Genoa Reinvents Color Television Fifty Years After Its Introduction

1-Jul-04

The basic color elements of television have not changed much since 1954; a half-century after RCA introduced the first color set, the RGB (red, green, and blue) system used then still prevails. But Israeli company Genoa Color Technologies has broken the RGB barrier by adding one to three primary colors such as yellow, cyan and magenta, thus expanding - from 55- to 95-percent - the coverage of the visible color gamut. The promised result of this multi-primary color (MPC) technology is a television picture that, with its truer, more vibrant color and brighter image, looks more like cinema than video. ""Genoa Color has advanced the industry with this breakthrough,"" said Ron Mintz, owner of The Listening Room in Scarsdale, N.Y., a company that specializes in sophisticated home theater installations. ""In a showroom setting where every set is tuned to the same movie or program, it will be difficult for the picture quality of RGB TVs to compete against that of Genoa-enhanced sets."" Last year Genoa and Royal Philips Electronics agreed to jointly develop Genoa's MPC system for display applications. Andre Papoular, Senior Vice President of Philips Consumer Electronics, said: ""Our strategic partnership with Genoa will move to the next level in the near future when we introduce a new line of LCOS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon) rear projection TVs comprising Genoa's multi-primary technology. We see the value proposition of the multi-primary picture performance to be thoroughly compelling."" Genoa uses advanced real-time algorithms and modifications to the color display elements to translate existing video data into multi-primary color, recreating the three-dimensional gamut of film. The result is a much larger range of color and a higher brightness efficiency than what is possible using the RGB model. Television performance has been limited by the need to trade off the range of possible colors for the brightness of the display but Genoaís MPC technology offers both a larger color gamut and as much as 40 percent greater brightness. In the third quarter of 2004 Genoa will ship the first of its MPC-enabling chips. Genoa has over 40 patents pending that apply to the concepts, processes, algorithms and implementation of the MPC technology. The development team comprises several of Israel's leading scientists in the fields of electro-optics, optical spectroscopy, solid-state physics and related algorithms. Genoa takes its name from the overlapping sail that extends beyond the reach of the mainsail on a racing yacht (it is triangular in shape as is a chromaticity diagram). ""Consumers of home entertainment devices are demanding enhanced quality and Genoa Color is poised to meet that challenge and more, dramatically transforming the television viewing experience,"" said Genoa CEO Ilan Ben-David. ""Genoa aims to become an essential player in the consumer electronics industry.î For more information about Genoa, please visit www.genoacolor.com.

Read More:
http://www.genoacolor.com