Quote:
Originally Posted by
RandyWalters 
3D is only one minor aspect of television tech so that's not "all we get now". Most people don't even care about 3D.
And it's not the end - the picture quality of Plasmas and LCD TVs are improving every year and the future is looking promising for both - there is no need for expensive SED - the current technologies look plenty good enough for 98% of the buying public and for WAY less than an SED TV would have been. SED so far has been a total waste of time and AVS bandwidth. Good riddance
LCD and Plasma may be improving every year, but there are problems with both that seem fundamental to the technologies, and if they are not, then the manufacturers do not seem interested in fixing them.
Contrast still sucks on 90% of the displays out thereonly the 9G Pioneers and the latest generation of Panasonics are passable. (though I have not seen a VT20 in person I'm told it is very close to an LX5090)
Plasma is inherently flawed and will always suffer from poor gradation, and at least on televisions, it looks like LCD is stuck with that too. They still suffer from requiring an ABL circuit and while they're improving, they are still not that good in bright light. Image retention is still a problem even on the latest sets.
Viewing angles & motion handling are awful on LCD and do not really seem to have improved much in recent years. Rather than try to fix motion handling we've seen junk like 120/240Hz interpolation to try and hide it instead. Contrast is universally bad.
As it stands, it looks like OLED is the only technology we have to look forward to in the near future, and that still looks to be a few years off yet. Who knows how it will actually turn out, and prices are likely to remain high without any competition. All current designs are AMOLED and it's my understanding that we need passive matrix displays to eliminate sample & hold.
SED and FED were really the only thing in the near future that could have competed with OLED, and potentially had some advantages over it. FED was virtually immune to dead/stuck pixels for example, and OLED has already shown those problems. It was also capable of 10-bit gradation, and its native panel response was not far off a CRT-like gamma, which means more of that 10-bit response would actually be worthwhile unlike LCD where you have to throw away gradation to compensate for their S-curve response.
You are, unfortunately, correct in saying that 98% of the buying public are happy with the current state of display technology. All they seem to care about at this point is getting the displays thinner and cheaper.
