Crave

Erica Ogg's post "Report: Pioneer to exit TV business" made a point abundantly clear: TV buyers won't pay a premium price for a better display.

"The company is reportedly exiting the TV business rather than continuing to incur losses in that division," Ogg wrote. "This latest report comes a few months after Pioneer announced that it anticipated huge losses at the end of its fiscal year in March and plans to lay off 2,000 workers."

The market's demands for lower and lower prices eventually take high-quality manufacturers out of the game.

I'm not a video guy, but I do know that while Pioneer made some of the best displays, the market wasn't willing to pay for its quality. The race-to-the-bottom environment is certainly in full swing on the audio side. Sales of high-quality speakers continue to erode, thanks to booming sales of lower-quality home-theater-in-a-box systems and iPod speakers.

I'm sorry, but I want companies making the highest-quality products to prosper. But the way things are going, only the bottom-feeders will survive.

What do you think?

It appears the TV industry's self-prescribed medicine of pushing smaller flat-panel sets is working.

The second-quarter check-up is in, and the industry is in far better health than a year ago. DisplaySearch's Quarterly Global TV Shipment and Forecast Report was released Thursday, and worldwide TV shipments increased 11 percent from the same period in 2007, but just 3 percent from first quarter of 2008.

(Credit: LG Electronics)

Still, the news is encouraging to an industry that was wringing its hands back in March over running out of places to sell its rapidly maturing, but still-pricey sets.

Around that same time, some of the bigger tier-one manufacturers began pushing smaller screens in an attempt to attract buyers who might be tightening their budgets as gas and food prices rose.

Vizio made a splash with its 32-inch plasma, a size that hasn't been available in that technology in the U.S. for a while. Even the big guys like Panasonic, LG, and Sony and Samsung were going small: 32, 40, 46 inches.

"Sony and Samsung launched what we termed 'fighter models,' because they were designed to reach new pricing lows," said Paul Gagnon, who monitors the TV industry for DisplaySearch. Vizio's smaller plasma was specifically launched "to blunt the impact" of Samsung's and Sony's moves into smaller-and-cheaper sets, he added.

Vizio's 32-inch plasma sells in club stores for about $550, while Samsung and Sony's 32-inch LCDs each retail for $699, the lowest price each has ever offered for that size TV.

The result has been a resurgent plasma TV business. DisplaySearch is reporting that shipments of plasma worldwide increased 52 percent from the same quarter a year ago, or 3.4 million units. That's way behind LCD TV shipments, but it's encouraging for a technology that many of the biggest vendors had basically left for dead.

Plasma shipments are on the rise everywhere, but they are particularly healthy in China, where they rose 285 percent in the last year.

To be sure, LCD TVs are still the new television of choice for most. LCD shipments jumped 47 percent in the last year to reach 23.7 million units (compared to plasma's 3.4 million units) in the second quarter worldwide, DisplaySearch says.

Despite LCD's established presence in many North American living rooms, it appears that the introduction of smaller sizes and lower prices are helping retailers to move plenty of product. Last year, LCD shipments to the region were dropping. But second-quarter shipments increased almost 30 percent from a year ago.

And LCD prices have still been dropping more quickly than plasma. With major shopping opportunities like Labor Day, the beginning of football season, and Black Friday fast approaching, plasma's recovery could be brief.

Sony and Samsung tend to set the pace on price reductions, and Gagnon of DisplaySearch says the other brands will all react in order to maintain their brand position in the market. If Samsung drops its 42-inch LCD $100 in the coming weeks, expect Panasonic to do the same on its 42-inch plasma.

But it doesn't appear there are going to be bold moves on the part of plasma to steal some more share and get ahead. For all the brands, said Gagnon, "it's all about maintaining price differential."

(Credit: Pioneer)

We've received a heads-up from our Pioneer source on a recent Japanese launch of its videophile-grade 9G Kuro. This delivers five times better dynamic contrast than the U.S.-centric PDP-6010FD, promising even richer blacks than any existing Kuro plasma TVs on the market.

Furthermore, the KRP-600M's 100,000:1 rating puts it in the class of the recently announced Panasonic Viera TH-65PY850M. That said, the former is strictly a full-HD monitor, shipped without an onboard TV tuner and loudspeakers.

It also features multiple remote LEDs for enhanced infrared control in dark home theaters, as well as a sleek 41- to 64-millimeter profile for a 60-incher. According to our contact, the 9G Kuros should be reaching Asia by October. This sounds like eternity by today's standards, but possibly a worthy one considering the fact that these are the last bunch of Made-by-Pioneer plasma panels. Officially, that is.

(Source: Crave Asia)

Pioneer plans to let someone else make its plasma TV panels, according to several reports.

Reuters reported Tuesday that the company will cease production of its own plasma panels because that portion of its business continues to lose money. The company will still sell plasma sets, but plans to get its plasma panels from Matsushita, parent company of Panasonic, the Nikkei business daily reported. Panasonic is the biggest plasma TV vendor in the world, shipping nearly 40 percent of all plasma displays, while Pioneer ranks fifth, shipping just over 6 percent of plasmas worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2007, according to DisplaySearch.

