Displays

What in the hell is going on over at

Apex? Back in March there were

laudatory articles in the New York Times Magazine about

how they were redefinining the market for low-end electronics with $30 DVD players and incredibly inexpensive

flat-panel CRT televisions, now nine months later it looks like the company is falling apart. Analysts estimate that

Apex’s market presence is down 80%, Sichuan Changhong Electric Company, the biggest television exporter in China and

one of their primary suppliers, says that the company owes them nearly half a billion dollars, and David Ji, Apex’s

president, has reportedly been arrested in the southern Chinese city of Shenzen on fraud charges. Something is

definitely amiss in the House of Apex.

Cambridge University researchers have created a more efficient holographic laser projector,
capable of generating 200 holographs a second (which would make for very smooth video), which could see potential use in
handheld devices, notebooks or PDAs. The image could be focused at any range and operates by "steering" light,
instead of blocking and wasting light energy the same way current projector lamps do. Save your Star Wars references,
though, as this is 2D video only, friend.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Even though Sony did (then didn’t, actually) get out out the plasma TV biz, it looks like Toshiba (in concert with

Canon Japan) intends to move their all 40-inch displays to SED (Surface-Conduction Electron-emitter Display)

technology exclusively, which they claim provides better color, sharper images, and faster response than both plasma

and LCDs (we told you about this

before). We can probably estimate that if this goes well,

they’ll be out of the business of plasma displays entirely soon enough, but we’ll all have to wait and see how this

pans out.

Yes, it’s pretty much been assumed for a couple of years now that sooner or later LCD would get good enough, cheap

enough, and big enough to dethrone plasma as the king of flat panels (that is, until LCD is itself overtaken by OLED),

but we didn’t exactly think that Sony, the largest TV manufacturer in the world, would decide that beginning next year

they were going to stop making plasma televisions to focus entirely on LCD TVs. We’ll try not to get all sentimental

about it, but obviously somebody at Sony ran the numbers and realized that making plasma TVs just wasn’t worth it

anymore.

[Thanks, Ethan]

UPDATE: Or maybe not. Read the update

here.

This might not be so weird if it was 2001, but damn, only now are people starting to outbuy LCDs over CRTs?

Apparently flat panels hit 54% of sales of displays last quarter, but honestly we think people have just been getting

those CRTs for as long as they have because they’re always bundled free with cheapo boxes. And really, who doesn’t like

a cheap computers with a free display? Besides us, of course.