According to a ZDNet arti­cle titled “16:9 wide-screen looks narrow-minded com­pared to Philips Cinema 21:9 HDTV” writ­ten by Sean Portnoy, the 21:9 aspect ratio Philips Cinema 21:9 will not be US bound: Sean reports a Philips spokesper­son con­firmed on January 30, 2009 that the ultra­w­ide set tar­geted to film buffs will not be made avail­able in the US. That’s not sur­pris­ing because it really isn’t Philips’ deci­sion to make its TVs avail­able in the US; it is Funai’s deci­sion because Funai bought the Philips brand to mar­ket TVs in the US.

Nearly all larger LCD TVs sport an aspect ratio of 16:9. So that hasn’t been a dif­fer­en­tia­tor for quite some time. TV brands have used LED back­lighting, higher color gamut, size, 1080p capa­bil­ity, local dim­ming, back­light scan­ning, 120Hz, 240Hz, thin chas­sis and bezels, etc. to make their TVs stand out from the com­pe­ti­tion. But nearly all high-end LCD TVs have nearly all of these state-of-the-art tech­nolo­gies. Philips has done some­thing remark­able in my opin­ion: the com­pany changed the play­ing field by mod­i­fy­ing what was com­mon place into some­thing spe­cial. If you want to com­pete at the very high end it seems you’ll need to bust out a LCD TV sport­ing an aspect ratio of 21:9. Sony, Sharp, Samsung, LG, Panasonic… let’s see what you guys can come up with.

Source: ZDNet via Engadget