A TV screen battle is set to break out at this year's CES, not between plasma and LCD but between OLED and LCD. So is LCD TV dead? Not according to Scott Birnbaum of Samsung.

He is the vice president for liquid crystal displays sales  for Samsung Semiconductor. That unit of the South Korean electronics giant makes the panels used by sister company Samsung Electronics and other TV makers to build televisions, computers, cellphones and an expanding array of other gizmos.

Indeed, Mr. Birnbaum's job is mainly to pitch his products to billboard companies. Samsung has a new line of panels that are more resistant to harsh weather and meant to be easier to see in bright sunlight.

Like all semiconductor businesses, L.C.D. panels are subject to wide swings of supply and demand. These days, Mr. Birnbaum said, demand is outstripping supply and so profit margins are up nicely.

"There weren't enough displays to go around," he said. Samsung, he said, has the largest market share for L.C.D. panels used in computer monitors and televisions.

It takes 18 months and lot of money to build a new plant to make the panels. And a few years ago there was a glut of L.C.D.s on the market so many companies scaled back their investment. Samsung, however, along with Sony, built a new plant that opened in July in Samsung's vast L.C.D. compound in Tangjeong, South Korea. It is what is called a Generation 8 plant, meaning that it fabricates 8.2 foot wide glass sheets that can be cut efficiently into 50-inch panels. Those sizes are becoming every more popular as the prices go down (though not as fast as the prices have dropped in the past).

The earlier Generation 7 plants are designed for 40-inch and 46-inch panels. Of course you can cut some 50- inch panels out of the big glass, but there is more waste.

Why not cut the excess from those panels into smaller screens for laptops or even cell phones? Mr. Birnbaum said that the factories are not designed to do this. Indeed, despite the explosion of small gizmos with color screens—MP3 players, cellphones, digital picture frames and so on—supplies of smaller LCD panels are tight, with prices going up. Since all the new investment is going into factories to make the very largest televisions, he added, there is not much new capacity in the industry for smaller sized panels.

"You can't build cellphones in a Gen 7 fab," he said. "This is creating problems for the industry because demand is increasing as is the amount of square millimeters required for the larger smart phones."
Samsung is trying to insulate itself from discounting, he said, by emphasizing higher-end panels with extra features. For televisions, it has various technologies it claims make images brighter with more contrast and less blur. One example is using a checkerboard of light-emitting diodes to provide backlight for the screen (instead of fluorescent tubes). This allows the set to dim certain squares as needed to help make dark areas of the image blacker. These features, he said, can add 30 percent or more to the wholesale price of a panel.

With the demand still high, Samsung can concentrate on these higher-margin products and not compete with the Taiwanese companies to supply panels to the low-price TV brands like Vizio.
Mr. Birnbaum said he expects the good times to last, in part because customers are likely to replace their L.C.D. sets much more often than their old C.R.T. sets.

"The difference between C.R.T. and L.C.D. is not how long the TV will last but how long is that technology good for," he said. "When you bought a C.R.T. TV, the only big change you saw was the change from black-and-white to color." L.C.D. sets are getting bigger, and increasing in resolution and quality, leading to a market similar to computers.

"You may have bought a PC that will last for a long time, but the technology changes, and that's why you upgrade," he said.
Mr. Birnbaum is looking toward a day when what is called high definition today is simply not good enough.
"The next wave of resolution will be 8 times the resolution of H.D.," he predicted of high-definition sets, noting that Samsung expects to start making displays that are roughly 2000 pixels by 4000 pixels. The company hasn't started building a plant that would do this, but it is starting to talk about the idea with potential customers.

"We're not trying to force the market to move," he said. "But sometimes technology surprises you and things pull in much quicker than you expect.