The 3-D image was of a human rib cage, and it rotated in midair. And the holographic rib cage rattled me.

It was my first experience with a Display Of The Future, and it set me on a mission. In the subsequent years, I've been hunting down display prototypes, talking with experts, and visiting labs. In short, I've been on a quest for the perfect display.

Now You See It

Even though holographic video blew me away when I first saw it, I quickly composed myself. It's simply not the sort of thing that will be commercially available any time soon.

I talked to Gregg Favalora, 3-D expert and founder of Actuality Systems, about the commercial viability of high-resolution 3-D video. His company broke resolution records with its display-a 100-million-voxel (3-D pixel) device that made images for radiologists and engineers hunting for oil reserves. The details of these 3-D images look eerily realistic, but Actuality had a heck of a time finding the right market for it.

In the end, the company only sold 30 systems at $200,000 each and it has now ceased engineering operations. And that MIT holographic video system I saw in a few years ago is still trapped in the lab. The lesson: no matter how extraordinary your technology, it's impractical for the people unless you can efficiently manufacture it in large numbers.

I See Practicality

At the opposite end of the price spectrum is LCD. It's cheap as dirt thanks to the billions of dollars of factories built over the past two decades. I wanted to get a look at the way LCDs are made and try to find clues for how a more interesting or useful display-like a reflective e-reader or an OLED screen-could scale up and become cheap.

So I took a trip down to Applied Materials in Santa Clara, California, a company that supplies 90 percent of the LCD industry with manufacturing equipment. What I saw was impressive: the newest fabs are built around sheets of glass—backplanes of LCDs—that are the size of a garage door. They're only as thick as six sheets of paper, and each one can yield eight large screen TVs.

The machines that deposit electronics on the glass are behemoths-taller than I can reach and with an area slightly larger than a garage door. In a fab, six of these machines are arrange circularly, and from above they look like a giant mechanized flower. The sheets of glass slide in like a floppy disk into a drive, and come out coated with thin film transistors.

The bigger the glass, the more displays can be pumped out of a factory, and the cheaper all sizes of LCD displays become. According to Sid Rosenblatt, the CFO of Universal Display Corporation, a big fab can make six 50-inch LCDs every three to four minutes. At that volume, how can anything else compete with LCD?

Fitting In

Well, instead of beating them, startup Pixel Qi decided to join them. The company's screens are all LCD—built on the same lines and with the same materials as any other liquid crystal display—but with an additional mode in which the power-hungry backlight is off, and the display reflects ambient light.

I've seen Pixel Qi's displays and visited with Mary Lou Jepsen, the startup's founder and the former CTO of the One Laptop Per Child project. Jepsen spends most of her time in Taipei, the capital of Displayland, but on a sunny day last fall, I caught her at her houseboat in Sausalito. It was the perfect time and place to try out an LCD that is most impressive in bright light.

In its reflective mode, the display is black and white, similar to a Kindle or Sony Reader except it's faster-capable of video, albeit in monochrome. The first batch of Pixel Qi screens is scheduled to come off the line this month. Jepsen says more designs that further reduce power consumption are on the way. In one, she explains that the screen, when not needing to refresh, should be able to shut down the central processing unit(and wake it up within milliseconds when it's in use).

As for a color reflective mode, Jepsen says it could be possible in a couple of years. The concept, which involves a particular arrangement of liquid crystals, is based on her PhD thesis, but it's admittedly a more complex design than the first Pixel Qi screens. Her first priority, she says, is making sure that Pixel Qi can ship its first products quickly and successfully.

Bright and Beautiful

While Pixel Qi might be making cheap displays that are easy on the eyes and energy efficient, they can't compare to the beauty and simplicity of OLED screens, in which each pixel emits its own light. The whites are whiter, the blacks are blacker, and the overall image is just gorgeous.

Even better, the manufacturing process is as simple as it gets. It's layer of organic material that can be printed between two layers of electrodes. This means that OLED displays have the potential to fold, roll, and be built over large areas.

Concepts I've seen: a paper-thin, flexible display slammed by a hammer without breaking, a display that's see-through when the power's off, and large area OLED coating that act as a window, a wall, or a display, depending on its mode.

In terms of touch, I'm keeping an eye on a new type of technology that's being integrated into the electronic foundation of OLED displays and LCDs too. It's called in-cell technology, and there are a number of variants, but one type incorporates photodetectors into the pixels of a screen. It's ideal for OLED displays, because it can be added without adding thickness, allowing them to maintain their sleek good looks.

