According to Reuters sources, Sony and Pansonic will team up for an OLED TV partnership.
The deal will be announced next week and be an “agreement to cooperate in developing ways to mass produce next generation organic light emitting diode (OLED) televisions.”
Both companies will develop tech to build the displays cheaper. Sony and Panasonic are looking to compete against South Korea’s LG and Samsung, the companies which knocked them from their perch as the kings of TV sales due to aggressive pricing.
The new deal will have both companies pool their research and development resources to regain some of that ground.
Result for: panasonic
Pioneer and Buffalo have introduced the world’s first Blu-ray writers with BDXL support, the standard that was approved by the BDA in June.
BDXL discs are quad-layer 128GB Blu-ray discs. The standard also allows for triple-layer BDs with 100GB capacity.
Available soon, the companies have shown off the external BRXL-6U2 and the internal BRXL-6FBS-BK.
Both writers can handle up to quad-layer discs at 4x speeds for the higher capacities.
Support for BD-R/BD-R DL and BD-RE/BD-RE DL are standard.
On the downside, there are no mainstream players that support the standard with only Panasonic and Sharp even introducing players, all of which cost over $2500. There is no word on pricing for the writers.
For now, the format is targeted at professional applications such as archiving and medial imaging.
Result for: panasonic
Last week, Toshiba announced they are currently developing 3D HDTVs that do not require any special glasses.
Sony has made a similar announcement today, working on 3DTVs it hopes can be released by early 2011
“Seeing 3-D without glasses is more convenient,” says Yoshihisa Ishida, Sony SVP. “We must take account of pricing before we can think about when to start offering them.”
Panasonic and Sony have already released 3D HDTVs, both the displays require special (and usually expensive) glasses.
Sony says it will take the top spot in 3D TVs and Blu-ray player market share in Japan, thanks to its movie studio.
