Digital Home Thoughts: A Harbinger of Things to Come: Westinghouse's LVM-37W1 LCD TV

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Friday, January 13, 2006

A Harbinger of Things to Come: Westinghouse's LVM-37W1 LCD TV

Posted by Felix Torres in "ARTICLE" @ 09:00 AM


Is This for Real?
Last January, at the Annual Las Vegas Consumer Electronics show, a handful of companies announced and displayed a variety of High Definition displays running at the once-futuristic native resolution of 1080p. They were not the first to do so; super-premium niche displays had been available at extreme prices for years, and Sharp Electronics had been marketing a high-end 45” LCD display with that same native resolution for months. What made the new displays at CES notable was that they were intended to sell in volume at the same prices as the currently available 720p models of similar size.

In other words, these new models are intended to mainstream native 1080p displays; a pretty tall order at a time when even true 720p content is far from common and the content in native 1080p can be easily listed on a few sheets of paper. One of the displayed models in particular drew skeptical looks because of the listed specs, the pricing, and the source: Westinghouse Digital was promising to deliver by mid-2005 a 37” 1080p LCD display for under $2500, the same price-point of their previous 32” 720p offering.

Knowledgeable heads nodded politely and moved on. After all, every year, CES sees a few ambitious products announced at price points and schedules that nobody would think possible and which, sure enough, later turn out to be delayed, underperforming, or both. That a third tier (at best) vendor could possibly match the specs of market-leader Sharp at something like half the price was generally seen as...ambitious. And unlikely.

Then a funny thing happened around May of 2005: Reports started appearing that the promised LVM-37W1 was real. That it had actually shipped and people were finding it for sale online and at local electronics chains. And the street price wasn’t under $2500 at all. It was under $2000. Sometimes, well under...

Now, it was up to real, live, consumers to find out if this thing could possibly be for real or if there was some hidden catch. Some of them decided to risk their own money to find out. And a body of data began to accumulate...

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