I don’t know of anyone who has seen a field-emission-type display who hasn’t loved it and wanted to use it as a professional reference monitor. They have exactly the same rise- and fall-times, color, and gray scale of CRT monitors because they use CRT phosphors, excited by electron emissions. They have the edge-to-edge sharpness of flat-panel displays because each pixel has its own electron stream. They are flat, thin, lightweight, and use much less power than even LCDs, and they can run at extraordinarily high frame rates. But intellectual-property rights, manufacturing difficulties, and the difficult economics of introducing a new display technology in the age of inexpensive LCD & plasma displays has popped our balloons.
When Sony spinoff Field Emission Technologies (FET) pulled the plug on its plans, that seemed to be the death of the last hope. But Ken Werner reports in today’s Display Daily that Taiwan display giant AUO is buying technologies and assets from FET and plans to deliver broadcast displays.
