Is there another electronic product that looks as cool as a flat TV hanging on a wall?
As prices have plummeted, consumers have snapped up plasma screens and their slightly smaller cousins, liquid crystal displays, with increasing fervor. Sales of both kinds of TVs have quintupled in the last three years.
Even traditional, rear-projection TV sets are enjoying a huge boost in popularity.
A new generation of rear-projection TVs replaces the old cathode-ray tube with silicon technology, producing models that aren’t as skinny as plasma models – but still look pretty sleek compared with their predecessors.
$4.7 billion sold last year
Sales of these chip-based TVs rose to $4.7 billion last year, about 13 times their total in 2002, according to Quixel Research. The TVs include models based on Texas Instruments Inc.’s Digital Light Processing technology and others using LCDs or liquid crystal on silicon.
Not all of the flat and chip-based TVs are capable of displaying wide-screen, high-definition images. Some manufacturers, such as Gateway Inc., have made a mint on models known as EDTV, or enhanced-definition television.
But the burst of success in each category shows how eager consumers are to have fancy TVs in their homes. Many of the sets are made for HD, and each purchase adds another household to the market of potential viewers.
26-inch sets cost about $1,000
The sets remain relatively expensive. Though some units capable of showing HD can be found for $700 or even lower, they’re relatively small and don’t include high-def tuners.
The big sets – 26 inches and above – still cost just under $1,000 without tuners.
Prices keep going in the right direction. Plasma sets measuring more than 40 inches diagonally are sneaking in under $2,500.
Rear-projection, chip-based sets of the same size are beginning to slip toward $2,000.
With every price drop, the TVs make their way into another viewer’s budget.
About 40 percent of HDTV owners make less than $50,000 a year, said Josh Bernoff, a vice president at Forrester Research.
“This is already reaching people well beyond what are normally considered the affluent early adopters,” he said.
Mark Cuban, who owns the Dallas Mavericks and the HDNet high-definition networks, believes HDTVs will go totally mainstream when plasma and LCD displays fall under $500 and manufacturers stop making analog TVs bigger than 13 inches.
“I think it’s less than five years,” he said in an e-mail.
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