A body-image crisis for televisions

Think a flat-panel LCD or plasma set is slender? Think again. Its time to replace your 4-inch-thick porker with a new model measuring under a deuce.

Following on Hitachi, which introduced 1.5-inch panels in the fall, JVC is introducing its own waifs here at CES. JVC also gets down to 1.5 inches (at its skinniest part, bulging to 2.9 inches in the center). JVC launched two screen sizes: slim 42 and 46 inches (pricing not set).

Triming the sets involved some radical re-working of their innards, as we describe in an article from our upcoming February issue. But now that its been done, expect other companies to follow. (Actually, you can expect another announcement in a few hours.)

Remember the old days—three months ago—when a 1.5-inch thick
LCD TV seemed skinny? My, how times have changed.

Today in Las Vegas,
Pioneer announced a prototype 50-inch plasma screen with no bezel (frame)
around it and just 9 millimeters of thickness. (The iPhone is 12mm fat.) This
blows away anything in the LCD realm and comes awfully close to Sonys OLED TV
(which is 3mm thick but also limited to a 10-inch diagonal screen size for the
foreseeable future.)

How did Pioneer do it? They arent saying yet, but for years
the company has been re-working plasma panels—rejiggering the cells,
eliminating sheets of glass or plastic filters—to get them skinner. Although
the intention there had been to make screen images look better, not to affect
how the screen itself looks.

Black is Black

Speaking of screen images, Pioneer also announced a
prototype that does what had seemed impossible: When it shows video with dark
scenes, black is actually black not muddy gray like on every other TV (or
projector) in human history.

Pioneers Kuro plasmas won a Pop Sci Best of Whats New
Grand Award recently for cutting so-called idle luminance (the residual
brightness even in black scenes) by 80% over early models. With todays
announcement, Pioneer seems to be saying it has eliminated the remaining 20%.
If so, theyve done what had always been considered impossible.

I want my thin, black TV!

So when can you get this goodness? Definitely not in 2008,
says Pioneer. But they do plan to make sets (in 2009?) that combine both the
super-slim and absolute black technologies. Whew! Glad I didnt shell out a ton
of dough for that LCD TV I was thinking about getting.—Sean Captain

Want more? Check out our entire CES 2008 coverage here.