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Another Gasp For Upscale Video?

Sharp’s announcement that they are going to resurrect the defunct Elite brand with a new line of LED LCD TVs renews my hope that high end flat panel display solutions will come back from the dead. Sharp’s new Elite 60-inch Pro-60X5FD  and 70-inch Pro-70X5FD  panels will be exclusive to upscale dealers, at least for the moment, and priced at USD $6,000 and $8,500 which by today’s standards are pricey indeed.

No category characterizes the CE industry’s suicidal Race To The Bottom more than flat panels. Commodification and lowering price points is a fact of life in this business, but the flat panel category took it to its second-most absurd conclusion (the most absurd would have been to pay consumers to take them home. That hasn’t happened. Yet).
Along the way, the casualties were many. At the major level, Pioneer retired their Elite brand, which had been beloved of both dealers and consumers all the way back to the old CRT Rear Projection days. Within a few months of Pioneer’s exit Fujitsu abandoned the plasma market and not long after Runco rolled up their Vidikron line. Brands offering superior video performance at a premium price simply couldn’t swim against the tide of cheaper and cheaper panels.
But what about image quality? Fast forward to today, and when you scope out the tear sheets of new models of flat panel, the major vendors seem to talk about everything but. Not to pick on Samsung, but all their magazine ads for their SMART TVs spend more time playing up how you can access Facebook, Netflix and Twitter on screen than whether or not the picture is any damn good.
Does image quality still matter? I’d say that it does. And as is the way of things maybe, just maybe we’re seeing a swing back, a Flight To Quality, if you will. Talking recently with my friend Igor Kivritsky, owner of Vancouver’s HiFi Center he confided that “None of our clients show any interest in being able to check Facebook on their TV.”
There’s no one-size fits all solution for every client. Some people are happy with a Home Theater in a Box, but others deserve a five or six figure AV system. So why should the industry only offer the same el cheapo price point TVs to everybody? I hope that we’re going to see a resurgence of high end flat panel video, and I hope that this time the manufacturer’s target their lines effectively to consumers who will make the category successful again.
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