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  1. #1
    Forum Regular Woochifer's Avatar
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    Intel cancels LCOS TV chip

    For those of you who had been putting off buying a HDTV until the first models sporting Intel's LCOS chip came out -- it all turned out to be vaporware! Intel just announced that they've stopped all LCOS chip development and cancelled the project. All throughout the year, people have been touting the Intel LCOS chip, even though they never displayed a working prototype and they have very limited experience in the home theater market. In the end, it was just empty hype. Hopefully now, those of us looking to buy HDTVs can start sifting through our options based on what's real, rather than hold our purchases hostage because of empty promises from Intel.

    Here's a snip from a PC World article:

    Intel started off with plans to develop a 1-megapixel LCOS chip, but realized it needed a 2-megapixel chip to compete with Texas Instruments' success in selling 1-megapixel chips for televisions, it said in August.

    The LCOS project was not thought to be extremely difficult from a manufacturing standpoint, but the implementation of the technology is tricky, according to analysts and Intel executives. Intel builds transistors as well as any company in the world, but it did not have a great deal of experience integrating liquid crystal and colored glass above those transistors.


    http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,118289,00.asp

  2. #2
    Suspended topspeed's Avatar
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    Wow, that's a bummer. Just last weekend I went into Sears while waiting for the next showing of "A Shark Tale" (ho-hum) and the JVC D-ILA set immediately caught both my wife and my eye. It was flanked by a DLP and LCD set and the difference in picture quality was considerable. Now, I don't know if the JVC was set to "kill", but it sure did look good by comparison...enough for me to research the tech all this week.

    Now it looks like the only LCOS sets are JVC (with their questionable quality) and Sony (which is priced at $10K!).

    Quick question Wooch:
    If LCD's have the dreaded screen door effect and DLP's have the rainbow and color bleeding...
    What are Plasma's shortcomings? Price? Early burnout? Am I wrong in thinking Plasma has the best resolution (most pixels) or does that title still go to CRT based RPTV's?

  3. #3
    eqm
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    Quote Originally Posted by topspeed
    What are Plasma's shortcomings? Price? Early burnout? Am I wrong in thinking Plasma has the best resolution (most pixels) or does that title still go to CRT based RPTV's?
    Plasma DOES NOT have the best inherent resolution! It is a fixed pixel display, like a normal direct-view television, in that it has red, green, OR blue pixels at any single point. It CANNOT be all of the above at the same point. A perfect way to demonstrate this is if you can see something like a tennis match or a football game...look for the white lines to be shown on a diagonal...notice the fluttering on the edges? the pixels have to fire in a precise fashion to make a white "point". it won't truly be a pixel because it's a combination of the red/green/and blue pixels firing simultaneously. a CRT based RPTV overlaps its 3 colors on a single screen, allowing red/green/and blue to be shown all at the same point at the same time...does that help?

  4. #4
    Forum Regular Woochifer's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by topspeed
    Wow, that's a bummer. Just last weekend I went into Sears while waiting for the next showing of "A Shark Tale" (ho-hum) and the JVC D-ILA set immediately caught both my wife and my eye. It was flanked by a DLP and LCD set and the difference in picture quality was considerable. Now, I don't know if the JVC was set to "kill", but it sure did look good by comparison...enough for me to research the tech all this week.
    I've been hearing a lot of good things about JVC's D-ILA models. Supposedly, wall mounted versions of those TVs will eventually come out, in much the way that DLP TVs are rapidly heading in that direction.

    Technically, D-ILA is supposedly the same thing as LCOS (but the more I read about LCOS, it seems that the term is used loosely). The reason why much of the market was waiting for the Intel LCOS chip to come out was that it would dramatically lower the cost bar. Some of the hype I was reading indicated that the Intel LCOS design would result in HDTVs that undercut LCD, plasma, and existing LCOS prices by about half. Obviously that's not going to happen now.

    Fortunately, it looks like good old fashioned market forces are going to push HDTV prices down throughout the next year. I read that the manufacturing capacity for both LCD and plasma panels will increase sharply as new plants open in the far east throughout the next year. Supposedly, this capacity increase will far outstrip the projected increase in demand for flat panel HDTVs. Refer to your econ textbook to see what happens next...

    Quote Originally Posted by topspeed
    Now it looks like the only LCOS sets are JVC (with their questionable quality) and Sony (which is priced at $10K!).

    Quick question Wooch:
    If LCD's have the dreaded screen door effect and DLP's have the rainbow and color bleeding...
    What are Plasma's shortcomings? Price? Early burnout? Am I wrong in thinking Plasma has the best resolution (most pixels) or does that title still go to CRT based RPTV's?
    Philips has been making LCOS TVs as well for almost a year now.

    Plasma's main advantage is in the 42" and over sizes, where it remains the most affordable wall-mountable flat panel design. But, it does have drawbacks galore. Plasmas are susceptible to burn-in with on-screen graphics, there are concerns over their long-term durability, they require cooling fans, they have trouble at high altitude (I've read that they start having problems around 5,000 ft.), and a lot of analysts look at plasma as an interim technology.

    But, for now, they are less expensive than LCD flat panels, and they have some performance advantages over LCD such as the contrast and off-angle viewing.

    In comparison to RPTVs, plasmas indeed are a lot more expensive. And if you look at DLP and LCOS RPTVs, they're getting to a point that they're not that much bulkier than plasma and LCD flat panels. Plasmas are about 5" deep, while DLP RPTVs have gotten down to about 14". RCA has already come out with a DLP RPTV that can be wall-mounted (although in person, that TV still looks too bulky to hang on the wall), and you can be sure that others will follow suit.

    I think that on the performance front, direct view CRTs still have the advantage, but they can only go up to 34" widescreen and they are bulky and heavy. The magic bullet is a HDTV design that can match the compactness of plasma and LCD, the black levels and contrast of a CRT, the durability of LCD and DLP, the off-angle viewing of plasma, and the price of a RPTV. So far, every option out there has a significant drawback, that's why we got so many choices and why there's so much confusion out there (myself included).

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