sydney.

Journalists attending the launch of the so called Laser TV were not allowed access to the inner workings of the demonstration Laser TV according to journalists who attended the event. 

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Engadget: Not that it should come as any surprise, but most manufacturers don’t give a shiznit ’bout those laser TVs. Yeah, despite all the blow-harding by Novalux’s C-levels about laser TVs supplanting plasmas, most big panel manufacturers have no plans to bring laser TV technology to market anytime soon. See, much of the laser TV hype is coming from Australia’s own Arasor — the company behind the optoelectronic chip central to the laser projection device — so the Sydney Morning Herald went ahead and contacted Fujitsu, Pioneer, Samsung and Philips to get the poop. Just like we expected, none of them have any immediate plans to incorporate laser TV into their product lines, having already made significant investments in plasma and LCD.

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News.com.au: Two companies have unveiled what they claimed to be the world’s first laser television in Sydney, with a pitch that it would be half the price, twice as good, and use a quarter of the electricity of conventional plasma and LCD TVs.

It’s being hailed by its developers, Australian company Arasor International and its US partner Novalux, as the next revolution in visual technology – a laser television that will make plasma screens obsolete.

Arasor produces the unique optoelectronic chip central to the laser projection device being developed by Silicon Valley-based Novalux, which is being used by a number of television manufacturers.

And when displayed beside a conventional 50-inch plasma TV, journalists report that the Mitsubishi-built prototype does appear brighter and clearer than the plasma.

With a worldwide launch date scheduled for Christmas 2007, under recognisable brands like Mitsubishi and Samsung, Novalux chief executive Jean-Michel Pelaprat is so bold as to predict the death of plasma.

“If you look at any screen today, the colour content is roughly about 30-35 per cent of what the eye can see,” he said.

“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.”

Combine that with energy efficiency, price advantage and the fact that the laser TVs will be half the weight and depth of plasma TVS, and Mr Pelaprat says “plasma is now something of the past”.

Mr Pelaprat predicted LCD TVs would come to dominate the market below 40 inches, and laser television the market above that screen size, displacing plasma.

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