Xigga

FED stands for Field Emission Display.  It’s very similar to SED technology, except FEDs use diamond crystals in the panels.  First, we are using gold to gold plate all the contacts on electronic equipment, like cables, memory cards, PC cards, etc.  It’s only a tiny bit of gold per component, but there are millions of components out there and I’m surprised we haven’t ran out of gold.

And now they want to use diamonds for TVs?  That’s going increase the prices of diamonds like crazy.  On this planet you’ve got two kinds of people, (1) those who want to wear diamonds, and (2) those who want to grind the diamonds to dust and stick them in a glass panel to watch high quality TV.  I prefer to be in the latter group.  I don’t care much for diamonds.  They look like a piece of glass, and you can’t tell much of a difference between a real diamond and a fake diamond.  Diamonds have great physical qualities, but you can’t do justice to them by just wearing them.  So I’m all up for putting diamonds in TVs.

The sad thing is that one company, called Candescent Technologies, tried to develop the FED technology to use another material for the panel instead of using diamonds.  They failed, but not because of what they were doing, it was because so much money was being put into LCDs that FED could not develop in time and they ran out of money.  FED is still being developed.  We could expect it in 2010 or later because LCD has too much support and investment.  Sony tried to join Candescent’s bandwagon, but didn’t want to fully commit to it.  Candescent filed for Bankruptcy in June 2004 (four years from today).  The company’s remaining assets and patents were sold to Canon for about $10.75 million.  Let’s see what Canon does with it.

As I was totally unaware of FED technoglogy, I had to do some research one it and I’m still read about it to understand how it works and if it will ever be a reality.  Stay tuned…