Last night, at a Consumer Electronics Show event at the Palms Hotel, in Las Vegas, Mitsubishi gave a first look at its forthcoming line of flat-panel, high-definition displays. The company claims that the display “delivers a range of color never seen before in home entertainment.” The display, called laser TV, uses laser as the light source, unlike liquid-crystal displays, which use a white backlight, and plasma displays, which use cells of charged gas to illuminate the screen. Mitsubishi representatives didn’t supply a lot of details; they said only that the TV will ship to retailers later this year.
At the event, Mitsubishi showed off three 65-inch laser displays, which are currently being manufactured. (Gadget blog Engadget posted nice pictures here.) In addition, the company demonstrated how its laser TV could be used as a 3-D home theater. The company played clips from Beowulf, a football game, and U2’s 3-D concert on its laser display. Viewers wore shutter glasses from RealD, a supplier of 3-D technology. Shutters on the lenses switched on and off–imperceptibly–60 times a second, synchronizing to a signal emitted from the display. (See “Hollywood’s New 3-D Age.”)
The basic premise behind laser TV is not entirely new. (See “Ultra-Colorful TV.”) It’s essentially a variant of digital light projection (DLP) technology developed at Texas Instruments. DLP chips are in most of the projectors used in business presentations, and they’re found in home projection displays. A laser display is built a little differently, however. Instead of projecting light onto a screen from the front, lasers and the DLP chip are in the rear of the display, which allows it to be manufactured thinner than traditional front-projection systems.
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