We all can remember those old televisions which were bulky, and style was not thought of. PC's had the same problem - they all used to come in beige! This seemed synonymous with electrical products; however, today we need more style! Can the HDTV manufacturers meet up to the challenge?
There are fundamentals to any technology, and television sets are one of them. A television has several aspects, the picture it produces, the sound it produces its features and capabilities, and its style. Television manufacturers have concerned themselves primarily with the picture quality in the past.
When TV's first came out, it was black and white, and picture qualities were nothing like today, and not to mention there size! The TV manufacturers worked primarily on improving the viewing experience, after all a television is more about the visual aspect than any other thing.
Today however, we have HDTV technology, and we are also in the new millennium, a millennium with a generation which is concerned about not only the picture quality but also every other aspect of the television. HDTV is simply an upgrade in that picture quality. But, this is not the only thing that manufacturers of HDTV sets must concern themselves with.
We can learn a lot from computers, especially those innovative iMacs. The computer when it came out was only available in one color, and one color only - beige. This went on for years, and a few companies did produce some different colors but again this became either black or beige - the black and white of TV's!
A change happened and it happened so fast. It came when Apple hired some crazy design teams, including people who designed sinks and toilets! The result was a computer that was translucent, and captivated the imagination of people - it was color! Since then Apple has been put back on the map, and computers have changed forever.
The HDTV manufacturers can learn a lot about this kind of thinking. The televisions up to this point including HDTV sets have not had much style go into them. Though there is improvement. HDTV manufacturers such as Sony have come up with Sony Style which is there way of being committed to not just the picture quality, but also making the television something which fits a nice design in the house.
I don't know if we would ever see a translucent television set, but it likely could be a hit. I have not seen any being manufactured up to this point. If anything can be learned from PC's and TV's it's that we don't just want to see the functions, we want the vibrant color to be expressed in a vibrant product, to have a product which fits into what it is. |
