Constraints on big LCDs? Glass!

Tags: HDTV, LCD

Today's Wall Street Journal has an interesting article today on how the sheer physical size of glass needed for manufacturing LCDs is constraining price drops on large LCD panels. But it had a very cool fact about Samsung's upcoming plans:

Samsung plans to build LCD screens as much as 100 inches in size. On the way to that goal, the company will use substrates that are 5.31 square meters, as large as a king-size bed, in its eighth-generation plant, and 6.72 square meters in its ninth-generation plant. At an industry conference in Boston last week, Lee Sang Wan, the president of Samsung's LCD business, recalled that such large LCD TVs were inconceivable five years ago. "Size should no longer be considered an issue for LCD TVs," he told the Society of Information Display.

But at the same conference, other engineers declared that the 10th generation of plants and glass substrates is likely to be the last. That glass will be 10.8 square meters, too large to be carried by oceangoing cargo containers and airplanes. Only low-bed trailer trucks could transport it, meaning the plants that make them would have to be built within driving distance of the factories where the glass is turned into a flat panel for TVs.