Lately several news are giving us an interesting insight in the future of big-screen TVs. On one hand Intel announced that they were canceling their Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) rear projection TV chips project.

So LCoS won’t be the Texas Instruments DLP killer, and it might actually have been only a lot of FUD as pointed out by Om Malik.

On the other hand DLP is doing great. Consumers are buying rear projection TVs and DLP are doing great there:

In the second quarter, some 53% of advanced TVs sold with a screen bigger than 30 inches were projection sets, and TI’s chip powered nearly half of them

Popular Science has an article comparing the different advantages of the various big-screen TV technologies. Flat-panel models that have high-resolutions (for HDTV) are still expensive, and burning is still a risk for plasma screens too.

Today DLP rear-projection TVs are still in the same price range as other technologies, but in the longer-term, the DLP technology has the strong advantage of benefiting of the advances in semi-conductor processes, and costs will drop much quicker than for plasma or LCD. With their patent portfolio and their manufacturing power, not forgetting their long experience with DLP, TI has definitively a strong opportunity there. Did someone say “Intel of televisions”?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 28th, 2004 at 10:18 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Linking Blogs