LCD Television is not a new technology. In the 1970's companies like AT&T, NEC, RCA and Panasonic experimented with flat screen television. Panasonic and RCA experimented with PLASMA and AT&T worked on Liquid Crystal Display (LCD).  The big problem then was the inability to get it bright enough to see in the daytime. By 1982 Casio came out with the first practical LCD TV. It was a portable black and white, and hard on batteries, poor picture quality and dim in bright light.  SONY stayed with the picture tube on the Watchman and second tier TV companies stayed with LCD. Epson / Seiko came out with the first Color LCD TV in 1983. Problem with early LCD TV was sharpness, color quality and brightness but much better than the 1970's. Seiko came out with the world's first wrist watch TV (LCD of course), which was featured in a James Bond movie "Octopussy". The LCD finally overcame many of the problems in the late 1990's. Casio and Sharp basically the lone companies producing mass production LCD's until companies started to get into the LCD boom including SONY, which changed all their CRT Watchmans to LCD models. Panasonic perfected PLASMA  for use in Big Screen Flat Screen's in the early 2000's