In an announcement that will come as a surprise only to deaf and blind Siberians, Canon has announced last Friday that its plans to produce SED TVs 4th quarter of this year have been delayed.

Matt Brennesholtz
Insight Media Analyst

This announcement comes as no surprise to industry observers such as Insight Media since several things have been going against Canon in recent months and years:

1) A ruling by a court in the US that Canon violated the terms of its license with Nano-Proprietary, which terminated the license. Canon will need to renegotiate the license or win on appeal before it can proceed with production.
2) Withdrawal of Toshiba from the joint venture set up to manufacture SED. While Insight Media believes this was originally a move intended to avoid the termination of the license, there are no signs of Toshiba rejoining the joint venture now that the license is a (nearly) settled case.
3) Price erosion in LCD and plasma panels have made SED non-competitive on a price basis with these technologies until Canon makes serious reductions in manufacturing costs.

We had heard rumors that Toshiba would transfer engineers to Canon so as not to violate the licensing agreement, and Canon would restart development efforts. This plan, if true, appears to have collapsed.

We can also speculate that Toshiba may have plans of its own in the FED arena, based upon a talk we heard from Dr. Masayuki Nakamoto, the Director of the Advanced Nanomachining Laboratory at Shizuoka University (Shizuoka, Japan) about a month ago.

This is not the first postponement of the introduction of SED technology, or even the second. To quote from the June, 2005 issue of Projection Monthly with Flat Panel Coverage: "Toshiba’s plans for a late 2005 launch of the long-promised SED flat-panel products were postponed until 2006." Later, 2006 was delayed to 2007 and now the 2007 launch is delayed until whenever.

When I first heard the terms of the original license between Canon and Nano-Proprietary I stunned at how favorable the deal was for Canon - there was no piece-part royalty. With an investment of what must have been hundreds of millions of dollars, you would think that Canon would have been very careful not to violate that license. You can be certain that in any renegotiated license, Nano-Proprietary will be seeking a per-piece royalty.

The one thing that keeps SED alive however, is the superb image quality it can produce. To quote from the May 2005 Projection Monthly with Flat Panel Coverage:

Though more expensive than comparably sized LCD-TVs at first, Toshiba will position its first 50-inch SED-HDTV offering late this year as the Ferrari of television technologies. The technology promises to deliver the superior picture quality of traditional cathode-ray tube devices with the flat-panel form factor of plasma and LCD-TVs. SED is said to handle fast images without producing jagged edges, while consuming one-third the power needed by plasma.

While the declining prices of LCD and Plasma make introducing SED more difficult, they do not make it impossible. There is still room at the top for displays with the ultimate in image quality. 100,000:1 contrast anyone? Not that you need SED for that anymore. Modern LCDs with dimmable LED backlights, such as the one shown by Samsung at SID, can do just fine, thank you. Perhaps the window of opportunity for SED based on its image quality is closing irrevocably.