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Sharp: You'll have a 20mm-thick TV in 2010

Sharp is set to usher in a new age of LCD TV displays that will point the way to LCD-covered walls in the home. As wereported yesterday, Sharp has been showing off prototypes of its new 50-inchLCD TVs which are only 20mm thick. Tommaso Monetto of Sharp told Tech.co.uk this morning that, by 2010, all LCD TVs will be this flat.

"We're no more than three years away from all Sharp LCD TVsbeing as flat as these new 20mm ones," Monetto told us in a private areaof the IFA expo in Berlin."When the new plant goes online in 2010, those are the TVs that it's going toproduce.

"We could be looking at the birth of the 'LCD wall' in maybefive or six years. We're displaying our 108-inch LCD TV here at IFA and withthe new factory we'll be able to produce panels bigger than that and just asflat as the prototypes we've been showing off," he said.

The 'LCD wall' that Monetto mentioned is in reference to Sharp'svision that one day all houses will be built with LCD screens covering entirewalls.

"There is a vision in Sharp that eventually you will arriveat the 'LCD wall'. So houses will be made with these huge panels which willcover just an entire wall. We always knew it was going to go that wayeventually and I think this is the first step. The new 10th generation factories will enable us to go much bigger than ever before," hesaid.

Sharp's next-next-generation LCD TV prototypes have anamazing contrast ratio of 100,000:1 and consume half the amount of power ascurrent TVs. Monetto says that Sharp executives arebeing incredibly secretive as to how the TVs are so good and yet so thin, but hedid speculate on what he thinks makes the new sets tick.

"There are a number of components which are bound to go in aseparate AV box. And so if you start taking things out of the main unit likethe power supply and the speakers - the new sets have no speakers - then that helpsto reduce size.

"If you take a panel which has 10000:1 dynamic contrastratio and overlay another panel on top of it with the same contrast ratio, youcan achieve huge numbers because the light has to filter through one and thenfilter through another one."