It has become a de rigueur aspect of the failing, elderly celebrity: television advertising. We have seen Johnny Carson’s sidekick Ed McMahon and stars from Little House On the Prairie, Mission Impossible, and the like, promoting everything from retrofitted bath units for the disabled to reverse mortgages. It is sad to see these stars – who should have been more financially comfortable in their later years – making a few dollars just to survive. Unfortunately, rather like many who receive their knighthoods in Britain, the very act of pitching products on the small screen seems to be a death sentence.
One hopes that is not so for George Takei, the actor who played Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu in the original Star Trek, who has taken to the airwaves to promote Sharp’s most recent LCD TV products using their so-called Quattro Technology. The latest commercial, dubbed Seahorse by its producers, tries to sell the idea that a fourth color of phosphor (how old fashioned of me!) in the form of yellow will greatly improve the display of that hue. George is in a Sharp lab coat in the ad and his 70+ years are, unfortunately, showing.
Sharp is more than a little short of explanation on its websites about the Quattro display technology, but one gathers that there are four vertical LCD columns, RGB plus yellow, in place of the normal three. All are activated by Sharp’s clever edge-on LED lighting which reduces the overall display depth to less than two inches.
All our current color video is encoded, of course, in RGB. Although image orthicons have long since been replaced with vidicons and then plumbicons, and now by solid-state sensors, the light image that is focused through the lens is still filtered into the standard RGB optical sensitivity curves that we have lived with for about sixty years. In the receiver, however that video reached it, we still have a decoding process of one form or another – analog or digital – which conventionally gives us those three analog channels again for the display.
If we are going to produce a separate yellow channel then we must mix, electronically, some of the red signal and some of the green signal with a filter characteristic that matches that yellow sensitivity. This mix may be in the digital world prior to conversion to analog, or in the analog world itself. Either way this, in turn, has to reduce the amplitude of the red and green drive signals to the display.
Can this be good or bad? The additional yellow display is probably goodish; not completely good, because it is a fake representation of the original scene, a colorization if you will; not completely bad, because yellow is a strong visual stimulation.
On the counterside the reduction in both the red and green signal levels must inevitably mean that there is a poorer signal-to-noise ratio in both those channels and there must be some confusion in gamma values.
So is this a marketing gimmick? Yes.
Sharp is not given to revealing too many details in the features of the new displays. For the 40 inch Quattron, the LC40LE820UN, the description is of a “4-color filter that adds yellow…” (“adds?” Maybe separates would be a better descriptor?) and enables “more than a billion unique colors to be displayed” (hope you can see all of those, because I cannot).
To increase the feature set of the displays, Sharp has also added, through its Aquos Net service, video streaming capability from Netflix. From my point of view, having suffered thousands of obnoxious pop-up ads from Netflix in their early corporate days and thus become completely alienated as a potential customer, this is a service I would go absolutely nowhere near.
The yellow technology story leaves me jaundiced. But Sulu might be able to convince me that it's all on account of the Jefferies Tubes and dilithium crystals.
