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Thinness Matters

Although convergence and green issues represented the main vision of the CEATEC show, the desire to keep making TVs thinner remains strong too.

Every manufacturer and their mother had some strikingly slender TV to show off, with highlights being Sony’s imminent 40ZX1 (just 9.9mm deep), Panasonic’s eagerly awaited but still disappointingly distant (2010) NeoPDP plasmas, and a really rather stunning ‘leaning’ concept TV from Toshiba designed to be simply leant against a wall.

Although it inevitably doesn’t really come over on our still photograph of this leaning TV, we have to say we particularly loved the ‘twinkling star’ effect in the Toshiba TV’s ‘stand’.

No matter how striking the above products undoubtedly were, though, it was Sony’s OLED TVs that inevitably stole the thin TV show.

The only commercially available OLED TV at the moment, the crazily expensive XEL-1, was abundantly present on the Sony stand. In fact, there were quite possibly more XEL-1s on the stand than Sony has actually sold.

As ever, the XEL-1’s 3mm depth was extremely striking – as was that of a 27in OLED prototype screen Sony had on display that looked little if any deeper than the XEL-1.

But even this 27in effort was left in the slimline shade by Sony’s new OLED prototype: a flexible LED display with a depth of just 0.3mm.

Sony had a couple of fancy, stand-mounted examples of what sort of ridiculously slender (0.9mm) finished screens this 0.3mm LED display could give rise to, and was also showing a video of the LED screen being bent and twisted about without the picture being damaged. This suddenly made the idea of wearable or roll-up TVs look remarkably feasible.

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