Most articles that have appeared about the Laser TV spoke along the lines of the ‘plasma TV killer’, while our article urged you to ‘forget plasma and LCD TVs’, but plasma, LCD TV and other technologies aren’t obsolete just yet. For a start, Laser TVs won’t come onto the market for at least another year, if not slipping into 2008, and will initially be best suited for larger displays of 50- to 60-inches and up, in stark contrast to the common plasma TVs size of 42-inches in size (with 50-inch and larger sizes available but at generally much higher prices than 42-inch panels), and mostly smaller sized LCD TVs which are 40 to 45-inch (and 65-inch and beyond categories at very expensive prices) and are also quite common in the smaller sizes of 37, 32 and 26-inches, with LCD monitors available at 15, 17, 19, 20, 21, 24, 26, 30-inch and larger sizes too.

If the room you want to put your TV in isn’t large enough to fit a 50- or 60-inch screen comfortably, a Laser TV or any other TV at that size won’t be on your shopping list. Putting in a TV screen that’s too big for your room results in unpleasantly unwatchable TV, and that’s an experience that nobody wants.

Laser TVs are also an unfinished product. Arasor and Novalux, the two companies behind the Laser technology, are more like an Intel, creating components that consumer electronics manufacturers use in their technologies. Arasor and Novalux do not manufacturer TVs and never will – they leave that up to the TV manufacturers themselves. The supporting chipsets and other components are yet to be fully optimised for the new levels of performance that a Laser TV can offer, and this is one of the reasons why there’s a minimum year long wait before they’re available.

It’s also interesting to discover that if you have a Laser TV and a Plasma TV side-by-side, why you see a duller plasma image, where previously with only the plasma TV on, it looked fantastic.

This was explained to me as being a trick the brain employs when watching TV. With a plasma or LCD, which according to the Laser TV people only shows approximately half (or even less) of the colours that the human eye can see, the brain adjusts to this lower range of colours and you see what looks like, and is, a stunning image, especially on a high-end plasma or LCD TV.

However, when you put that plasma or LCD TV next to a Laser TV, the brain adjusts to the higher colour output of the Laser TV, and the plasma or LCD TV then looks duller in comparison. Turn off the Laser TV, and in three of four minutes your brain has re-adjusted itself, and the plasma looks fantastic again.

Because few people will be buying a Laser TV to place right next to their plasma or LCD TV, your existing or future plasma/LCD will still look fantastic, and will continue to for some time to come.

It’s just that when Laser TVs arrive, if you really want a big TV, you’ll have a new choice that is demonstrably more colourful, doesn’t have any of the rainbow effect problems that DLP TVs can have, doesn’t have burn in (although this is much less of a problem with the best new plasmas which use multiple anti-burn in technologies, and any burn in can still generally be 'washed out' if it occurs anyway) and is said to be much more price competitive.

To answer some of the questions that we posed in our second Laser TV article, Larry Marshall, the co-chairman of Arasor and one of the developers gave us some answers, for which we are thankful! We’ve edited them grammatically and made minor changes for clarity, but otherwise these are Larry’s answers. They're on the next page.