TVs Should Be Better With Lasers

Back in October 2006, right before they listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, a company called Arasor held a press conference in Sydney announcing that the future of television had arrived, and that future was lasers. Arasor claimed that an optical chip they made could enable TV manufacturers to use lasers in their TVs for an amazing picture quality. They claimed it would happen by Christmas 2007, and would be supported by a range of manufacturers. Sadly though, it didn't and it wasn't.

That's not to say the company was making false claims in order to boost their ASX listing... Laser TV did become a reality in early 2008, when Mitsubishi showed off their Laservue TVs at CES.

Laser TVs are essentially just rear projection TVs that use lasers to provide the backlight. Using the Arasor chip, the laser-powered TVs are able to reproduce twice the colour range that LCD and plasma can, while using less power and being thinner than traditional rear projection screens.To date, only the Mitsubishi Laservue TVs have launched with the technology, and sadly they're not available in many global markets, including Australia.

It seems unlikely that we'll ever see laser TVs in Australia. But we can always hope that the technology might be enhanced in future TV sets so that one day, all TVs have freakin' lasers in them.

History of TV is Giz AU’s month-long look back at the development of the world-changing medium and its influence on our daily lives.


    wait... so it has twice the colors, less power, is rearpro so the screen sizes are probably big, yet doesn't seem to have the problem of being so big that it gets shipped on a table. actually looks a perfectly practical size.

    so what gives? why not? price?

    I think they are actually cheaper to manufacture matt from what I have read. It's all economies of scale at the moment hence why it's currently a $7000 TV. I think we have just fallen into the old car industry trick. Increase the technology in small increments to eke the most out of each stage of development and recoup costs.
    A real shame as this laser technology seems to be far superior to everything else we have at the moment.

    too bad western governments wouldn't get around to getting behind this along the line of cash for clunkers. think of the wholesale power (carbon) savings from changing over to these beauties. earth day's impetus to change light bulbs from tungsten to led/fluoro etc would be peanuts compared with changing over from plasma/crt to this technology. even sweeter if it were to remain australian intellectual property (but alas, not likely).

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