Sony puts more cash into flat screens
SONY is buying LCD screens from Sharp in a bid to bolster its flagging sales.
According to the Nikkei Sony will invest $926 million in a plant Sharp is building to make panels for flat TVs.
The information comes from a deep throat within Sony and an official announcement was expected sometime today.
Sharp is spending $3.5 billion on the new plant which will churn out 40-inch, 50-inch and 60-inch flat tellies. It will be online by 2010.
Sony has not made LCD or plasma display panels but has preferred to shop at its chum Samsung.
However lately the outfit has been a bit worried about supply, and it has not been doing very well on the telly market.
It is a somewhat strange world when the big three telly makers, who are all sworn to kill each other in the marketplace are buying gear off each other and investing in each others companies.
Sharp has been a bit of an also ran in comparison to the other two. µ
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Another example of Sony's misplaced focus now catching up with them. They were THE leader in display technology in the days of Trinitron, but they hardly spent a dime on researching for their future and now they buy panels from Samsung/Sharp?? Shame on them.
It is true that Sony made a strategic mistake by initially choosing rear projection to make its mark in the large screen TV market.

http://www.displaysearchblog.com/2007/12/sony-pulls-the-plug-on-rear-projection/#more-74

But now they have changed course and their Bravia LCD TV brand is a huge success. As the article says, they are trading ranks with Samsung for first place. They source most of their panels from the joint Samsung/Sony LCD favtory.

The fact that they now need to go to Sharp reflects that the joint Samsung/Sony plant is not able to supply all the LCD panels needed by Sony because of the commercial success of the Bravia line.

Selling panels to Sony is a good thing for Sharp too, as they have built a lot of new panel capacity while at the same time being surpassed in the market by Sony, Samsung and...Vizio.
You really like to stick the boot in to Sony don't you Nick, even with the flimsiest of arguments. Do you have some figures to back up your statement that Sony's lcd tv sales are flagging? 

Sony's LCD Bravia XBR series tv's are the best on the market in terms of image quality. (Yes they have Samsung panels, but Samsung tv's are inferior due to cheaper/lower quality image processing electronics and only 60Hz refresh). Sony are also among the most expensive, confirming the saying that you get what you pay for.

Many people are happy to pay more for a superior quality tv. If I wanted a blurry image refreshed at only 60Hz I'd buy the cheapest piece of junk the local shop sells. Sony knows this and does not compete in the low end of the market, they make quality tv's instead. How is that a bad thing?
Sony is probably the smartest brand name in the pot. Why invest heavily in an insecure technology when parts can be bought cheaply from suppliers?
All Panels are pretty much made equally, the only major differences to PQ are made by the filters and processing of which Sony puts their own spin on to different themselves from the rest of the flock.
As for rear projection: Still the best bang for the buck for a big screen - PLasma/LCD picture quality for less then half the price of a comparable flat screen. - They're being killed off because of their shipping expenses, retail shelf bulk and past issues with expensive bulb replacements and rainbow giving color wheels (no longer issues) but mostly because they're not as profitable as flat panels to both the supplier and retailer
--- Plasma, the best digital display technology out there is getting killed off too as Sony (for awhile now) and now Pioneer don't make panels anymore, because of their lack of profitability.
These companies, Sony included are just out to shave a few bucks, by cutting manufacturing costs and jobs just to report bigger profits to greedy profit sharing executives and shareholders regardless of the quality or lack there of, of the product they're marketing.