2000-2010: Permanently changing your TV

Which was ten years ago? It’s hard to believe, but just ten years ago the consumer television market was very different from today: the basis of it was kinescope devices. In 2000-2001, even a 100 Hz TV was the height of fashion, a real breakthrough that was to overturn the TV market. By the way, for reference: the average price of a kinescope TV with a diagonal of about 30 inches from the top series was about $ 2000. Remember? Back then, even the stores were actively using price tags in dollars.

Flat-panel TVs were already around at the time, but they were mostly represented by plasmas. LCDs were an exotic item, which perhaps only Sharp was seriously involved in. At the time, it was plasma TVs that objectively represented the “cutting edge” of television progress. Really, what else could you wish for: flat – thickness of panel was about 15 cm, big – screen with 42 inch diagonal was considered very big just imagine dimensions of kinescope TV with 42 inch screen . Plus, plasmas were noticeably cheaper than projectors and brighter than the latter in those early days, there were practically no projectors that you could watch in a darkened room . In 2000 a 50″ model was realistic to buy for 8-9 thousand dollars, although of course there were also premium models for 15-20 thousand.

Projectors of those days had at least two serious drawbacks: low brightness that made it very inconvenient to use them it was necessary to darken the room and quite an impressive price prices even for “unpretentious” models started about 10 000 dollars . Recall that a significant reduction in the prices of projectors occurred after the mass market entered the two technologies that dominate to this day – DLP and LCD.

And there was such a curious type of TVs as “projection televisions”. In fact it was a sort of hybrid of a TV and a projector. The projector and the screen were enclosed in a single case, once and for all positioned in relation to each other it allowed to simplify significantly and cheapen the construction, because you did not need to worry about focusing in arbitrary conditions of the unknown room . At that time projection televisions were very popular, especially in the US, but due to their design features they had a number of inherent flaws uneven screen backlighting, low brightness, large size which could not be solved with the state of the art at that time. And by the time the technology was ready to give birth to new and more advanced “projection devices”, it turned out that the whole TV market had already been conquered by the LCD. As a result, after 2006, projection televisions virtually ceased to exist after the release of the highly successful Sony models which became the “swan song” of this family of TVs.

Everything Flows, Everything Changes?

So, what has happened over these ten years in the area of home television receivers?

Perhaps the most notable and significant event is the virtual “extinction” of a whole class of TVs which once accounted for the lion’s share of the market, of course, kinescope TVs.

Their place was confidently taken by LCD-TV sets, which not only felt at ease in the freed “ecological niche”, but also greatly enlarged it. On the one hand they squeezed plasmas in the area of large diagonals and in the area of small diagonals they actually created a new class of equipment: portable LCD TVs. At one time they were successfully combined with a compact DVD player, which led to a whole market of portable entertainment devices that could be carried everywhere.

The next important change that greatly influenced the look of modern television and not just television is the mass spread of digital video content, primarily DVD. It raised the bar for TVs, accelerating the “fading” of kinescopes and giving a head start to the initially “digital” LCD and plasma.

Once video went digital the next step was literally begging for it: increasing resolution frame size . So began the race to Full HD. Yes, ideologically this step is much smaller than the transition from analog to digital signal, but an almost fivefold increase in the area of the frame has set a number of challenges for engineers. It turns out that the problem of resolution increase is not so easy to solve for different types of modern televisions. So it turned out that the production of Full HD plasma panel with a diagonal of 42 inches – is no longer a trivial task, perhaps this fact will be the final straw that “breaks the camel’s back” and end the evolution of plasma TVs. At the same time LCDs allow without much trouble to make Full HD screens with a diagonal of even less than 32 inches. By the way, this class of TV sets is becoming extremely popular now, and we dedicated a separate review to it in our magazine.

Now a new “revolution” is starting before our eyes – stereo television 3D . Time will tell if it’s a new breakthrough or just one of the passing episodes in the history of television development. Today this class of equipment has more than enough problems, starting with the problems of content, which now is not much, and the growth rate is not particularly impressive. Other, even more important, problems lie on a different plane: in the psychology of human vision. This makes it difficult to watch and even makes stereo TV completely inaccessible to a certain part of people.

And we are about to find out what is waiting for us in the nearest future, what television will be tomorrow. Just wait for our next article, ten years from now.