Very much out on a limb, Canon Inc reckons it has solved all the problems of fabricating colour liquid crystal displays in ferro-electric technology and plans to start volume production in Japan next month, Reuter reports from Tokyo. The move marks its entry into the fast-growing flat-panel market, and Canon believes it will be the first in the world to go into volume production with the technology, claiming that now that it has solved the reliability problems, the displays will make possible larger-screen and higher-resolution images than thin-film transistor liquid crystals. Canon plans to sell 14.8 panels for personal computers and workstations for a pricey $5,860 – but still about half the cost of thin-film transistor panels of the same size, and it plans to produce them at a rate of 1,000 a month to start with. The company caused a few raised eyebrows among competitors when it announced it was investing $200m in new ferro-electric display production facilities in Hiratsuka, Kanagawa prefecture in 1991 (CI No 1,817). Canon claims it has solved all the problems with the technology, cited as insufficient shock resistance, susceptibility to heat with response times slowing at high temperatures, and poor colour reproduction.
