boneidol said:
i'm not saying where i've got this info from lol but i've been told pioneer are making screens again, due to be announced in easter, to be released in august. will be exclusive to a well know chain of retailers for 12 mnths, but they are gunna be back. anyone else already joing the queue to get 1 lol
AFAIK Pioneer has no capacity to make screens these days.
However, Sharp is the largest single shareholder in Pioneer, and
as you may have read in our news channel of late, is trying almost anything to make some money, given its currently horrendous expected losses for this year.
And
Sharp already licences the Pioneer Elite name for large-screen TVs sold in the USA, while Hon Hai, which partners with Sharp in its major LCD plant in Japan,
has launched TVs in Taiwan and China under the RadioShack name, using Sharp panels. Both companies are pretty keen to see some of the current overcapacity in Sharp plants used for something profitable.
Of course all this is absolute conjecture and doing the old '2+2=5' on my part, and we have no insider knoweldge, but if it happened that way it would be a bit spooky given a conversation DepWebEd Joe Cox and I had in the office the other day about whether Hon Hai would want to enter the European TV market, and which brand name it might licence if it wanted to do so.
But then in the current volatile TV market, almost any scenario, however fanciful it may seem, could be on the cards...