It was meant to be the successor to LCD; to be a revolutionary display technology that gave perfect blacks and ultra-thin casings. But now SED TV’s chief proponent, Canon, has cancelled development of the budding technology. So what can fill its shoes?

May 25, 2010 — It was to be a new era: The surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) promised to bring the lightning-fast response times and high contrast of traditional CRT TVs to the flat-panel generation. Canon began research into SED in the late 1980s, hoping to turn it into the next big display technology. Although LCD and plasma were also under development, both suffered from disadvantages at that time that would have left SED in a strong position — had it ever left the development stage.

But it never did, leaving first plasma and then LCD to dominate the flat-panel TV market. Still Canon didn’t give up; the Japanese company teamed up with Toshiba in 2004 to continue developing SED. Together, the two companies brought the technology up to the prototype stage and even showed it off at trade fairs. The first SED models were expected to hit the market in 2007 or 2008.

So what went wrong? Well, Canon came up against legal problems: It was sued by the US company Applied Nanotech for patent infringement. Toshiba then stepped down from the joint venture, and the global economy entered a massive downturn. Somewhere in the midst of this financial storm, Canon must have decided that SED just wasn’t worth the risk any longer, especially in the face of continuing improvements to LCD and plasma technology. Many of the HDTVs currently on the market are almost as flat and contrast-rich as SED could ever hope to be.

It’s sad to see SED go. After all, its arrival would have meant more competition for the ‘big five’ TV manufacturers, and could have lead to a drop in prices. Not just that: It could have driven manufacturers to further improve picture quality.

But it’s not all doom and gloom: Organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology may yet save the day. This new display technology already appears in many mobile devices, and has reached the TV market in Sony’s 11-inch XEL-1 and LG’s 15-inch 15EL9500. OLED gives enormous contrast ratios, crisp motion depiction, wide viewing angles, low power consumption, and slim casings — and might just give plasma and LCD a run for their money.