Sony is bleeding money - business strategy discussion

[Michellstar]

the thing is who is making money in the android market.. even samsung is strugling with the advent of chinesse manufacturers

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Yeah I think it's a combination of the triluminous display coupled with their XReality video processor.

I'm very happy with my Bravia and the degree that you can customise the XReality processor in advanced settings is quite cool.

 

[London Geezer]

The marketing and hype behind these new Quantum Dots make my skin crawl. People! They're still LCD screens with that disgusting backlight, but instead of the "old style" LCD screen, they have a Quantum Dot screen - ooooooooh it has the word quantum in it so it's futuristic! - for better colour reproduction and better brightness. Apparently.

As if brightness was ever a problem with LCD screens. All the articles going on about how much brighter the screens are, when really no one will keep them at anywhere maximum brightness at home unless they want to lose their eyesight in five minutes.

Completely ignoring, of course, contrast and black level, which are among the top 3 most important aspects of a screen. So these screens will practically be the same old LCDs displays showing grey instead of black, with that backlight bleed - barf! - and backlight adjustment according to the contrast in the scene - is it on? is it off? oh it's back on now! - but better reds! Wowwww! Redder red!

These people don't deserve eyes.


Yes, I have now completed my rant. You can now continue with your day.



EDIT: This was on topic because Sony's Triluminuos displays are said to be based on QD tech.

 

[orangpelupa]

comparing Surface Pro 3 with Vaio Tap 11. The triluminos display do have better color, especially in greyscale.

 

[wco81]

Sony made their bones in the analog age.

Trinitron CRT TVs and cassette tape Walkmans.

They could not carry these brands forward to flat-panel TVs and MP3 players. A lot of it was of their own doing, like poor software for digital audio players.

But a lot of it was time passing them by, like the brutal competition from South Korean and then Chinese flat panel makers.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

The marketing and hype behind these new Quantum Dots make my skin crawl. People!

I don't prentend to understand the technology but as I understand it conventional displays use a phosphor coated blue LED to produce white light which passes through the red, green and blue crystals to produce colour but they don't do a great job of filtering out white and light at nearby wavelengths resulting in poor colour reproduction - relative to the ideal.

In comparison a Triluminous panel is made up of blue LEDs without any coating inside a tube with distinct red and green dots, which produce accurate wavelengths, these are then mixed in with blue LED for better colour reproduction by way of less wavelength bleed.

I didn't know about the quantum dot things until you mentioned them. Not everything with 'quantum' is a crock, though. Quantum signal encoding and cryptography is the dog's bollocks

 

[wco81]

Samsung and others touted QD at this past CES because they're not ready to make OLEDs. Latest word is that the Kateeva OLED printing might be ready to deliver TVs by 2017.

They didn't badmouth OLED, which only LG is making this year, because of their future plans and the fact that their phones use OLED.

The market for videophiles is small. People aren't willing to pay a premium for TVs to get the so-called best picture quality. Only a few people calibrate their TVs. In the US, people are used to TVs being set to "torch mode" to fight the bright showroom lights. That's why LCD beat out plasma here.

And nobody was willing to pay the premium Sony tried to command for their TVs.

In 2013, most of the 4K TVs bought were by the Chinese, who bought no-name brands.

In 2014, 4K sales in the US increased as prices dropped. TVs are a commodity business. No premium brands any more. It's a wonder that UHD Blu Ray is even being developed. It would be great if Sony supported 4K in the Playstation but it one of the few business units that's doing well. They probably aren't going to risk it to try to bolster their TV and video (Blu Ray players and patents) business.

 

[Dave Baumann]

Sony made their bones in the analog age.

Trinitron CRT TVs and cassette tape Walkmans.

I grew up with a Trinitron - still stands out as being a great flat panel CRT. Meaningful differentiation is much more difficult with the current technologies though.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I grew up with a Trinitron - still stands out as being a great flat panel CRT. Meaningful differentiation is much more difficult with the current technologies though.

We also had a Trinitron too but it wasn't remotely flat - that TV had a big ass on it!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Dave means the screen, the FST. Trinitron wasn't a bubble like everyone else. I don't see anything particularly wrong with Sony exiting the consumer TV space as long as they keep their professional display arm. It'll be from here that any wonderful developments could happen, I think. But leaving TV and mobile, as I said before, would diminish their public brand.

 

[orangpelupa]

and with PS Now... its even worse when sony decided to get out of TV and mobile. They will depend on 3rd party for adopting PS Now.
but to be frank, even now Sony is not doing anything good with PS Now. Its nowhere in their phones and tablet, only comes in new TV flagship...
They already exited PC business so no wonder they also dont have PS Now for PC...

cant they transform to something like google or MS where the app is available everywhere? (office on iPhone, Gmail on iPhone, etc)

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Dave means the screen, the FST. Trinitron wasn't a bubble like everyone else..

Trinitron and FST are different technologies. Trinitron (defined by the use of aperture grille CRT) goes back to the 1960s and is related to colour reproduction, contrast and brightness of the image.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Not FST exactly, but Trinitron had a flatter screen. It was necessary for the vertical grille in the first place.

 

[Dave Baumann]

They called it "TFT", Trinitron Flat Tube. Meaning the display area was flat where previously other CRT's were convex.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

They called it "TFT", Trinitron Flat Tube. Meaning the display area was flat where previously other CRT's were convex.

