The concept is being proposed by Autralian company Arasor and Silicon Valley company Novalux, who have worked with Mitsubishi to produce working prototypes. The proponents claim several manufacturers will demonstrate products before the end of the year, and that the system has the benefit of producing displays half the weight of existing LCD screens, and consuming only a quarter of the power.
Suggested downsides are safety concerns - although the advocates say these are avoided by filtering -, the cost of the laser devices (which would of course fall in mass production), and ultimate image quality, which remains unproven to date.
The big 'however', however, is that so far none of the leading names in the plasma/LCD market has shown much interest in the technology, not least because they've all made huge investments in plants to make plasma and LCD screens and refining these technologies.
The history of TV is littered with great ideas that never quite happened, and while I'm by no means suggesting this will be another one of those, it would seem unwise to hold off buying a current LCD or plasma screen, especially give the low prices created by the cut-throat flatscreen market, just because there is possibly a new technology somewhere over the horizon.
After all, look what happened to the much-vaunted Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display (SED) technology, jointly developed by Toshiba and Canon. That was going to be the plasma/LCD killer, with product on sale in spring of 2006. Then mid 2006, Then early in 2007. Then the end of 2007. You get the idea...
The current state of play on SED is that Toshiba isn't as yet making any SED screens, and is blaming Canon for non-delivery of the display panels. Canon, meanwhile, got mired in legals with the US supplier of part of the technology - apparently Canon shouldn't have told Toshiba how that part of the jigsaw worked! - and has said the introduction is now delayed indefinitely, as we reported
here.
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