If there were ever a perfect display, OLED is it.

The Holdup

In a conversation with Vladimir Bulovic, a professor at MIT (and star of the famous HYPERLINK "http://techtv.mit.edu/genres/19-engineering/videos/3175-vladimir-bulovic-on-oled-displays" light-emitting pickle video) we waxed poetic on the possibilities of OLEDs. Bulovic believes that it's only a matter of time before OLEDs take their rightful place at the head of the display industry. The reason we have to wait is simply bad timing. "If back in the 1970s, we had OLEDs, no one would even know what an LCD is today," he said.

The widely understood problem with OLED displays, however, is that the technology doesn't exist to mass manufacture them on large sheets of glass like those I saw at Applied Material. Therefore, their beauty is relegated to smaller screens like cell phone displays, Sony's 11-inch (expensive) TV, and concept demos.

Engineers are working on the problem, of course. Bulovic told me about a former student of his, named Conor Madigan, who has an OLED-printing startup in Menlo Park called Kateeva. I got a hold of Madigan who said his company, which uses a hybrid approach to printing large-scale OLED display, is well funded (even in these difficult economic times) and the display industry is really starting to push large-scale OLED technology.

While it's true that big display makers are promising big OLED screens in the next couple of years, I'm not holding my breath. Even when the technology for printing large-scale OLED displays arrives, it will still take significant investments to scale up manufacturing. It's difficult for companies to justify investing too much money in OLED displays while LCD sales are still doing well and continue to get cheaper. Besides, these large-screen OLEDs will still be made on glass, just like LCD, which keeps things rigid, fragile, and heavy.

Past Glass

In order to have a light, flexible, rugged OLED display, it's obvious that display makers must go with plastic instead of glass. Plastic Logic, is promising the world's first plastic-backed screens with printed organic transistors, by early next year.

I've handled a proto-version of Que, Plastic Logic's e-reader, at the company's Mountain View headquarters and was impressed by the form factor. While it's still rigid, it's light as a thin stack of papers. And because it's made of plastic, it's robust. I felt like flinging it across the boardroom where I sat with the head of marketing and a public relations handler. I didn't.

Here's the bad news for Plastic Logic: it all comes back to scalability. At the recent Printed Electronics conference in San Jose, I had lunchtime conversations with people who just shake their head at Plastic Logic's challenges. A number of them expressed skepticism that the manufacturing process could scale.

Printed organic transistors currently can't compete in speed with amorphous silicon transistors used in LCDs and OLED displays. And the company's printing technology is done in a single fab in Dresden, which could make it difficult to produce the e-reader in large volume. In other words, it won't be cheap or widespread, at least in the near future.

Roll With It

However, the folks at HP Labs think they have a scalable way to make plastic-backed displays with fast silicon transistors. On a recent tour of HP Labs I saw the proof: sheets of plastic, tens of meters long, are rolled onto tubes and are loaded and locked into a system that imprints silicon transistors onto the material.

Carl Taussig, the director of HP's information surfaces lab, walked me through the process of the so-called Self Aligned Imprint Lithography. Plastic, with a shiny coating, spins on a series of cylinders, where it is exposed to chemicals, ultra-violet light, etching solutions, and ionized gasses. The roll-to-roll setups are compact, and they don't require clean-room level purity that other display processes do.

Taussig, who is also responsible for inventing the DVD-RW, showed me prototypes, built with HP's silicon-on-plastic transistors. One of these plastic backplanes controlled an E Ink display. Some of the pixels that were supposed to be black appeared gray, but these prototypes help the researchers find the problems in the roll-to-roll process. If they see a blown-out pixel, they retrace their steps to find where in the process the problem arose. 


In another demonstration, I saw a new type of reflective display developed at HP that was about the size of a smart phone screen. It has color and video and is one of the best-looking reflective screen I've seen. Technical details were sparse (they will come out early next year), but Taussig told me that part of the trick is to make a pixel out of three layers of color dyes that take incoming white light and reflect specific colors of it back at you, something like the way that butterfly wings reflect light.

Within Two Years

While Taussig doesn't think roll-to-roll will replace LCD processes anytime soon, he hopes it can help plastic become the foundation for reflective displays as well as emissive displays like those made of OLEDs. HP has licensed its roll-to-roll technology to PowerFilm, a thin film solar manufacturer. And recently, PowerFilm's subsidiary Phicot has started to commercially developing the process for electronics. The first products will be displays for soldiers that may be integrated into clothing or wrap around their arms.

