Canon buys out Toshiba in SED TV venture

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 16 January 2007 18:43

Your IT - Entertainment

Canon has bought out Toshiba to nullify the recent lawsuit from Nano-Proprietary, claiming their technology was only licensed to Canon, and not Canon and Toshiba. Will we ever see an SED TV for sale in shops?

The world of high-def, flat panel television screens is hotting up as never before, with the hot Christmas item of 2006 not the mp3 player, the games console or the digital camera, but a shiny new high definition TV.

But in the race towards high-def heaven, there are many players. One that we’ve all heard of and have even seen prototypes of is SED technology, or ‘surface-conduction electron-emitter’. It’s meant to be a totally souped up version of CRT technology, taking it to the next level, and delivering fantastic colour and contrast.

Now comes word, after the recent lawsuit from Nano-Proprietary, Inc, that Canon is buying all of Toshiba’s shares in SED, Inc, to resolve the lawsuit and move forward with the technology with a view to getting onto store shelves as quickly as possible.

SED, Inc. will then become a full Canon subsidiary. According to Canon’s press release, the current SED, Inc. president, Kazunori Fukuma, will become a Canon employee, with Toshiba still lending engineers and other resources under a new agreement, although what interest Toshiba will still have, financial or otherwise, if any, is unclear, nor is the value of the transaction that was needed to buy Toshiba’s shares.

Canon is putting 550 employees into SED, Inc., so they clearly want this venture to succeed.

There’s no doubt that entering the TV market in the current environment is a risky proposition, with the high expense of getting production up and running, along with continuing price pressures. Not only would a new plant cost just under US $1.5 billion, prices for LCD screens have fallen significantly, while new developments in LCD technology, such as 120Hz refresh rates, ensure that there is less ‘blurring’ when viewing fast moving action in sports and movies, which currently plagues many cheaper LCD screens and has pushed video aficionados in the direction of high quality (and more expensive) plasma TV technology from companies such as Pioneer.

Because of all of the delays in getting SED to market, Canon now expects production to start in the fourth quarter of 2007 – essentially almost a year away.

Canon has signaled that, because of high costs involved in setting up a plant, they will start with a smaller production run for Japan, no doubt to test the technology’s popularity on home soil. But if it is successful, and can be cost effectively produced, SED high-definition TVs should be on store shelves, completing with plasma, LCD, rear projection TVs, projectors and other display devices in about a year’s time.