Sharp is convinced that the picture quality other HDTV makers provide just isn’t enough. Instead of looking at a million colors they want to sell you on the thought of seeing a billion colors. This is done by adding yellow along with the red, green, blue found in other televisions.
It’s too soon to tell if 4 colors actually look better than 3 but Sharp is spending a lot on marketing the new technology.
According to TWICE:
Mike Troetti, Sharp Electronics marketing president, said Sharp has developed a color filter for its better Aquos LCD TVs that uses four colors instead of the traditional three primary colors to produce a full color spectrum on the screen. The filter adds yellow, to the red, green and blue combinations, to expand the color gamut of the sets from 1 billion to 1 trillion colors, while significantly increasing image detail.
“All of the four-color sets will use glass from Sharp’s new Gen 10 panel facility in Sakai City, Japan. The full-product facility specializes in panels in the 40- and 60-inch classes.
“We believe that by giving retailers advanced technology like our four-color system, we can put profitability back, and by giving dealers something new to talk about we can get out of the price discussion and focus on a performance discussion,” Troetti said.
The most interesting part in the above quote is that Sharp knows that they can’t be the company with the “cheapest” LED backlit LCD HDTVs. Vizio already owns that space. Instead they’re hoping that they can wow people with better color and hope that they don’t look at the price tag. This may work on the high end where only a few thousand models will get sold but the strategy may just backfire on Sharp. Everyone else is discounting with hopes to gain share and name recognition from Samsung. If Sharp is the only one hoping to increase profitability they may become the odd man out.
[Via Sharp]
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