Combining HP's roll-to-roll manufacturing with OLEDs and a reflective reading technology is the closest thing to the perfect display that I've seen. So I ask Taussig how long it's going to take to make the process reliable. He's optimistic that Phicot can iron out the problems soon. "To be successful we need to roll this out within two years," he says, since the first plastic displays will hit the market in 2010.

In talking with Taussig, it's clear to me that even though he's a researcher, he's focused on making plastic displays practical. He knows the only way to do that is with solid, cost-effective manufacturing. Once the manufacturing problems are solved, he says, plastic displays become inevitable. "My grandkids will never believe that we made displays with glass," he says. "Everything will be on plastic."

I can't wait. The perfect screen will be lightweight, energy-efficient, and able to take various forms—flexible, transparent, and with touch or some other form of gesture recognition. I want colors so vibrant that images look real enough to grab. Still, I want to read on it without feeling like I'm staring at a flashlight. And it's got to be cheap.

So far, the displays I've seen come close. And while nothing yet gets it all right, there are some up-and-coming technologies-and, crucially, emerging manufacturing processes-that give me confidence that the perfect display is on the way.

Kate Greene spends most of her day staring at the screens of her MacBook Pro and iPhone. She became a journalist by way of physics, where she worked in a basement lab with lasers and a lot of liquid nitrogen. Currently, she writes for publications like The Economist and Technology Review and goes on display hunts for Gizmodo. She can be found on the Internet at kategreene.net and on twitter

The new factory will also host a process to reduce afterglow and improve 3D performance. It'll eventually output 1 million smaller sets a month. [JapanToday]

TV makers may think we want these things, and I think they're right we want content on our sets, but I don't want it from them. I'd believe that such extras might help sales in a world where ever ad says their set is the prettiest in picture. I believe that they believe that extras like this help sales. But I don't think a smart TV buyer would want these extras, or use them very often.

Several months ago, I reviewed the pinnacle of junk extra content in a Samsung LCD TV, which I didn't love but earned much critical acclaim. The 7000 and 8000 series in this line up had identical specs to the 6000, more or less, but for a few hundred dollars more, you could get WIDGET-FIED. There was a menu, hidden, that when you found it had an astounding amount of content. Insane, weirdo content. Receipes for dinner, lunch, desert annotated, step by step. Over 15 creepy children's songs, by a big yellow and short blue cartoon character. Bowling and a Galaga type game. Yahoo Widgets: An open API system that allows for weather, tweeting and flickr photos. Only 8 had been developed and so the openness was a joke. So was the performance. It was heartbreakingly slow to load, and therefore useless. Like all the other extras, they were poorly implemented, added cost to the set, and were instantly outdated. Here's the review, or just watch this ridiculous video:

I think some basic media playback in a TV is fine. I'll take that. Though so many Blu-ray players and set-top boxes are doing the same thing, it's almost certain to be redundant. And it's better to keep all that outside the TV itself, anyway. If you have to add processors and Ethernet connections to a TV to run shitty software and content, I'd rather they didn't.

Because here's the thing: People keep TVs for a long time, and building TVs is serious business. They should focus on the set itself. And they can't beat the content in my Xbox, and even if they did for a second, an Xbox is replaceable rather easily, compared to a HDTV set that costs thousands of dollars. I plan to get one TV and have it last over several generations of Xboxes.

TV makers, please stick to making the pixels more pretty. We'll get our content from who we want, the way we want to.

The more-affordable design benefits from lessons learned with the first concept, and new PDP materials and chips were developed to accelerate pixel illumination while maintaining brightness. Of course, the upcoming challenge for 3D (aside from the wacky glasses) is that you'll need a Blu-ray player and movies that support the 3D format.

The 50-incher will be shown next week at Tokyo's CEATEC show—Japan's version of CES. We'll let you know if Panasonic dish up any more details, or if Sony hits back with something new of its own. You might remember that Sony intends to introduce a 3D Bravia TV and PS3 games next year. [Panasonic via Akihabara News]

I ran across this scene today outside Park Avenue Audio on 29th and Park in Manhattan—a shop that caters to A/V junkies (I bought my Grado SR60s there), and it's a shipment fresh from Japan. The guys at Park Ave. say that it's becoming quite a battle to secure whatever Kuro inventory remains, but they've got a source that should keep them in Kuros for at least a little longer.

