Sony, Panasonic and Sharp TV divisions melting down in summer 2012 heat - Page 3

I have no idea where that study is from, but that's simply not what seems to be happening. Yes, big and cheap sells. But the feature-free, lowish quality giant sets that were already 60" and well below $1000 last year (some from major brand names like Sharp and Panasonic) have not come to dominate the market at all.

Panasonic will continue with plasmas for another couple of years. Their production capability is primarily in plasma and there is still virtually no global capacity to make 65" LCDs.


Sadly, the likelihood of a mostly Samsung world is more and more likely. Well, Samsung plus Chinese brands that people ought to start to get to know, e.g. Haier, TCL.


On the one hand, I don't doubt they have EOL plans for plasma. On the other hand, I doubt they are rushing to do much with them. The market for TVs is shrinking. At best, the market for TVs will again begin to grow slowly. Plasma is mature, the factories are built, the costs to build are low enough.

If I were forced to guess, I'd say that the plasma death watch is at 5 years, possibly as few as 3. The growth of OLED is going to be awfully slow and LCD doesn't offer much; it's just "winning" because there is so much global capacity. If the Japanese yen were to fall in value, the viability of making more Panasonic plasmas for several more years would increase significantly -- especially if Sony exited the TV market.

It's weird to me that Sony is still bothering with TV at all, in fact. They own no production facilities of any kind (except for some tiny TV capacity in small LCDs... too small for anyone to care about), they haven't had primary production of anything at all in the entire flat-panel era, and they are years from OLED commercialization, despite pioneering the technology (they have no fab, no plans for a fab, no LCD fab to begin converting, no expertise in any of the critical technologies needed to make OLED TVs, insufficient capital to risk, etc.) -- and Sony has other businesses. Oh, and Sony hasn't made any money selling TVs in years. It seems like a very strange stubbornness to risk the whole company on such a fundamentally uninteresting business, especially when Samsung is just taking share quarter after quarter.

The dollar value of those CRTs is probably a good deal less than the dollar value of the plasmas, not that it really matters. It's mostly an LCD world.

Of course, plasma's small market share and large-screen, videophile niche isn't really news.

Eventually, it will go away. I suspect by the time the OLED era is truly underway.

At that rate, it will never reach zero!

Plasma fans are hoping that the plasma market only disappears by half each year until we can buy something better to replace plasma with. Given the philosophical conundrum, we should be fine!

More seriously, I think most of us would be comfortable with today's Panasonic plasmas for a few more years until a truly great, equivalent big, reasonably priced OLED is out. I'm still of the mind that's around 2015-2017, which works for me. Someone buying in 2015, however, might well be able to buy a better plasma than today's for less money if the OLED isn't ready.