Faith + Reason = Truth

Today's Blog Maverick post is a speculation on the futures of TVs and PCs as entertainment centers for homes.  Read it for the details and his thought process, but his theory is that TVs will start being upgraded every few years instead of PCs, since that's where the noticeable technology leaps will be occurring.  We will all go from 42 inch HD to 70 inch to 100 inch in our living or bedrooms.

I say perhaps, but via a different path.  What do you do with a 100 inch when some LCD pixels burn out, or the DLP mirrors break/misalign, or the plasma burns in, or other technical things that I don't understand happen?  Do you set it out by the curb for the trash pick up and go get another one (requiring store delivery, since it's not going in your backseat or trunk)?  And what becomes of these discarded 8+ foot wide behemoths that are not very environmentally friendly when disposed of?

One solution I can see is modular TV displays, interlocking/interconnecting "building block" displays of a manageable and super cheap production size (a 100 inch display costs FAR more to produce than 4x the cost of screen of 1/4 the size).  Take 17 inch displays and connect them by physically interlocking them together and plugging them into each other so that the size would be variable and customizable.  Link 3 across and 2 tall and you've got roughly a 60 inch display.  If 1 display has some issues down the road, you just replace that segment rather than the entire display.  There would also be the option of toggling to mutli-channel display mode so that you can view (in this example) 5 different video selections, 1 per module/display, if you don't feel like watching them all act together as 1 massive display.  Obviously the modules could be made available in different sizes as well, with smaller displays/modules giving you more flexibility/choices of total display size and lower replacement/disposal cost when something stops working.  It's also vastly easier to transport five 17 inch flat panels than it is to move one 60 inch flat panel, which involves a delivery truck, friends for moving it around the house, impossibility of negotiating tight turns in hallways or on staircases, etc. and is not practical to order online and have delivered to your door by brown truck.  And that's just with a 60 inch.  A 100 inch or larger?  Forget it.

The technology is already in common use to have multiple displays work together to produce 1 larger display; all that's required is the industrial design of making multiple smaller displays lock together in a near-seamless, simple, attractive manner.  "Upgrades" to larger sets would be a matter of starting with a few smaller displays and adding on as you see fit.  This would solve the dilemma of people like me, who want HD but can't justify the expense of a 70 inch right now, while at the same time being unable to settle for a 42 inch with the knowledge that a couple of years from now the 70+ inch will be the same price, but again not justifiable, because the 42 inch would be working just fine.   Apple or Sony (and I suppose Samsung needs to be added to this list) can work out the details of the appropriate module sizes and interlock designs and we'll be on our way.