"Thank you for correcting me, if I am mistaken ... I must admit that I am far from an expert on any of these technologies."
Anytime. No problem.
" I did not realize that the problems with Plasmas had been completely corrected. Burn-in is still an issue, I presume ... but maybe not to the same degree? "
Correct. Lifespan on plasmas is not an issue. Burn in is much less of an issue (in part due to longer-than-CRT lifespans) but burn in risk does exist.
"The lack of burn-in is, of course, one of the nice features in this (and I guess all) RP DLP TV."
Yes, it is. You can play Xbox all day, leave Tivo paused, whatever and the good part is you'll only waste electricity.
" It's nice to know that when you replace the bulb you pretty much have a new TV, in terms of picture quality. "
Right. "New" to the state of the art when you bought it though. In 3-4 years, the "new" TV will be a lot better, I'd bet.
"As for the patent-ability of the technology, all I can say is that I think the Company either has a patent or one pending. Again, I am not a techie, but my understanding is that there is more to making this happen in sub-7-inches than the simple explanation they show on their website. Otherwise, wouldn't others be doing this already?"
They may have a patent pending on something. I'm not really doubting that, but here's some info you might not have considered:
(1) NEC showed an ultra, ultra short-throw projector more than a year ago. It does not work the same way as this TV, but could easily be built into a TV. There are, in other words, multiple ways to skin the cat.
(2) The "reason" no one has done this before is there was never any reason to. You cannot do this with a CRT -- period -- because the "imagers" are way, way too large. You need a microdisplay set to make this work. And, really, a reflective, single-chip design makes it much, much easier. That means it'd be much harder to do this with LCD (transmissive not reflective and 3-chip instead of 1) and harder to do with 3-chip LCOS.
The DLP RPTV market was "invented" about 2-3 years ago (when the Samsung products made it mainstream after the failures in the market by Hitachi, Mitsubishi and Panasonic -- the latter two having made comebacks into the arena of late). I'm guessing Infocus started work on this sometime around then... The key development was spending the fortune required on the lens and getting that to work right.
Again, after that there might be some clever tweaking of the electronics to avoid having such a short-throw image avoid distortion -- I dunno how that would work or why it'd be needed, but it might be there. And the mirror setup is quite clever and a bit novel -- but fundamentally a lot of same old, same old.
There are a lot of potential patents in the universe and I'm not saying they don't have a few pending, but the point is someone else
could indeed do the same thing if they had the talent and the R&D money. Their implementation might be different, of course.
I think they might not because I suspect the marrket here is very small. It certainly seems attractive at 61 inches and there are enough TVs sold in that size that -- again -- they ought to sell some. But very few 70 inch TVs are sold and this product is unlikely to dramatically grow that market. As said, at 50, I think they'll either need to go awfully cheap or give up on that -- it's overall not compelling enough.
I bet the sales targets are in the single-digit thousands per year for each of RCA and Infocus.
Mark
