Getting a charge out of plasma TV

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After mulling his future, he made a decision that probably saved the plasma TV business. "After a month of depression I said, 'Oh, there's a fantastic opportunity here.'" He was 40 years old then, and in his words, was broke, but had "plenty of ambition," so he found people at IBM willing to work with him to buy the plasma-making equipment and finance a new company. Called Plasmaco, Weber's new business immediately got to work churning out 10- and 21-inch monochrome displays using his very own energy recovery sustain circuit.

It wasn't the first time, and it doesn't look like the last that the plasma display has appeared headed toward extinction. But Weber stuck with it anyway. "I knew it hadn't reached its potential, so I just kept working on it. Maybe I was naive. I was young, energetic and there was always the next thing to do," he recalled.

Plasma's future again looked uncertain in 1993 when rival display technology liquid crystal display (LCD) began to incorporate multiple colors, while plasma was getting by with just orange and black. Though color wasn't impossible with plasma, it just hadn't been necessary--yet.

"I knew it had tremendous potential and it wasn't living up to that potential...it worked out much better than I ever imagined."

--Larry Weber, plasma research pioneer

In January 1994, faced with being put out of business by LCD, Weber dreamed up a way to start producing color displays using the Plasmaco facilities. He had until June of the same year. Five months is cutting it close for a process that should have taken more than a year.

Though it was down to the wire, with the soldered connections still hot, Weber unveiled his color plasma display on schedule at an important industry event.

"I turned it on and everyone's jaws dropped. They said, 'Wow, what a beautiful display, the colors are so bright, the colors are so sharp!'" Weber recalled.

What they really liked, but couldn't quite put their fingers on, he said, was the contrast ratio. "What they meant was that the colors were bright, but that the areas next to (the colors) were completely dark," he said. What they didn't know was that in his rush to get the display to the show, he had only connected power to the color pixels and not the black ones, meaning no light at all was coming from the black pixels, creating incredibly rich contrast.

It was completely an accident, but a happy one at that. "I had to invent something that worked. I just learned how important contrast ratio was to people. They really liked that," he said.

The contrast ratio he had mustered was a mere 400:1. Today, the best plasma TVs feature up to 20,000:1. Fortunately for Weber and Plasmaco, his technology got the attention of Matsushita, the Japanese electronics giant known stateside as Panasonic. Two years later, by January 1996, Plasmaco and its contrast-ratio technology were purchased by Panasonic.

Competing directly with LCD makers would eventually be a losing battle, according to Weber. In 1996, they decided to go somewhere LCD couldn't.

"We knew at the time LCD and CRT couldn't (scale to larger sizes)," Weber said. "We realized we might have a market all to ourselves."

Though at the time a 42-inch display was considered large, Plasmaco figured out how to make a 60-inch panel. One of the biggest problems wasn't making a panel that large, which they did successfully, but finding a furnace that could fit a 60-inch panel to heat the glass.

Stretching screen size helped catapult plasma into a new niche, one that it owned for at least a decade. But as with everything else in consumer electronics, things change. Today, LCD TVs can get big--Sharp unveiled an LCD display at CES this year measuring 108 inches diagonal. And LCD TVs in the 37- to 42-inch range sport price tags that are becoming more attractive too, as many more vendors are jumping into the business.

Still, Weber soldiers on. Though no one person can be given credit for where plasma display technology is today, no one's been around consistently longer than Weber, and he's not planning on leaving the business any time soon.

"Maybe one of the things I contributed is I survived all these years in that business. There are not many survivors from that era, the '60s, that are still working on plasma displays today," he said. "I believed in it. I knew it had tremendous potential and it wasn't living up to that potential...it worked out much better than I ever imagined."