Irvine-based Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America Inc., the consumer electronics arm of Japan’s Mitsubishi Electric Corp., is pushing the next generation of flat-screen TVs.
The TV, dubbed LaserVue, gets its picture and color from a trio of red, green and blue lasers.
Its part of Mitsubishi Digital’s bid to sell people high-end TVs and to differentiate its brand from the “sea of sameness” in flat-panel TVs, said Frank DeMartin, vice president of marketing.
“Flat panel TVs are commoditizing so rapidly that it’s hard to differentiate our products,” he said. “Flat has already been done,it’s time to move on and do something new.”
The company is known for making big screen, digital and high-definition TVs.
Its lineup includes flat-panel, liquid crystal display TVs, DVD players and projection systems.
Mitsubishi Digital Electronics
It also sells what’s known as digital light processing TVs, a large-screen, digital projection technology made possible by a chip from Texas Instruments Inc.
Mitsubishi Digital has roughly 30% market share for DLP TVs, which are on the large side,60 inches or more.
The company doesn’t break out sales. According to some estimates, Mitsubishi Digital sees about $300 million in revenue a year.
What sets it apart is that Mitsubishi Digital is using lasers as the internal light source for its TVs. Traditional TVs use cathode-ray tubes to give them their “glow.”
“We use red, green and blue lasers to create a picture that scales to large sizes but also shows color that hasn’t been produced before,” DeMartin said. “It allows us to get a wider range of color.”
Mitsubishi Digital’s LaserVue TVs are decidedly high-end.
“We are somewhat of a niche player, there’s no question about that,” DeMartin said. “We are at the premium end,we don’t sell $300 TVs.”
Prices for the new line aren’t being disclosed before the sets debut next month.
Mitsubishi’s sets are more expensive than most and compete with the top tier of electronics makers, including Sony Corp., Samsung Corp., LG Electronics Inc., Toshiba Corp. and Pioneer Corp., which has offices in Long Beach.
Mitsubishi doesn’t try to compete with the lower-end brands, including Westinghouse Electric Corp., Olevia, a brand owned by Syntax-Brillian Corp., Irvine’s Vizio Inc. or Funai Electric Co., a Taiwanese company that last month bought the North American TV rights of Royal Philips Electronics NV.
LaserVue TVs are geared toward two distinct markets.
The first group is what Mitsubishi Digital calls the “home theater family.”
“These are families who tend to watch TV and movies together, who find TV-watching to be a valuable family experience,” DeMartin said. “They play a lot of video games and tend toward larger-screen TVs.”
The second target group is Mitsubishi’s “golden guy.”
“He’s a little more affluent and tends to want the best of all the products they own,” he said.
It took five years of research to get the laser TVs into production.
Mitsubishi already makes the red lasers in Japan, which are built into its DVD players.
The company has roughly 70% of the market for red lasers, which it sells to other companies, according to DeMartin.
“We’ve been able to leverage that capability for (television) displays,” he said.
The project wasn’t without stumbling blocks.
Researchers had to figure out how to make red lasers,which are typically used in low-power appliances,work in TVs.
“The trick was generating a high-power red laser light,” DeMartin said.
Mitsubishi Digital prides itself on doing all of its design work in Irvine and manufacturing just over the border in Mexicali.
“We are different than a lot of brands in the U.S. because we are completely autonomous here,” DeMartin said.
Mitsubishi Digital has roughly 1,000 workers,down from a few years ago when it had nearly 2,500.
It has some 250 workers in Irvine and an office in Cypress that acts as a holding company for Mitsubishi Digital and the U.S. headquarters. The rest are in Mexico.
