NYTimes: First Impressions on Mitsubishi’s New LaserVue TVs

With a laser light engine, colors don’t look so much as if they’re painted on the screen as if they’re shooting out from it. Colors are alive and vibrant in a way that mimics the brightness of neon light, or a large advertising transparency being illuminated from behind in a light box. The company also says that their laser TVs produce twice as many colors as any traditional TV technology. Indeed, many colors on the plasma and especially on the LCD sets were washed out and dull, while their laser counterparts were vibrant, without looking overblown. The picture looks much like a giant version of the images produced by Sony’s superb but tiny OLED HDTV screens.

While Mitsubishi would not talk sizing, pricing, or specs for its LaserVue sets, a casual observation of one of its models indicated that the production version is likely to be about two-thirds as deep as a same-sized DLP rear projection set. That’s still not as thin as an LCD or the really thin OLED TV tech, but it moves toward diminishing the single biggest objection to rear-projection TV.

Frank DeMartin, the company’s marketing vice president: "There’s no possibility that laser won’t make it," he said. The stars have aligned; it fits our core competency.

Posted: Apr 08,2008 by Ron Mertens