£3.3m over five years is not going to go very far - the display business works in £billions. Has somebody dropped a factor of a thousand or so?

Whats the UK entry to highly efficent consumer goods? O wait... we spent all our cash on inefficent servers and storage to run a national ID database that wont work... And we're the ones told to stop wasting power tshh

I also expect it to be bank breaking ;-)

So, $6.6 million over 5 years to 3 mega-giant corporations and various smaller-fry. Let's see, even if were just the big three, that would be less than 1/2 a million each a year. Sony alone is spending $206 million on developement.

Do these big corps really need this small pittance and will it really make a difference?

...now will the Japanese government fund my purchase of a 40W 40" OLED TV?

although I dislike Sony as much as the next guy, there is one thing I must admit : they really drive display technology. FED, OLED, now I wonder what's next.

3 million quid? Peanuts. Barely enough to finance the drinks at the hanami parties I would have thought.

But I guess the importance of the money is that it sends a signal (and signals are terribly important here) that JGOV wants this to happen. And so it will.

But there are already sub 1 Watt LCDs out there like the the CITIZEN 03TA with 0.4 Watts and those are even smaller than 40 inch.

If you want to go for high resolution you can get lots of 10 Watt CRT TV-sets which are all far smaller than those 40 inch.

So there are already smaller and more energy efficient TV-sets out there, so what's the point?

It really seems like Sony are 2 different companies,

Sony Consumer puts out proprietary, expensive goods that don't really compete, and tend to be DRM laden.

Sony Business tends to put out innovative, function-over-form products of the highest quality.

They even [used to] have 2 websites, Sony for consumers was pretty but useless. Sony business was functional, and had everything you might want available in an easy-to-access form.

I think they are after bigger, not smaller.

Hey, maybe this initial investment is just to prime the pump- they certainly don't want all of the investment opportunity to be taken up by a gov't program.

Assuming the manufacturing process for these OLED TVs is anything greener than for others (recent gas emission debacle comes to mind) the Japanese can create a major competitive advantage by offering the cleaner greener big-screener and stick the Koreans with an environmental albatross.

OLED is an active technology, i.e. it generates light, unlike LCD which has a backlight whose output is blocked to get black (well, dark grey), so you only really need to light up one OLED pixel at a time. That must help a lot with power consumption.

don't OLED displays suffer from poor (compared to CRT/LCD) lifetimes?

The manufacturers have to remember that some people will leave their tv on for as long as they're awake, and longer if they fall asleep in front of it with or without the sleep timer. CRTs can cope with decades of such usage patterns but I doubt OLEDs will.

Oh, wait, that's built-in obselecense isn't it, silly me - how else would they make you buy a new set right after the warranty runs out...