This was called Trinitron FD or WEGA in some markets. Flat screens Trinitron screens were decades after the technology was introduced in many consumer markets - depending on your market, naturally. All Trinitron screens were not flat, my family had non-flat Trinitron in 1980s.

 

[wco81]

Remember Trinitron was around for decades before HDTV.

I had an old one where vertically it was straight but horizontally it was convex.

It was just before HDTVs came in the mid to late 90s that some super flat CRTs came, like the NEC and Panasonics.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I grew up with a Trinitron - still stands out as being a great flat panel CRT. Meaningful differentiation is much more difficult with the current technologies though.

Aye, when they came out with their vertically flat Trinitron CRTs (they were still curved horizontally), it was absolutely amazing and a virtual revolution in display technology at the time. Enough that almost everyone wanted one for their big screen TV. Conventional CRT TV's were horribly curved in all dimensions at the time and that became much worse as the size of the screen increased.

Vertically flat Trinitron screens basically made large screen CRT TVs viable. And people with money bought them up in droves. Comparing a Triitron big screen TV to a convention CRT big screen TV at that point in time showed a drastic difference that led to people to paying hundreds and thousands of USD more for a Trinitron TV.

With LCD, there is very very little that is significantly noticeable to the general public. Hence the rapid growth by Samsung, LG, Vizio, etc. And those brands are now under attack by Chinese brands that can significantly undercut them with minimal loss in comparative image quality and checklist features for the general public.

In this environment Sony really has nothing to offer. The Bravia line subjectively might be 5% better than the best Samsung and LG TVs (debatable, with many AV enthusiasts going with Samsung for best in class IQ), but that's virtually unnoticeable for the vast majority of buyers. Meaning, why pay more for a Sony when you can get equal or better quality (subjectively) for much less money?

Dave means the screen, the FST. Trinitron wasn't a bubble like everyone else. I don't see anything particularly wrong with Sony exiting the consumer TV space as long as they keep their professional display arm. It'll be from here that any wonderful developments could happen, I think. But leaving TV and mobile, as I said before, would diminish their public brand.

They may not have a choice. There's virtually no money to be made in high end Android smartphones anymore when mid-level handsets often have more than enough performance for the vast majority of people, and can still tick off the same checklist features.

If Sony want to stay relevant in mobile phones, they'll have to find something other than Android to base it on. And they'll have to somehow convince people that it's better than Samsung phones on the high end (good luck) or better than the myriad cheaper Chinese phones on the low end.

Basically, there isn't a viable way for Sony to stay in the mobile phone business and still have a profitable or even break even mobile phone division. Look at it another way. Android phone are now entering a similar situation as PCs. The hardware is already good enough for the vast majority of people. Now it's a race to the bottom in price in order to grow the market. And we've all seen how Sony is doing in the PC business...

For TVs, Sony basically has to hope LG can greatly ramp up OLED panel production AND be one of the first partners for OLED panels from LG AND hope that OLED production by LG isn't so great that they can supply a lot of Sony's competitors with OLED panels. That will buy them a few years of relevancy but once the market catches up they'll be right back to where they are now. Little to nothing to differentiate themselves from competition that can offer similar IQ and features at a lower price.

Either that or they attempt to become one of the extremely high priced niche boutique TV providers. Unfortunately, they don't have the cachet to even attempt that.

Regards,
SB

 

[Shifty Geezer]

They may not have a choice. There's virtually no money to be made in high end Android smartphones anymore when mid-level handsets often have more than enough performance for the vast majority of people, and can still tick off the same checklist features.

I think the problem is the lack of ingenuity by phone designers. If I was in charge, I'd add HDMI in to my phone and allow people to use it as a video monitor. One expensive, super-gorgeous screen usable on your phone and with your camera. Better yet, design a component system where the one screen can be used across devices more tightly (possibly too niche) and drop the combined ownership of camera and phone by reusing some of the most expensive components. Of course, that idea is now not patentable so Sony couldn't secure it and the clones would come. But I'm sure there are far better design choices available and ways to differentiate. The problem is the mindset of dumb clones and generic, incremental improvements. Trinitron was born from Sony wanting to produce colour TVs, not wanting to license the existing tech, and experimenting until they found a better solution. If they went looking for more uses for phones (mobile computers), I'm sure their ingenuity could come up with great designs (and then their software will suck and let it down! )

 

[orangpelupa]

sony have modular wireless camera for android and ios and windows. Too bad their phone did not able to act as "Generic miracast receiver".

 

[Dave Baumann]

I think the problem is the lack of ingenuity by phone designers. If I was in charge, I'd add HDMI in to my phone and allow people to use it as a video monitor. One expensive, super-gorgeous screen usable on your phone and with your camera. Better yet, design a component system where the one screen can be used across devices more tightly (possibly too niche) and drop the combined ownership of camera and phone by reusing some of the most expensive components. Of course, that idea is now not patentable so Sony couldn't secure it and the clones would come. But I'm sure there are far better design choices available and ways to differentiate. The problem is the mindset of dumb clones and generic, incremental improvements. Trinitron was born from Sony wanting to produce colour TVs, not wanting to license the existing tech, and experimenting until they found a better solution. If they went looking for more uses for phones (mobile computers), I'm sure their ingenuity could come up with great designs (and then their software will suck and let it down! )

Meet USB Type C. All of this will be open to everyone soon.