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Financial Times, Friday 3 January 1997 Flat screens: Canon claims if anyone can, it canMichael Kenward on Canon's hopes to leapfrog its competitors with an innovative display system A flat television screen that hangs on the wall is the aspiration of many electronics companies. Several leading manufacturers showed off flat screens, for TVs and computers, at last year's consumer electronics shows. The signs are that 1997 will see flat screens in the showrooms. Philips, Fujitsu, Panasonic and Sony all plan to market flat screen TV sets during the year, mostly 40in screens based on plasma technology, the science behind fluorescent lighting. But the price of these TV sets - Philips talks of charging $13,000 for its first generation product - puts them beyond the domestic market. So far no one has come up with a technology that comes in at a price anywhere near that of the modern TV set. Companies insist that prices will tumble as production rises, but the falls will be limited by the underlying technology. Philips, for example, sees the world market reaching 1m units a year by 2000, but expects prices to fall by only 50 per cent. So the market remains wide open for anyone who can devise a technology that not only looks good, but that also offers lower prices. The target is a screen with a price tag no more than 20 per cent higher than that of a conventional cathode ray tube (CRT). Canon, the Japanese cameras-to-copiers company, has just added a new display technology to its own flat-screen armoury. The company launched its ferroelectric liquid crystal displays (FLCDs) three years ago as an alternative to the large monitors used with modern computers. But it has had little success in bringing the cost of FLCDs down to levels acceptable for computers, let alone for TV sets. Now Canon hopes to improve its chances in the flatscreen market with a completely new system, the surface-conduction electron emitter (SCE), which it unveiled recently. At its heart, the SCE is a very simple device that depends on conventional manufacturing technology to bring it to fruition. In an SCE device a thin film of fine particles sits on a pair of electrodes. Pass a current between the electrodes and electrons come out of a narrow region between them. The next steps copy a conventional TV. The electrons hit a chemical, a phosphor, that creates either red, green or blue light. Canon claims that, unlike some competing technologies, SCEs need no extra components to focus the electrons on the phosphor, so the panel's construction is simple. Simplicity is very important in reducing the cost of manufacture. The idea for SCEs has been around since 1965, but the industry has not been able to develop the technology needed to make usable devices. Canon says that techniques honed by the microelectronics industry can deposit the electrodes on a substrate. Added to this skill, the company's ability to produce and deposit ultra-fine particles of palladium oxide (PdO) allowed it to produce the first SCE display, a 3in screen, earlier this year. An SCE flat screen consists of an array of electron emitters on a sheet of glass a few millimetres from another sheet of glass coated with phosphor. The result is a bright picture, and unlike some flat screens you can view it from any angle. Canon says also that its flat screens have an advantage in using less electricity than some competing technologies, most of which can beat conventional monitors on power consumption. The Japanese company says that its prototype already produces an image that matches the next generation of high-definition TV, due to be introduced in the next few years. And Canon's technology, the company claims, works at a much lower voltage than competing flat screens. It also says that tests show that an SCE flat screen should last the 10,000 hours needed for a TV screen. Impressive as a small SCE screen may be, the real challenges will be in scaling up the device and readying it for mass production and at a reasonable price. This is where Canon's older FLCD technology has been bogged down. The company is pinning a lot on the new SCE technology. Less than a year old, it already has 80 people working on the project. Canon has already started work on the production processes involved. When will it happen? "The top management says hurry hurry hurry," says Takashi Nakagiri, head of the Canon Research Centre, 30 miles west of Tokyo. The company hopes to have the technology in the market "at the beginning of the 21st century". The first goal will be to produce a 40in screen that is no more than 10cm deep. There is another key dimension, says Nakagiri. The flat screen has to weigh no more than 18kg, less than half the weight of today's flat screens, and a fifth the weight of an equivalent CRT. Anything over 20kg is too heavy to carry. Canon sees its flat screen technology as a crucial component in its plans to broaden its product range. "I have high hopes for the wall hanging television set," says Fujio Mitterai, the company's president. It is an important plank in the company's strategy for entering the multimedia market. "We are absolutely serious about developing displays as a technology as well as a business," he insists. Mitterai admits that Canon's new technology starts behind the competition. But, he says, the opportunities are so big that this will not matter, even if the SCE technology is launched two or three years later to market. "If we can announce a nicer and cheaper product, we have a chance to gain our share of the pie." © Copyright the Financial Times Limited 1997. Front Page Biography Cuttings Science Writing Last update 19 January 1997 |
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Michael Kenward ©2000 Last changed 07 February 2008 |
