TV designers plan sets to hang like paintings

Press, 22 August 1979, Page 16

TV designers plan sets to hang like paintings

From the “Economist,” London

The television set is going back to the drawingboard. Electronics engineers want to make it flatter and, while they are at it, would not mind swapping its cathoderay tube for one of the fancy new semiconductor displays that have been developed in defence laboratories. The reasons are: Thinness sells. Customers want television sets that can be stored out of the way on shelves or in cupboards when not in use. The goal (illusive maybe) is a television set so thin it can be hung from a picture rail; turning it over when not in use could display a painting. Semiconductor products tend to be cheap. As their production wrinkles are iro out, their prices generally plummet (remember the pocket calculator and the digital watch.

The bulk of the cost of today’s colour tube lies in making its complicated glass envelope. So there is little chance of its price falling further, unless, of course, it can be fundamentally redesigned — to simplify its manufacture.

Taking a different tack from their Japanese rivals, this is what the small British electronics firm, Sinclair Radionics, has attempted to do. Japanese television giants such as Sony, Hitachi, Sharp, and Matsushita have demonstrated small flat-screen television sets using exotic new displays (such as liquid crystals, thin-films of transistors or so-called electroluminescent panels). These devices may represent the future, but no Japanese firm has yet dared put one into production. The initial costs look formidable. Besides, there is still some life in the old cathode-ray

tube.. Sinclair has spent the last two years (and $1.5 million of the British National Research Development Corporation’s money) learning to squash a cathode-ray tube flat.

The result: a paperbacksized television set with a three-inch black-and-white screen and only three quarters of an inch thick.

Sinclair’s trick is to squirt the electron beam creating the picture in from the side instead of the back of the set (see diagram). The beam is focused and steered in the normal way. But instead of passing in a straight line through the tube, the beam is deflected through a right angle by a powerful electric field to impinge on a phosphor screen placed on the side. The viewer sees the picture exactly as it is beamed on to the phosphor screen. In today’s conventional sets the picture is seen at one remove: as it is transmitted by the phosphor screen through the thick and spe-cially-coated glass screen of the ordinary tube.

The advantage of the Sinclair system is a brighter picture. The tube is to be three times brighter than an equivalent-sized conventional television. It is also said to need less than a quarter the power to drive it — which means longer battery life. Difficult to make? Its production ought to be a lot easier to automate. The tube’s sardine-tin shape should allow the electron gun and all the beam focusing and steering paraphernalia to be installed before the faceplate is attached and sealed down, saving time and money.

But who will manufacture

th» new flat tube? Not Sinclair. The small Huntingdonshire firm has not got the cash. Nor is the corporation keen to spend more. Setting up an automated production plant to make just one monochrome model of the tube would cost at least $4 million (and possibly as much as $7 million). Last year Sinclair lost close to $4.5 million on sales totalling $14.3 million. The company’s previous venture into the pocket-tele-vision market was based on a miniaturised (albeit conventional) cathode-ray tube. At the time, Sinclair persuaded A.E.G.-Telefunken to make the two-inch monochrome tube for it. Sales turned out to be too low for the West German firm ever to make a profit on the venture. Hence the current reluctance among television tube manufacturers to rush to make Sinclair’s new fiat three-inch tube.

Mullard is the biggest television tube manufacturer left in Britain. G.E.C. has a joint venture with Hitachi to make colour tubes. Rank has teamed up with Toshiba to do likewise. All use high volume techniques to pare tube costs to a minimum. Sinclair’s flat tube is never likely to be made in enough numbers to interest them. It might, however, interest manufacturers of industrial tubes — i.e., those used in oscilloscopes, computer terminals, and so on. However, few of these companies are optimistic about being able to manufacture Sinclair’s new tube (and make a profit) for much under $lOO wholesale. Problem: Sinclair wants to market the complete pocketsized television for under $2OO.