Expect to hear more manufacturers at next year's NAB tout their move away from the late, great format of tape.

--Dan Ochiva
Technical Editor, Video Systems
Senior Editor, Millimeter

Obsolescence ain't what it used to be

Moore's Law may not be guiding all our lives quite so tyrannically any more. For decades, technology buyers have been haunted by the famous dictum about capabilities doubling every 18 months.

The certainty of obsolescence infected the video and projection industry, too. Major technology advances seemed to pop up every six months or so. Ten-pound projectors gave way to six-pounders, and then sixes to threes, as ANSI lumens dashed upward through one barrier after another.

A product isn't obsolete just because a newer one comes out, of course, though the computer folks may have conditioned their customers to think that way.

In today's marketplace, while some buyers fret about obsolescence and "future proofing" their investments, many more seem perfectly content with not-quite-the-latest-and-greatest.

"There's no big rush to SXGA," notes analyst Chris Chinnock of Insight Media. Indeed, even though 1280 x 1024 resolution has been around a while, people aren't throwing their 1020 x 768 systems down the trash chute.

A market watcher at Texas Instruments -- whose 1996 launch of Digital Light Processing was a milestone in the 1990s cascade of product improvements -- also comments that "XGA has been the sweet spot in resolution for several years now, even though SXGA has been out."

And at the low end of the market, the SOHO segment that has vendors salivating, SVGA is "still robust," in Chinnock's view.

The arrival of computer players like Dell and Hewlett-Packard in the projector business may presage even more computer-like marketing of projectors. Perhaps that will be enough to keep the continuous-upgrade mentality alive in the a/v sphere.

But maybe not. "The life of a projector is a lot greater than the life of your desktop," says Sharp Electronics' Director of Strategic Marketing, Fred Krazeise. True, Krazeise says, a perfectly functional projector may become effectively obsolete if the user's needs change. If you find yourself doing more and more video, you may want a machine that handles compression a little better, or which accepts more types of video inputs.

Connectivity may be a true upgrade driver, or the desire for a system that needs less and cheaper maintenance. LCD panels do suffer some image degradation over time. All of these factors can fuel upgrades, or at least product replacements.

But the chase after more pixels and more lumens, which shaped so much of the 1990s, is a thing of the past. In 2001, an IDC survey revealed that substantially less than half of respondents rated resolution and brightness as their most important buying factors. Leading the way, by a wide margin, was the price/performance ratio.

The last word on fear of obsolescence as a market shaper might just come from the consumer electronics business, where sales of analog TVs continue to be colossal despite the fact that a date has been set for analog broadcasting to disappear. If it works and the price is right, a product will continue to sell.

--John McKeon

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