No new TV size record to be set at CES 2009

A high-tech tradition is about to come grinding to a halt: There won't be a new record set for "largest TV on earth" at this January's Consumer Electronics Show. Panasonic's 150-inch plasma television, unveiled last year at the show, is almost certain to retain its title as the largest TV on earth.

According to discussions with the companies, neither of the two "big TV" challengers -- Panasonic and Sharp, which have alternated setting new records claiming the largest television on earth at CES for three years running -- will be breaking the record. And in fact, according to Panasonic, its 150-inch model may retain the record for years to come.

In an interview with Panasonic Professional Display Co. President Andrew Nelkin, he said that 150 inches was a natural stopping point, for a number of reasons. First, Nelkin says that 150 inches handily replaces a bank of nine 50-inch TVs in a three-by-three grid, and commercial outlets are interested in a single-device solution instead of having to position nine separate televisions and deal with the bezels in between each pair.

But the bigger issue is one of "real logistics problems": Beyond 150 inches, says Nelkin, it becomes nearly impossible to get the set into a building in one piece, even going through a window. Merely trying to ship such a TV set is also prohibitively expensive, let alone the cost of the TV itself.

Naturally there's technological hurdles too: Nelkin says someone would have to design a larger motherboard and Panasonic would have to retool its factories in order to handle something bigger than 150 inches.

Meanwhile, Panasonic's largest commercially available set is still 103 inches, as is Sharp's, and actually commercializing the 150-inch set is still an undertermined amount of time away. Nelkin says he thinks a bigger TV will happen -- eventually -- but he declined to speculate on how long that might take. For now, even if someone does surprise the market and one-up Panasonic with a larger display, Nelkin says he's "not concerned about the bragging rights." Selling the TVs the company already has in a terrible market is obviously enough to worry about.