If you're just joining us, Pioneer's Kuros have been the King of All Plasmas for the last several years, with blacks blacker than the depths of cold space. Park Avenue is moving the final generation Elite Pro 111FD 50-inchers for $3,500 and the 60-inchers for $5,000, which is a bit of a markup from the best prices you could find online right now (from the few retailers that still have any stock), but not horrible for an audiophile-centric brick and mortar. Those prices are sure to go up as supply becomes scarcer, though, so if you want to save this dodo from extinction before you'll have to proffer some rare golden doubloons for the privilege, act fast.

They wouldn't be the first by any stretch—Pioneer and Vizio have both recently clenched the sphincter on plasma production, citing low profitability. If razor-thin profit margins are the concern, though, LG's next move—to produce CRT displays for the developing world, according to the article—seems an odd choice. UPDATE: For what it's worth (a lot?), LG has denied the report. [47News via Crunchgear]

Here's how the flat panel television market looked as of Q4 2008:

20.2% - Samsung
14.3% - Vizio
13.5% - Sony
10.7% - Panasonic

So why is Vizio doing so well? We're guessing people like buying cheap televisions. But incidentally, if you're in the market for a cheap set, we recommend the Toshiba Regza. [Reuters]

Of course, it's a further sign that the economy being in trouble, and goes along with the generally more subdued feel of CES 2009; but no one scrapped any plans to show a 200-incher within the last six months, so there's more to it than that.

The current kings of ridiculous TV extremes—Panasonic's 150-inch plasma and Sharp's 108-inch LCD—represent the biggest physical pieces of glass that the factory can produce without imperfections. Usually, these massive pieces of "mother glass" are carved into a number of smaller panels, and they obviously don't build them bigger only to get bigger showpiece TVs for CES—the more smaller sets you can produce from a single run of glass means more efficient manufacturing and more money saved per panel.

So the short answer is: in the last 12 months, no one has had a bigger and better factory go online that can produce any bigger pieces of mother glass.

But here's an interesting tidbit: Sharp is currently building a new plant in Japan that's capable of producing a piece of mother glass that's 120 inches by 112 inches. If we know our Pythagorean theorem, that's just under 165 inches diagonal, which would take the crown from Panny's 150-incher.

But it's not going to happen. Sharp's Senior Product Manager for LCD TVs, Tony Favia, says that right now there are no plans to build a 165-inch TV from the new mother glass when the plant goes online in the spring of next year. When we asked why, Tony and several other execs basically just laughed at the idea of building a 165-inch set today.

Here's why—the logistics make it too ridiculous in any economy, especially the one we've got right now. Panasonic's 150-inch set still isn't even on sale. They've sold a few thousand of their 103-inch plasma (2007's plasma size king) and have announced intentions to sell the 150, but right now they're just intentions. A 150-inch TV requires a chartered 747 to ship—and they can only fit two in each 747. And on top of that, no one's there to buy these things. Sharp unveiled an 82-inch LCD prototype this year because 108 inches is simply too big and expensive at $129k, and they needed a middle step between that and their 65-inchers.

So where will the next size race come into play? OLED. Even though we didn't see much of that technology at CES this year either, the shipping logistics of a massive display that can effectively be rolled up into a shipping tube is where we'll see the next big size wars. Once manufacturers figure out how to seal the OLED filling into naturally more porous plastic, that's the war we'll have.

It better be soon, because without the HDTV size match, CES is a snooze.

Here's what we don't know: Anything else.

If you head on over to the site, they've broken down each major size category by size, price and technology type. So if you want to spend about $1,200 buck on a 426" 46" LCD, you know that the Samsung LN46A550 is a safe bet. Or if you want a 42" plasma for under $1,000, maybe you should look at the Panasonic TH42PZ80U.

