TV Information

With the success of Apple's iPhone, bloggers and technology fans everywhere have been speculating about Microsoft's plans to compete in the cell phone industry. Those waiting for a Zune phone shouldn't hold their breath; Microsoft plans to bring its software and online store to television sets instead.

Looking at numbers from Zune and iPod sales, this could be a smart move for Microsoft. Apple brought in $3.5 billion last year with sales from its iTunes Store, while Microsoft only banked $85 million from Zune hardware, and music and video downloads combined.

The Zune Marketplace continues to be buried by the almighty Apple. As of May of last year, only two million Zunes were sold, compared to 200 million iPods and 18 million iPhones. A change in strategy from Microsoft could be a good thing for both the company and its consumers.

Rather than heading in the direction of a ZunePhone or other type of hardware, Microsoft will introduce the Zune Marketplace to more screens than one: the PC, phone, and TV. Analyst Matt Rosoff guesses that Microsoft will also eventually bring the Zune Marketplace to its gaming platform as well: the Xbox 360 Live service. This online and interactive service allows 28 million Xbox 360 owners the opportunity to download games and content, and even stream Netflix movies.

With all of these new and intriguing possibilities being thrown in the mix, most experts agree that Microsoft is unlikely to produce its own television box. Regardless, Microsoft's Marketplace could potentially thrive and find many new consumers across many different media platforms, offering serious competition for the iTunes Music Store.

Sony has announced that it has made a breakthrough that may have significant effects on the home TV market. At only 10% of the thickness of the regular liquid crystal display, or LCD screen, the new organic light emitting diode or OLED is incredibly thin at less than 1mm.

At a mere 0.9mm, this is very easily, the thinnest large size TV screen ever produced. This is clearly a new hybrid technology that if it proves to be successful would drastically reduce the overall weight of a large flat panel TV.

This revolutionary organic material is capable of giving off its own light as a result new television is produced with this ingenious technology will not require a backlight which will again reduce the overall thickness of TVs.

If that wasn't enough the new screens will also only use a fraction of the power taken up by LCD units. According to the company, these new thin screens offer a far higher quality of color as well as dealing with moving images much more efficiently than LCD technology.

Big time Japanese electronics manufacturer NEC has created a subsidiary company, which goes under the name of NEC Display Solutions. They are mostly concerned with the production of monitors suitable for use with computers.

They also create those massive TV screens seen in Times Square or at sports stadiums; they are also heavily involved in various kinds of research and development into new ways of displaying images.

Their latest creation is an extremely clever small TV screen that is capable of showing a truly 3-D image. The new small screen works very ingeniously by projecting two images at once. Our eyes see the two images separately, so you would think that the picture would be distorted looking like different colored shadow images.

But those clever people at NEC realized that the brain does not work that way, and instead what the brain does is compensate for the picture obviously being incorrect and joins the two images together to produce one sharp clear image.

However, because the two images are separate, the effect that we see is pure 3-D; this is a high-tech version of the old-fashioned 3-D specs that had two different colored pieces of plastic, one for each eye.