Do you remember SED? SED stands for Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display. SED technology was developed by Toshiba and Canon that had the picture quality of a CRT but with a thickness of a LCD. As you can see from the diagram above, SED dramatically thins the basic CRT design that generates high picture quality: blacker blacks than even a KURO. SED was thought dead after taking legal bullets from Applied Nano Technologies. But Canon appealed and won and then bought Toshiba’s stake in SED. Read “SED Back on Track” for the full story.
Now comes news from Peter Putman at Roam Consulting in his Display Daily article “NAB 2009: The Season of Their Discontent” that SED is alive and well.
… a source within Canon told me at the show that the SED is still very much alive as a pro monitor technology. Indeed, a Canon SED engineer from Japan was quietly making the rounds in the Las Vegas Convention Center to scope out the competition.
If SED is indeed alive and well, we can expect it to have died a TV and resurrected as a professional monitor for the broadcast market. I’m sure it will be quite expensive: unfortunate, but at least there is hope that some day a SED pro monitor will end up on eBay for a more reasonable price.
