Canon wins SED lawsuit, can produce SED displays again

by Nilay Patel, posted Aug 6th 2008 at 10:03PM

It's been a while since we've heard about Canon's legal troubles with SED, but it sounds like things are taking a turn for the better -- the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that Canon had not broken its contract with Nano-Proprietary (now called Applied Nanotech Holdings) since Canon is now the sole owner of its previous joint venture with Toshiba, SED Inc. The court also reinstated Canon's license to the SED tech, but since Canon stopped working on the tech last year, it'll probably be a while before we see any SED displays actually show up. We'll see how it goes down -- hopefully those rumors of a skunkworks SED project inside Canon will make this all seem like a bad dream someday.

[Thanks, Alex]

Filed under: Displays, Canon, SED

Tags: applied nanotech holdings, AppliedNanotechHoldings, canon, lawsuit, legal, nano-proprietary, patent, sed

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Neutral

Charles @ Aug 6th 2008 11:51PM

Thanks, Alex.

Neutral

EQC @ Aug 7th 2008 1:40AM

I hope they can get it to market quickly...

weren't they right around the corner from releasing a product when the legal issues arose and stopped them? Hopefully they are still very close to a product-release stage (maybe they kept working on it behind closed doors while they pursued legal recourse?!?).

If they can get a product out in 6 months, great...if it's going to be "sometime in 2010," that could be over 2 years away and I'm not going to get excited.

3 years ago, SED was supposed to be "better and cheaper" than LCD...if after all of this, it comes out 3 years late, is more expensive than LCD and plasma, and isn't any better than the other 2010 products (LCD's and plasmas get better every day), I'm going to be (even more) disillusioned.

Neutral

gus @ Aug 7th 2008 4:07AM

i await the day sed comes into the public once it does plasma lcd oled fed and any other tv technology currently wont have a chance

this is from a guy that seem the pioneer kuro pro-111 the best flat panel in the planet.

Neutral

kcjones @ Aug 7th 2008 8:33AM

Wake up people. Even if SED wasn't sidelined, it would have been too expensive to make a dent in the marketplace. Its now guaranteed to be uber-expensive and laughed at by the "What I have is good enough" general public. If you guys think Pioneer Elite is too expensive, wait to see SED's prices.

BTW, for all you newcomers, SED was feared to be too expensive for the marketplace as far back as 2005 (When 50" plasmas were $5000.00). Canon nor Toshiba ever reassured the media that it wouldn't be crazy expensive.

Neutral

Spiza @ Aug 7th 2008 8:36AM

These things were supposed to have a contrast ratio of 100,000:1. Of course, Pioneer had the infinite contrast TV at CES.

Neutral

slarity @ Aug 7th 2008 10:57AM

I hope they can make this work. SEDs have looked great since the beginning and I have a lot of respec for canon, I think they make great products and hopefully TVs will follow this trend.

Neutral

jrtallen @ Aug 7th 2008 11:17AM

My assumption right now is that OLED will be the next technology. First gen displays have already been sold, and PQ performance potential very good.

If it turns out that SED takes off, I would gladly take that too. :)

Neutral

Mr. E @ Aug 7th 2008 12:06PM

If Canon has been quietly continuing work on SED all along during the lawsuit, now that the legal B.S. is out of the way I think they have a good chance of competing with or even beating OLED in the marketplace. For all the promise of OLED, the best projection we can get is that Matsushita is going to try to have 40" displays on the market in three years (no estimated price given). That's still a lot of lead time for SED. I'd love to see more competition in the flat panel arena, so I'll be rooting for SED the underdog in this race.

Neutral

blauck44 @ Aug 8th 2008 12:25AM

Isnt FED also somehow related to SED

Neutral

Hurin @ Sep 17th 2008 6:41PM

Every SED item on engadget seems to make reference to "Canon abandoning its efforts to lower production costs." Yet this always seemed to be based on an initial mis-reading of a news report that said exactly the opposite.

Engadget story initially reporting the "abandonment": http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/25/sed-televisions-delayed-again-possibly-forever/

3rd-party story upon which this is based:
http://www.reuters.com/article/technology-media-telco-SP/idUST621220070525

What that story actually says:

"Canon cited a prolonged patent lawsuit with Nano-Proprietary Inc. NNPP.OB as a reason for the delay. It is also delaying the launch to develop the technology to cut production costs, a step necessary to compete with LCD and plasma TVs, the company said."

They aren't abandoning the efforts to lower costs. . . they've *refocused* on them. I think a few words got skipped in a hurried reading and the opposite of the actual meaning has been conveyed ever since.

Neutral

Yaniv-Israel @ Oct 14th 2008 5:42PM

I think... OLED or Laser have chance to be the next technology!

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