(Credit: Pioneer)

So far, Pioneer isn't confirming or denying the reports ("Our headquarters are planning to publicly discuss our TV strategy at the end of this week, so we'll have no information until then," said a spokesperson), but it doesn't look good.

As CNET colleague and resident TV expert David Katzmaier put it, this news amounts to "a black day for black levels."

Pioneer has been repositioning its plasma business over the last few years as a premium brand, most recently pushing its "Kuro" technology, which emphasizes deep black levels and contrast, at CES 2007 and 2008. CNET Reviews ranked the 50-inch plasma from Pioneer as "the best it's ever tested" last year.

Though it appears Pioneer will continue to sell plasmas sets, if it's not making the panels, it seems unlikely that it will prolong the life of its Kuro technology. Pioneer is, however, already planning to buy liquid crystal display panels from Sharp in order to start selling LCD TVs. LCD sets have quickly become the fastest-growing TV technology, displacing traditional cathode-ray tube sets, as well as rear-projection and plasma.

The crown for manufacturers that produce the "world's largest TV" seems more like a relay baton the way it's constantly being handed off to someone new.

Recently, JVC showed off a 110-inch LCD set at IFA in Berlin. Next up: Shinoda Plasma. The Japanese company says it will begin producing 142-inch panels based on plasma display technology, called "plasma tube array," by the end of 2008. That's roughly 12 feet measured diagonally. It will be up to TV manufacturers to put the displays into their own sets. No customers have been announced yet.

At a press conference in Kobe, Japan, on Friday, company president Tsutae Shinoda said the new high-definition display would have a display resolution of 720p and boast a 10,000:1 contrast ratio.

As you might expect, the giant display will come with an outsize price tag too: likely in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Is this plasma worth $4.88?

(Credit: Walmart.com)

Could it be a rounding error? Deep discounts? Rebates? Try none of the above: The Associated Press reported today that a man in Monroe, La., paid just $4.88 for a Sanyo plasma TV (normally $984) at a Wal-Mart self-checkout stand. The 23-year-old suspect allegedly switched the TV's original price tag with a tag from another product. When store security stopped the man on his way out, he produced a receipt for the full value of the TV.

The glitch? The man was at the Monroe Wal-Mart store, while the receipt came from the West Monroe location. Apparently he had purchased the same TV at the other store and planned to return it while keeping the "cheaper" version. The criminal mastermind was arrested on a charge of felony theft. Don't try this one at home, kids.

Sales of plasma TVs are humming along, but declining prices led to the category's first-ever year-over-year revenue decline. While that's not such good news for manufacturers and retailers, it's fantastic for consumers.

Unit sales of plasmas brought in $181 million to retailers in February 2007, a 16 percent drop from the $216 million in sales the same month last year, according to data collected by The NPD Group.

Although the number of plasma sets sold was up 30 percent over the same period, the average selling price was $1,688, representing a 35 percent decrease.

"We'll likely continue to see average prices continue to drop, but the market still has quite a bit of upside left to it," said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for The NPD Group. Still, plasma manufacturers are facing the challenge of finding ways to add features and charge higher prices.

Just ratcheting up the screen size isn't really a good option since that starts to home in on microdisplay TV manufacturers' territory. Instead, higher resolutions, more HDMI connections and home networking options offer the most promise, according to Rubin.

It was a tough month for all consumer electronics products. TVs were the best-selling product, but the category's $900 million in February revenue was off by 13 percent from the previous February.

(Credit: Samsung)

Only a day after fellow Craver Michael Kanellos noted that the little guys were driving much of digital TV market, one of the giants has decided to step in with a new tactic. Rather than just compete in the brutal price wars of recent months, Samsung will introduce a whole new line of thinner rear-projection TVs that The New York Times says will cost 30 percent less than the plasma screens on the market today.

Samsung, the second-highest seller of plasmas and LCD sets in North America, plans to make the new TVs in some of the largest mass-market sizes (50- and 60-inch screens) with frames about 10 inches thick so that they can be mounted on the wall. The idea is to make these for consumers who want a larger TV but still find plasma prices too high--an interesting move, considering that at least one competitor may getting out of the DLP market altogether.

It's a nice thought, but how low can the prices go? With plasma prices already dropping precipitously, Samsung's slimmed-down projection TVs will have to enter the market at a relative bargain--never an easy thing to do with any new line. And wall-mounting a 10-inch-thick TV? No thanks.

(Credit: AM Denmark)

So you've just blown a month's salary on a plasma TV, and you're treating it like your first-born. Do you really want to pull out one of those janitorial-grade plastic bottles to keep it clean? Certainly not in front of company, we hope.

With that much money hanging on the wall, the least you can do is spend a few more bucks for a nicely designed cleaning solution like this one from AM Denmark, which comes in an "integrated spray container" made of acrylic and textile, according to Core77. For all its beautiful lines, however, the product's name--"Eazycare"--could have benefited from a bit more thought so that it wouldn't sound so much like an oven cleaner.