![[Engineer Interview] JVC's Drive to Create — We asked Junichi Hasegawa, a group leader from the Engineering Department of Display Category, about creating JVC televisions with high picture quality.](images/interview_img_01.jpg)
How would you describe your drive to create?
JVC was the first company in Japan to develop a television receiver, so we have a long history — over sixty years, in fact. And it is precisely because of that long history that, with each generation of TV, we aim at achieving a picture quality that people will see as superb. This is always our goal, and we are working hard every day to achieve it.
How do you go about development?
In the Engineering Department, each specialist is engaged in the development process as a member of a team. The fact that this gathering of engineers from each specialised field is working on development, each of them with a strong drive to create, is something that contributes immensely to overall picture quality, product quality, and performance. Of this I am sure.
When developing LCD TVs, what sort of objectives did you have for the design?
Recently, just about all of the TV manufacturers have been announcing, one after another, top-of-the-range televisions for the consumer market featuring Full HD panels, Full HD input, and so on. Understandably, some people are of the opinion that the television is a mature product that now meets all our current needs. But I don't agree with that.
The flat panel display, which is now the mainstream product, is still evolving — from being a simple information display device to reaching a point at which it can really express the thoughts and even the artistic sensibilities of the people responsible for the content. Yet there are still several limitations on its expressive capabilities. We are making use of JVC's original technologies to push back the boundaries so we can create the sort of picture quality that can communicate with the viewer on a higher level.
Could you be more specific?
- Image processing engine
Well, at JVC we have this phrase genshoku-tankyu — that is, the pursuit of the original colours. It dates back to the era of analogue televisions and expresses our strong feelings about picture quality. It's like saying "This is what colours and images should really look like," or "If that's what something should look like, then it should look the same way on television."
Of course, television is partly about entertainment, so it is not simply a matter of ensuring faithful reproduction: at the same time, we are aiming to awaken memories in the TV viewer, presenting him with images that he feels are even more beautiful.
We are in a new era now, with new formats being introduced: CRTs have given way to LCDs, analogue to digital, and so on. The evolution of new technologies also gives rise to new problems, but at JVC we have always taken the same approach. We aim to create products that make the viewer feel almost as if he were there, experiencing that spontaneous thrill and viewing that beautiful scene firsthand. To do this, we are continually pushing the envelope, refining technologies, and finding new ways to create the sort of beautiful pictures that can appeal directly to the mind of the viewer.
Is there anything special that you have been focusing on in the development of LCD TVs recently?
We are concentrating on the development of an image processing engine that can realise the high picture quality I was just talking about, and also on ways to reduce the motion blur that has been a characteristic of LCDs.
Could you provide a brief explanation of those?
Our high picture quality image processing engine is DynaPix. There are different versions of it to suit different types of display panels, but they all basically function in the same way — detecting the features and quality of the input signal, reducing various types of noise depending on the quality, and ensuring optimum tuning of contours, contrast and colours for the whole picture. What really makes DynaPix stand apart from the crowd is its speed, processing 50/60 images a second, in real time. And since it achieves optimum tuning for each input image, tailored to the specific JVC panel being used, we can always be sure of delivering beautiful, high-resolution pictures of a quality never seen before.
We have also developed a driver to reduce LCD motion blur — the 100Hz/120Hz Clear Motion Drive. Simply speaking, this is original technology for ensuring that moving images are displayed sharply and without blur, despite the fact that LCD TVs are known to fall short when it comes to handling objects that are moving fast on the screen. It does this by doubling the frame rate. When fed a picture signal at 50/60 frames per second, it performs very precise calculations to create a new image in between every two frames, thus doubling the number of frames to 100/120 per second. This technology is designed to ensure that images appear smoother, brighter, and sharper.
What did you find particularly difficult in this development work?
As I explained, the DynaPix engine performs optimum processing for each frame. To accomplish this, we have drawn on all the experience and expertise JVC has built up over the years and reproduced that expert knowledge in image processing software, so the chip can do our job for us.
Even if we can achieve spectacular results for a single input image, that particular tuning is not necessarily optimum for other images. It was no easy task to develop a program that can always perform optimum processing for whatever image we input.
As for the 100Hz/120Hz Clear Motion Drive, it was first necessary to develop an algorithm for creating new frames. If it is not possible to accurately estimate the movement in a picture and use that information to create a precisely interpolated image, you will of course fail to improve motion blur. But it's worse than that: you will actually be introducing an inferior image, and this will effectively reduce picture quality rather than increase it.
It was, needless to say, a tough job for us, developing a highly accurate algorithm as well as the dedicated chip for it, and simultaneously developing an LCD panel that could handle the double frame rate — all the time optimising the capabilities of each of these elements.
Last year [2006] our competitors realised just how effective the 100Hz/120Hz drive LCD television is — in 2005 JVC became the first manufacturer in the world to develop and market this — so they soon followed suit. I believe that this will become the standard technology for LCD televisions from now on.
We are satisfied that we have been able to score a world-first by developing something that will rewrite the technology roadmap for the LCD TV industry, but we also want to make further strides in developing newer technologies.
Finally, is there anything you would like to add?
As engineers we always feel our goal is to be the first in the world to develop something new that has the potential to rewrite the roadmap, to change the course of future technological trends.
JVC is always looking into the future, developing technologies that match changes in formats and materials — technologies that would not exist without JVC. And we are committed to creating products that will appeal to a large proportion of customers.
