Mitsubishi's laser TV coming to CES
By Joshua Topolsky 
posted June 25th 2007 10:39AM
posted June 25th 2007 10:39AM
Frank DeMartin, vice president for marketing and product development at Mitsubishi, casually mentioned in a recent NY Times article that the company will be showing off its large-screen laser TVs at the next CES (in January, put it in your calendar!). As we mentioned in 2006, the new tri-laser projectors are said to have higher picture quality and a larger range of color than LCD or plasma screens, making them a bit of a threat to the status quo -- although currently it looks like the TVs will be promoted to the "premium" end of the market, thus waylaying any direct competition (save for the videophile crowd). Then again, since we'll all be getting these under the tree this year anyway, we're not sure what the big deal is.
This is just a new source of light and televisions based off them would be projection based would compete with MMD televisions and front projectors... not lcd or plasma panels.
In anycase, you would still need an mmd of some sort to produce the image. That would become the limiting factor.
I would be most concerned about longevity of the solid state lasers... given how bright they need to be for larger sets.
If "MMD" means micromirror device, then most likely Mitsubishi will a DLP Digital Micromirror Device (DMD).
nope, no micro-mirror device...they can put thousands of lasers on one chip which implied to me 3 lasers (RGB) will make up one pixel...
You can also use LCoS chips as they are reflective like DLP... or you could also use 3 panel LCD (using the lasers as 3 individual light sources for monochrome LCD panels - basically the same as what they do now with a light bulb and 3 color filters).
The point is this is for front/rear projection, not flat panels.
I would rather see this in a front projector (same with LED setups ) than in a rear projection "box"... but they will need to be even brighter for that to happen... while they have far superior color accuracy, lower heat, near-zero startup time, etc., they still can't compete with the arc lamps on lumens.
You would think that "burn in" would be a horrible problem with Laser TVs, wouldn't you?
Now if you watch The View you _really can_ go blind!
Thats a pretty picture in the post.
Dr. Evil already has one of these sets with frickin laser beams.
No!
Insolent fool, Dr. Evil will only accept /Evil/ laser beams.
Are there any sharks involved with these lasers?
If you read the earlier article, it says that the thickness of the TVs is half that of a plasma TV. It may be a projection based technology, but not like current DLP sets. Also, projection based shouldn't have to worry about burn-in, and should be much lighter in weight than plasma.
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Someone did research a couple years ago and found out that if the MMD (aka DLP) mirrors were small enough, the phase of the light can be controlled to make a 3d effect similar to holography. Gotta wonder about that.
German Laser-TV news and Infos can be find at http://www.sed-fernseher.eu