SED TVs delayed until fall/winter 2007

[Buster Darkwings]

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nb20060309a6.html (use bugmenot.com for viewing this article more than a week after it was put up)

Damn, and I was seriously considering being an early adopter of these. Guess my CRT monitor will have to last me another year or two.

[JeffDM]

The cost of manufacturing thing seems to be a spurrious excuse to delay production, by now they should have had some amount of production capacity to at least get them going and get some early adopters and store displays so people can see it and get them interested once it is more affordable. Now, it is another eighteen months of a lead given to competing technologies to improve even more and go further down in price.

The only thing I can think of is if they decided that pricing them to make money on early units would be so expensive that releasing now would send the wrong message about the supposed affordability of this technology.

[Ty]

I found this both idiotic and disappointing when I first read this. I think it casts into doubt whether the technology will ever really go commercial. There are some pretty intelligent comments on AVS on the subject's official thread. One poster made the excellent point that it would be far better for them to carve out a niche with the high end enthusiast market even if the prices are very high than to hold off coming to market even longer attempting to achieve cost competitiveness with technologies that are far more mature still rapidly improving. At least then they'd have a foothold and good word of mouth about the performance of the technology would establish them in the market. Once they got their cost down they could expand their market share in the same way plasma has.

[Skywise]

Perhaps the real problem isn't so much cost, but the actual performance and durability of the technology as it stands right now. So if they did start selling them now those early adopters who do pay the exhorbitant price may find out that their TV either breaks, or has other issues. I don't see any real marketing reason to delay the launch, so that pretty much leave technical ones, and they wouldn't delay it that long if there wasn't some serious design issues they have to work out. It could simply be one of yield, but that shouldn't take a year to fix/figure out. Neither should component cost evaluation.