DisplaySearch Blog

Ultra Thin Frame, Big Idea

By Ross Young, Founder and President, DisplaySearch

As TV sizes get larger and larger as well as more affordable, it presents a problem for those of us with TV cabinets in our homes. For example, in both my house and a second, smaller vacation home, I have large floor to ceiling cabinets with a fixed width. One of my cabinets resembles the one below, optimized for a 4×3 CRT RPTV. No matter how big a TV I want, it must fit in this limited space. I have thought about pulling the cabinet out, but my wife would have no part of that.

Typical 4×3 TV Cabinet

One cabinet is 48” wide, which can fit my four-year-old 50” 720p DLP RPTV with a conventional frame or bezel. As flat panel TV prices get increasingly affordable and performance improves, I have considered replacing it with a 1080p flat panel. Having to explain the benefits of 1080p to my wife without her seeing it first wasn’t easy, but since I am in the business, she was willing to trust me. But how big of a TV would fit?< It is a really bright room, so I looked at LCD TVs first. There are no 50” LCD TVs, so I looked at 52” LCD TVs. I couldn’t find one that fit. This meant I would have to trade down in size. I was amazed to discover that a significant number of 46” LCD TVs would not fit either due to side speakers, wide bezels, etc. Did I really want to trade my 50” DLP for a 40-42” flat panel? No way!

Sensing this opportunity, Mitsubishi was the first to market with Ultra Thin Frame™ LCD TVs, which squeeze more display in less area. The bezel around the screen is just 3/4”, down from more than 2” on my existing DLP. Now I can upgrade to a 52” 1080p LCD or DLP and not have to change my cabinet. Boy, does this solve a lot of problems in my house! Now I get a bigger display with more resolution and my wife gets to keep her recently painted cabinet. Now where do I put my old DLP? That is actually a real challenge due to its thickness. Perhaps eBay….

It is actually surprising that it took this long for TV brands to discover thin frames. Narrow bezel panels took off in notebook PCs, LCD monitors and mobile phones, and generated a premium for the panel suppliers and brands that introduced them. They look cool, they can have a floating effect, and they can reduce weight. LPL’s side mounting patent which enables narrow bezels became a key patent in this industry. Furthermore, I would argue that because of all the existing TV cabinets, this concept is even more important in large screen TVs than in monitors, which don’t have a space limitation—unless you are a multiple monitor user where you want the narrowest bezel possible.

I contacted Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America about evaluating their Ultra Thin Frame LCD TVs, and they actually sent me their recently introduced LT-46133 LCD TV for review and evaluation. This was my first experience with a 1080p TV in my home. This TV has all the bells and whistles: HDMI 1.3 with CEC compliance, 10-bit panel, x.v. Color, 10,000:1 dynamic contrast, etc. Although it did not have 120 Hz, Mitsubishi will have a 120 Hz version in a couple of months. The icon driven menu system was also a significant improvement over anything I have ever used before. But the picture, wow, as good as anything I have ever seen at trade shows when watching HD content and playing video games. My 7-year old son and I are now convinced that games are easier with a 1080p TV, as you can see the details faster and more clearly as a result of the extra pixels. My son was addicted to this TV and was very sad when we returned it. In his words, “The Star Wars LEGO game characters look like real LEGOs with this new TV.” I also thought HD movie and sports content looked superior to my 720p TVs, although the graininess of some film content was made more apparent. In addition, the wider color gamut and increased bit depth was visible with the PS3 source.

Mitsubishi’s LT-46133

The only downside to this TV from a performance standpoint was how bad standard definition content looked. Scaling 480i to 1080p is not easy, and the artifacts are going to be amplified on a TV this big. Mitsubishi uses their own in-house and proprietary scaler, so it could potentially not be as good as ICs from merchant suppliers. However, other 1080p TV owners who use brands other than Mitsubishi have told me they have the same problem. One of them refuses to watch standard definition content on his 1080p LCD TV. Instead he watches it on an old CRT. Of course, this problem can easily be overcome by not watching standard definition channels. With DirecTV promising 100 HD channels this year and 50 more in 2008 and cable providers likely to try and match them through switched digital video technology, this shouldn’t be a problem for too much longer.

So, loved the TV and the Ultra Thin Frame is definitely a big idea.

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