In the presentation given by Hisense at Display Summit China, it became clear that the company is very serious about the potential for the laser TV category and they are investing heavily to develop it. This category is defined by products like their Laser Cast TV, which is a short throw projector designed to be used with a custom, light-rejecting screen to offer a large (~100”) image in a compact form factor.
Hisense noted that 48M TVs sold in China in 2015 and Hisense was the number 1 brand – and they are the #3 TV maker on a global basis. All of these TVs use LCD technology as the speaker said that OLED remained too risky to adopt for TVs today. At CES and CES Asia, Hisense showed their ULED LCD TV technology next to an OLED set to demonstrate the comparable image quality.
As a result, they like the laser TV projection category, but they also recognize some of the deficiencies that most projection solutions have like low contrast, lack of brightness, desaturated colors and unsightly installation.
The answer, not surprisingly, is their laser TV which features a laser phosphor light engine that achieves 3000 lumens and 85% of the NTSC color gamut. They see this moving to 6000 lumens and the BT 2020 color gamut. This will serve screen sizes of 60 to 200 inches. Laser TV offers a much better solution at these larger screen sizes than does LCD.
The speaker, Mr. Yu Ling Gao, then showed the roadmap for the laser TV development. The current generation 2 model was released at the end of 2015, but the new 4K model will be released in just a few weeks, said Mr. Gao. When questioned after his presentation on the technology, he said this would use the new 2 million pixel DMD chip with a shifting optic to achieve an image shifted/processed 4K image. This will be the first product of this kind on the market. No other detail on lumen output, color gamut or pricing was revealed.
He also noted that a dual laser solution would come in early 2017. This means it will include a red boost laser in addition to the blue laser which is used to pump the phosphor. This will help to expand the color gamut and increase efficiency, but it is unclear if it can reach the 2020 color gamut.
Like Inovel, Hisense sees this market as immature with a need for an expanded supply chain and further technical developments. And, it wants to cooperate with industry partners to get there.
Analyst Comment
Last year in our Infocomm report, we mentioned the Coretronic product in this UST projector + matched screen configuration which was one of the more impressive products shown during the event. (Coretronic Sells Laser TV in China) (BR)
