No Large Screen OLED TV's From Panasonic Until At Least 2012

Toshihiro Sakamoto, president of Panasonic AVC Networks Company, shed some light on what we can expect from Panasonic's high-def department in the next few years, in an interview with TWICE, an online consumer electronics magazine. Some of the highlights of the interview are old news, but Sakamoto provided clarification on a number of issues including the usage of Tru2way technology. So what can we expect from Panasonic?

1. Flat panel TV's still are the center of the 21st century living room and Panasonic tends to make HDTV more usable with technologies such as the VIERA Link audio/video operating system. All Panasonic HDTV's will now be under the VIERA brand name.

2. Panasonic will have a Tru2way-ready HDTV available sometime this year in collaboration with Comcast. Tru2way requires no set-top box and is controlled via one remote.

3. VIERACast, a VIERA IPTV, will enable access to YouTube and Picasa photo albums on your HDTV via Google.

4. Plasma displays in development will have about twice the brightness of current models and be ridiculously thin as their 24.7 mm thin plasma display showed. Sakamoto says plasma can compete with LCD even with larger LCD screens drastically dropping in price.

5. Panasonic's monster 150-inch plasma display shown at CES will not be available until after 2009 as a new factory must be built to house the building requirements for such large panels. The reasoning behind such a large TV: that's what consumers want and it's the perfect size panel to display 2160x4096 pixel resolution, 4 times 1080p.

6. Wireless 1080p signal transmission will be a prominent HDTV feature in the next few years.

7. Panasonic is in talks with cable companies other than Comcast to use Tru2way and other DVR technologies.

8. We won't see any OLED TV's retailed for a few years yet. Panasonic feels they need their own specialized facility for the production of OLED and doesn't expect it to be available in larger screen sizes (32 inches and above) until somewhere in the vicinity of 2012-2014.

9. Panasonic is happy about Warner Bros. decision to exclusively back the Blu-ray disc format as it will accelerate the American format war, something that ended already in Japan.

January 29, 2008

No Large Screen OLED TV's From Panasonic Until At Least 2012