HD Guru is well-known for scientifically testing every TV under the sun, so if something's on their list that you were already considering, you can pretty much consider it a no-brainer. For more advice on buying an HDTV, check out our buyer's guide. [HDGuru]

PANASONIC PREVIEWS LARGER SIZE INTERNET ENABLED VIERA PLASMAS AT 2008 CEDIA CONVENTION

Industry Leader Panasonic Premieres 58-inch And 65-inch VIERA Plasma Displays to Custom Installers

Denver, CO (September 3, 2008) – Panasonic Corporation of North America, the principal U.S. subsidiary of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (NYSE:MC), the industry leader in high definition and Plasma televison, today introduced attendees to the 2008 CEDIA convention to the latest additions in the company’s already acclaimed internet enabled Plasma line, the PZ850 series. Joining the TH-50PZ850 and the TH-46PZ850, the industry’s first internet enabled TVs, are the 58-inch class (58-inches measured diagonally) and the TH-65PZ850 class (64.7-inches measured diagonally), giving Panasonic a wide breadth of screen sizes in the flagship series of high performance Plasma TVs. Building upon the market and critical success of Panasonic’s previous Plasma models, the 2008 PZ850 series includes a number of step-up features that will further strengthen Panasonic’s leadership position.

The introduction of the IP enabled televisions, a technology that provides access to on-line content directly from the televison with VIERA CAST™ technology, is one of many advances found in the PZ850 line. VIERA CAST is a revolutionary new feature that streams web content directly to your VIERA HDTV without the need for an external box or a PC. The consumer can access the unlimited YouTube™ library, share digital photos from Picasa™ Web Albums with friends and family, get local weather updates and gain access to financial data from Bloomberg. There is no fee for VIERA Cast and the feature automatically updates itself as new web content becomes available.

“We’re very excited about the technological advances that have been incorporated into VIERA’s PZ850 series and the bigger screen sizes should prove extremely beneficial to both Panasonic and the CEDIA membership.,” said Bob Perry, Senior Vice President, Panasonic Display Products Company. “The 58-inch and 65-inch now stand beside their smaller brethren to provide the installer with a number of screen size options. IPTV in particular is a technology that by providing access to on-line content directly from the TV, allows the consumer to optimize his or her options and use the VIERA Plasma for more than entertainment. Now the consumer has a large screen TV that is also the source of an endless stream of internet information.”

The state-of-the-art technology that is inherent in the PZ850 series provides the consumer with detailed images, high moving-picture resolution, advanced networking and excellent compatibility with other AV devices. The PZ850 series features a Pro Setting Menu, allowing the user to access professional calibration software; an improved native resolution contrast ratio of 30,000:1 and a dynamic ratio of 1,000,000:1; Digital Cinema Color Re-Mastering; 24p native reproduction; Game Mode; an SD memory Card slot; RS-232C connection; four HDMI connections; increased luminous efficiency; lead free panels; 100,000 hours to half brightness and a PC input. The 850 series further expands the capabilities of the SD Card feature by utilizing the H.264 codec to display high definition video recorded on a HD camcorder equipped with the H.264 codec.

Recognizing the growing use of Plasma HD televisions in the gaming world, Panasonic created the Game Mode, which minimizes the time lag when displaying game images on the Plasma screen. The Mode synchronizes the response of the game image to the player’s operation, thereby producing an extremely clear image with no motion artifacts.

Digital Cinema Color Re-Mastering is a value added technology that creates a wide color gamut covering 120% of the conventional HDTV color standard , enabling VIERA displays to reproduce the essential colors for viewing movies. 24p native reproduction, which negates the need for 3:2 pulldown, resulting in a smoother picture, is another feature that provides the best possible viewing experience.

Also: The quick-glance spec sheet we ran in May still appears to be valid.

More Kuro Than Kuro
On the plasma front, Pioneer's new Kuros fit midway on the contrast gamut between the previous generation and the "Extreme Contrast" panel shown at CES. The five-times-deeper blacks don't show up on the brightly lit sales floor as well as they do in a dimly lit home, but Pioneer's Russ Johnson says they will blow away videophiles, particularly with respect to color purity and gradations of shadow. The idea is that you will see more without colors being blown out, and without "hotspots" that make whites too bright. There will be two 1080p plasma TVs out next month, the 50" PDP-5020FD for $4,000 and the 60" PDP-6020FD for $5,500. They're both about 20% thinner than the previous Kuro models, now measuring 3.7" thick. Besides the features that it shares with the previous generation, these Kuros have a new remote control and new HD GUI for better ease-of-use. We're also told they have some networking capabilities—Home Media Gallery plus DLNA compatibility with PCs and other network devices. More on that when we check them out.In the Elite line, Pioneer is rolling out souped-up versions of the above TVs at $1,000 premiums—the 50" PRO-111FD and 60" PRO-151FD. The bigger news from a gadget perspective is that there will be two plasma monitors that are even thinner. They will be 50% as thick as the original Kuro, measuring just 2.5". As monitors, there have no ATSC tuners or speakers, but they will be highly customizable thanks to some serious connectivity and remote access tools. It's a rich man's product, for sure, but worth knowing it's hitting the market, since the tech will eventually trickle down.That Projector Rings a Bell
As for the KRF-9000FD projector that snuck out at the European launch, some were smart enough to spot it as a re-branded JVC RS2 or HD100, the two so similar they're referred to as "twins". Johnson tells us that the company chose the LCOS projector because its performance was "consistent with the deep black levels" of the Kuro line. Pioneer added some tuning options to jive with Kuro deep-black benchmarks, but at this time the company did not do too much to make it a product distinct from JVC's. It will be branded simply as the Pioneer Elite Kuro Projector, and it will sell for $9,000, as early as June via the Elite dealer network.

