Last week the Laser TV launched on the world stage, and although only a prototype, showed an amazing ability to deliver such a rich range of colours that a plasma TV next to it looked dull in comparison. Our follow up article asked some questions about the viability of Laser TVs, and now we have some answers. Read on for more!

  
        Prototype Laser TV left, high-end plasma TV right

The Laser TV is an excellent example of a new technology with a disruptive potential, one that can change industries and technology as we know it. But as with any new technology, there are caveats and limitations right alongside shiny new benefits that make us want the technology anyway.

Most articles that have appeared about the Laser TV spoke along the lines of the ‘plasma TV killer’, while our article urged you to ‘forget plasma and LCD TVs’, but plasma, LCD TV and other technologies aren’t obsolete just yet. For a start, Laser TVs won’t come onto the market for at least another year, if not slipping into 2008, and will initially be best suited for larger displays of 50- to 60-inches and up, in stark contrast to most plasma TVs at 42-inches in size (with 50-inch and larger sizes available), while most LCD TVs are in the 40 to 45-inch category and smaller – in 37, 32, 26-inch sizes, with LCD screens available at 15, 17, 19, 20, 21, 24, 26, 30-inch and larger sizes.

If the room you want to put your TV in isn’t large enough to fit a 50- or 60-inch screen comfortably, a Laser TV won’t be on your shopping list. Putting in a TV screen that’s too big for your room results in unpleasantly unwatchable TV, and that’s an experience that nobody wants.

Laser TVs are also an unfinished product. Arasor and Novalux, the two companies behind the Laser technology, are more like an Intel, creating components that consumer electronics manufacturers use in their technologies. Arasor and Novalux do not manufacturer TVs and never will – they leave that up to the TV manufacturers themselves. The supporting chipsets and other components are yet to be fully optimised for the new levels of performance that a Laser TV can offer, and this is one of the reasons why there’s a minimum year long wait before they’re available.

It’s also interesting to discover that if you have a Laser TV and a Plasma TV side-by-side, why you see a duller plasma image, where previously with only the plasma TV on, it looked fantastic.

This was explained to me as being a trick the brain employs when watching TV. With a plasma or LCD, which according to Arasor and Novalux only shows approximately half of the colours that the human eye can see, the brain adjusts to this lower range of colours and you see what looks like, and is, a stunning image.

When you put this next to a Laser TV, the brain adjusts to the higher colour output of the Laser TV, and the plasma or LCD TV then looks duller in comparison. Turn off the Laser TV, and in three of four minutes your brain has re-adjusted itself, and the plasma looks fantastic again.

  
      Laser TV demo at the launch - Laser left, plasma right

Because few people will be buying a Laser TV to place right next to their plasma or LCD TV, your existing or future plasma/LCD will still look fantastic, and will continue to for some time to come.

It’s just that when Laser TVs arrive, if you really want a big TV, you’ll have a new choice that is demonstrably more colourful, doesn’t have any of the rainbow effect problems that DLP TVs can have, doesn’t have burn in (like LCD TVs) and is said to be much more price competitive.

To answer some of the questions that we posed in our second Laser TV article, Larry Marshall, to co-chairman of Arasor and one of the developers gave us some answers, for which we are thankful! We’ve edited them grammatically and made minor changes for clarity, but otherwise these are Larry’s answers.

Was the Plasma set up correctly? (and answers to questions raised in our second article), answered by Larry Marshall:

The plasma looked great while the Laser TV was covered up – which was a high end commercial plasma - the difference in colour saturation and contrast only became apparent when the Laser TV was uncovered and the two technologies were compared.

Besides, the Laser TV was by no means a finished product, so there are still huge improvements that can be made - something which will be showcased by Mitsubishi at the CES 2007 in Las Vegas. The prototype showed in Sydney is basically a DLP TV with the laser technology replacing the light bulb - only minor tweaks had been done to account for the wider spectrum of the laser. In contrast, the plasma is a commerical product that has been selling for years, and I trust they are well & trully tweaked. Again, the plasma looked great, until you saw twice the colour coming from the Laser TV next to it.

The Laser TV is brighter – there’s no fundamental limit to screen size like there is with plasma or LCD - the screen is just a piece of glass rather than a complex, multilayer structure than suffers of imperfections when you exceed about 40″ diagonal screen size in a plasma or LCD. There is simply much more light from a laser, so you could turn up the plasma all you like and it will still not be as bright.

I think the people who haven’t seen the Laser TV are missing the point. If you were at the launch most of these questions were asked & answered. The laser doesn’t make the TV any higher resolution, it’s main benefit are that it delivers twice as much colour as a plasma or LCD TV. The Laser TV gives you almost the full color spectrum that you see in real life, and the contrast in things like fleshtones, deep blues & reds, and also rich yellows really jump out at you because you’ve never seen them before on a TV. That’s why it looks better and brighter than plasma or LCD. It’s twice the colour that gives the real life rich content experience.

The DLP or rear projection TVs are big and clunky because the optoelectronics engine that drives them is made of discrete components including a huge high power lamp. The optical chips (used in Laser TV) simply integrate all those separate components together into a chip, and that takes out the manual labor, cost and bulk.

Arasor make optical chips that enable the colours to be produced for the TV, Novalux makes infrared lasers that drive the chips, and neither of us make TVs. We just supply the chips. Seiko, Epson, Mitsubishi, Unaxis, and others make the TVs or the guts of them. You should think of us like Intel or AMD making the heart of your Laptop, but it’s Dell that is the laptop maker. In fairness, Novalux are the pioneers of Laser TV and have succeeded where many others have failed. We’ve all been in the industry for almost 20 years, and have seen many attempts to use lasers in display. Jean-Michel Pelaprat (of Novalux, and presenter at the Laser TV launch) is a veteran of the laser industry, he and his team at Novalux have done an outstanding job of solving these problems.

Arasor is like the Intel of the optoelectronics industry creating a silicon chip that integrates optoelectronics and wireless solutions for a number of applications including:

- broadband data systems

- optically driven wireless communications

- and next generation consumer television displays.

If you want to know more about the colour gamut, google the term “plasma colour gamut”. There are a lot of these type of images on the web. The reason laser can give twice the colour is that the chips can be made to sit the red, blue and green colours right on the corners of the gamut while plasma & LCD are limited to the centre triangle region you see in the image.

See this link for an example.

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