By Juro Osawa
If you were to spend over $30,000 on one item, what would you buy? A car? How about a TV?
Japan’s Sharp Corp. has just unveiled its most expensive television set to date: the 60-inch ICC Purios, which has a price tag of Y2,625,000 ($31,283) and a resolution that is much higher than that of conventional high-definition TVs. Sharp plans to start selling the Purios in Japan from Feb. 20 on a made-to-order basis, but hasn’t yet decided whether to sell it overseas.
Sharp’s new TV debuts at a time when the company’s survival is at stake. The Osaka-based electronics maker is struggling to overcome a cash crunch and continued losses from its mainstay operations. Earlier this month, Qualcomm Inc. agreed to invest up to $120 million in the company.
The TV market is a tough battlefield, with fierce price wars putting constant pressure on TV makers’ margins. Sharp isn’t the only manufacturer of TVs using the so-called 4K displays that boast four times the resolution of full HD screens. Sony Corp. last month started selling an 84-inch TV with a 4K LCD display for Y1.68 million apiece. In December last year, Toshiba Corp. released a 55-inch 4K TV, which cost around Y750,000, and the company plans to launch an 84-inch model next spring.
Why does Sharp’s 4K TV cost so much more than rival products? Sharp believes that some consumers – albeit a minority — are so conscious about the quality of images on TV screens that they wouldn’t mind the higher cost.
“There may be other 4K TVs on the market, but our 4K TV offers images that are so realistic that viewers feel as if they were experiencing the scene in real life,” a spokeswoman said.
Spokesmen from Toshiba and Sony said they can’t comment on Sharp’s new 4K TV because they haven’t seen it themselves.
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