Why No LCDs???
Johnson was good enough to shed some light on the missing LCDs. It turns out, Pioneer Europe has a different LCD supplier than Pioneer USA. Pioneer's European supplier—Philips?—has Pioneer's global LCD partner—Sharp—supplies different product to Europe than it does to the US. Sharp supplies 1080p LCDs in 32", 37" and 46" sizes with 100Hz frame mode to Pioneer Europe, but can't bring them to the US—even for itself. Of course in the US, it would be 120Hz, not 100Hz, a PAL spec. Those are the baseline requirements for Pioneer to work its Kuro magic. These requirements can't be met by the US LCD affiliate, says Johnson, "not even in their own line-up", but he does expect them to come eventually. Since Philips is no longer in the US TV biz, and since Sharp appears to be Pioneer's other LCD partner, I guess we'll have to wait until Sharp catches up.

That Kuro Secret Sauce
All this hullabaloo about Pioneer quitting panel manufacturing and instead buying panels from Panasonic made us ask Johnson exactly how Kuro will stay alive, and he surprised us with some factoids:
• The second-gen Kuros gets the 5X deeper black with the same panel, plus better filtering and video processing.
• Even the "Extreme Contrast" CES panel, the one that freaked us out, was based on "current glass," and not some futuristic laboratory panel. "It's how you fire the pixel," says Johnson. We don't know exactly what that means, but it's strangely reassuring. [Pioneer USA]

Shadow detail was not as good, however, appearing too bright, and the sets pushed reds a bit. The set scored below average in standard def upscaling, noise reduction and to top it off the power consumption was conspicuously high for its size. It does have 3 HDMI ports. This set, for all the reasons listed above, scored a 7.7. (That's low on CNet's relatively stubby scale.) UPDATE: David writes in to say he expected more from this set, but it is still fifth best, overall. [Panasonic, CNet]

KURO Plasma TVs for absolute picture quality The new 2008 range of KURO plasma TVs exceeds the boundaries of what was thought possible in picture quality performance. The second generation KURO pushes closer to absolute black by further reducing the idling luminance and improving black levels five times over the previous 2007 KURO models. This has enabled Pioneer to accurately reproduce even higher contrast levels and deeper colours within the high-definition colour spectrum. The all-new 2008 KURO plasma TVs are available in 50 and 60-inch (availability depending on region).

Like I said, we can't figure out exactly what Pioneer's US division has done to get moved to the back of the line as far as SWEET NEW PLASMAS go, but we're looking into it now. [Pioneer EU]

The current press coverage was not released by Pioneer so it may be misleading and contains many inaccuracies.

The statement continues:

Pioneer reviews its display business strategy every year looking to maximize profitability and efficiency. At this time, the Company is not announcing any decisions with regards to manufacturing of any single component of its plasma displays. We will announce Pioneer's display strategy in detail at the information meeting in Japan to be held on March 7th and via press release to the rest of the world later that day.

While these Big Four gained ground—often by keeping profit margins slim and exploring cheaper manufacturing—other well-regarded brands like Sharp, Philips and Hitachi fell back. The strongest competition in LCD came from Vizio and Polaroid, but many other brands clamored like barbarians at the gate.

DisplaySearch's charts with market share number are just below, but first answer this simple question:

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

[DisplaySearch]

Anyone who's ever tried to "install" a 50 inch plasma or LCD all by themselves (GUILTY!!) knows that this here is wonderful news, and not too far off. Many of these TVs will be shipping in 2008 and some in 2009. By and large, the buzz is that, before we get to the next wave of TV technology, there will be some nice improvements in the current stuff. TV manufacturers, my back and my little pinky finger thank you!