News.blog: Sharp to kick off LCD price war

This Christmas, Sharp is going to hunt down its enemies.

Last year, the Japanese electronics giant lost some footing in the LCD TV market, in part because its rivals had moved to a different standard of manufacturing that allowed them to release cheaper, bigger sets.

Those days are over, one Sharp employee told me. The company is already making TVs out of glass from its eighth-generation Kameyama plant. The sheets of glass from this plant measure 2.16m by 2.46m. Six 52-inch LCDs can be popped out of a single sheet. The smaller glass sheets processed in sixth and seventh generation plants (Sony and Samsung have a seventh generation plant) can only produce two and three 52-inch panels, respectively, out of a single piece of glass.

Christmas pricing will be interesting, the source said.

Earlier in the month at the Ceatec trade show in Japan, Sharp trotted out a 64-inch LCD monitor that provides a resolution that is three times that of normal (HD Ready) high definition. Normal HD screens have 720 lines. The prototype monitor sports a 4,096x2,160-pixel resolution, triple the number of vertical lines (the second figure) to a normal HD screen, and double that of 'Full HD' 1080p resolution.