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at w w w.ifa-international.org MARKET & TE CHNOLOGY TRENDS TRACKING THE TRENDS AT IFA 2008 THE LCD/PDP BATTLE GETS SERIOUS (AND MEAN!) Interview by Richard Barnes One of the most important aspects of IFA is that it’s a forum for tracking trends in new technologies. To get an unbiased and educated view of the trends “as seen by the analysts”, we have “cornered” a couple of the most influential specialists in the business to ask their point of view. In this interview, we asked Bob Raikes - Meko’s Principal, what he feels are the biggest trends in TV technologies this year… Download Video Last year our TV specialist came away from IFA wanting a Pioneer Kuro. The Pioneer TV last year had the best black, the best image quality, it really had punch and you really wanted to buy it. In the last year or two the best plasmas have still been better than LCD TVs. There was still that edge of quality in the plasma TVs. However, this year the LCD manufacturers have come back against plasma by really improving their colour performance and the black levels and really that punch is there. Pioneer are not here and often is what you don’t see that’s as interesting as what you do see. The LCD manufacturers have fantastic looking LED LCD TVs. They’re very expensive this year, but they’ve made their point. Plasma is going to have a real battle in the future to say that it has better colour, better contrast and even better motion. One of the big stories has been the announcement by Sony and Samsung that they have 200Hz panels, now the difference between 50Hz and 100Hz is much more than the difference between 100Hz and 200Hz but nevertheless even the motion performance, which is one of the last issues for LCD in visual quality is very nearly solved. And given the advantages they have with LED backlights, it looks very difficult for plasma to claim the top position in visual quality. Plasma is not going to go away. Panasonic in particular has a huge investment over the next year in Amagasaki in Japan with a big push to boost plasma sales and they will push plasma very strongly, but the LCD guys are going to attack as the prices of LCDs come down. At the end of the day, LCDs and LEDs are semi-conductors and the LEDs respond to Moore’s law: they get twice as bright approximately every 18 months and although they’re expensive today, in a couple of years they’re going to be much nearer the mainstream and really attack plasma’s position. Now we’re starting to see some LED backlit TVs in the shops and this is really going to be, as you said, the inflection point, the fact that they’re coming into shops now… Absolutely, and they will be expensive. There’s no way you can make an LED backlit TV at low cost and it will be several years before it’s really the common TV. However, you have to start from a point and here the issue is that they’ve beaten the plasma on several points. Meko has done a lot of tracking of LCD sales volume versus plasma and LCD has a huge share of the market compared to plasma anyway. Yes, we always talk about the old LCD monster. The wonderful thing about LCDs is that you can use an LCD from almost any size, so your mobile phone has an LCD but so do the 65” TVs and that means LCDs can go into, for example, a billion phones per year, computer monitors, laptops and TVs and all the small sizes that people like for TV so the PDPs really have a problem to go down to 37” or 32”. Just a final question about OLED, that we’re starting to see coming into the market… I know virtually all the companies are investigating the possibilities of what they’re going to do with OLED. Sony was the first to bring it out commercially. What do you see as being the future of OLED? OLED now is like LCD 15 years ago. It’s an interesting technology that everybody’s playing with, but LCD took a long time to compete with CRT. Now it will be very difficult to compete with LCD. It’s just going to get cheaper and there are alternatives that can leverage the infrastructure for LCD today with still other new technologies. Companies like Unipics will have some very interesting ideas how to take the factories that are already making the LCDs and actually make even better panels which are even simpler than OLEDS. So there are still a lot of questions about OLEDS. It’s a wonderful technology, I always say, when I see an OLED, my heart knows that OLED, is best but when you look at the technology problems and the difficulties to overcome in production and volume, it’s very hard. The Sony OLED is fantastic, they brought it to market but I’ve got a long memory, I know where the bodies are buried and Sony originally promised to have OLED shipping by 2003… Now it’s 2008 so they slipped five years, meanwhile LCDs got better and better and cheaper and cheaper. The technical difficulties are going to be a problem for OLED in the mainstream for several years yet. We won’t be seeing them at IFA in volume at low prices for several years yet. DISPLAYFORUM 2008 - KEYNOTES ANNOUNCED DisplayForum 2008, the annual business meeting for the display market in Europe, has announced that executives from Amazon, Sony and Lenovo will deliver keynotes at the conference in Düsseldorf, Germany on 4-5 November 2008. According to Bob Raikes: “This year’s impressive line-up of keynote speakers are all influential players who have played an active role in helping to define the future of the display markets and will surely provide thought-provoking discussions of interest to all those who attend“. IFA International • Wednesday, 3 rd September 2008 www.ifa-international.org 13
