Our lounge rooms are dominated by them, and most of our entertainment comes from them, but have you ever wondered how a television is made? Last time we looked at the design process, and how the bezel was made. This time we'll tour the nearby LCD factory where the panels themselves are made.
Compared to Samsung, LG's LCD factory at Paju felt like a ghost town — despite housing thousands of people on-site. Of course, the sub-zero temperatures at the time probably accounted for that. It was also doubly eerie because the LCD plant is the tallest building visible from North Korea — as it's so close to the border — and the army base built next door to protect it probably makes it even more of a target!
As VIPs we got to visit the "Victory Tower" on the top floor of the plant, and while you can see across the border with the naked eye they have a telescope set up so you can get a better view. All you can see are the empty "office buildings" built by North Korea and we felt a bit like we were peering into our neighbour's bedroom. However, we were quite tickled at the thought of someone with a telescope peeking back at us and trying to work out what the South Koreans were up to today.
While televisions of one type or other have been in Australia for over 50 years, they have gone through several changes, with flat panels the latest iteration. LCD TVs have been mainstream products for about four years, but what makes them tick? This year we were fortunate enough to have visited both the Samsung and LG plants in South Korea to get a better understanding of how an LCD TV is made, and what the future holds for the technology.
Samsung is one of the world's largest manufacturers of LCD panels, and it claims to produce one out of every four in the world. One of Samsung's largest facilities is in Tangjeong, 80km south of Seoul. Samsung has four different plants on this site, and this is where the joint Sony/Samsung S-LCD plant was first built — and still produces Sony panels to this day. CNET Australia visited Tangjeong recently and while we not only got a squiz at the production lines, we also met with the engineers and designers who helped make them possible.
Samsung's two main facilities had dozens of 20-something year olds wandering around sculpted gardens with huge planters filled with purple flowers acting as road dividers. They felt more like universities than industrial think tanks.
Inside the factory
The Tangjeong factory is a large facility south of Seoul, and produces panels for the five-year-old S-LCD collaboration between Sony and Samsung. As a result of this union, Sony owns part of the production lines on the Tangjeong site — this equates to 50 per cent of the L7-1 line, plus half of the combined L8 (1 and 2) lines. The L8-2 factory has only come online in the last month.
Samsung has begun planning its ninth plant, which will produce its Generation 11 panels (L9), and this will fit in behind the two existing factories. It will be capable of producing much larger panels than the L8 plant with 40, 62 and 72 inches possible.
We got to see one of the L7 (no relation to the LA-based band) lines in operation, after donning the fetching blue shoe covers. Unfortunately, we were unable to take photos inside the LCD factory, as apparently corporate espionage is a big problem. However, we'll do our best to explain the long corridor with its helpful blue signs and series of LCD panels in various states of undress explaining each part of the process.
The set-up to these "demonstration" factory lines doesn't seem to change from factory to factory, but we wouldn't appreciate working in one of these "fish bowl" situations. Imagine if you had to work behind a long glass corridor with all of your things labelled with blue signs and thousands of strangers peering in at you. It's like a factory zoo!
There were several different "lines" in each factory — each doing a different sized panel. Apparently it takes three days to convert one line to produce another size, so there is some redundancy built into the system to cover for any downtime.
Ty Pendlebury travelled to South Korea as a guest of Samsung.
Sony owns half of the L8 facility on the left, and a quarter of the L7 facility on the right. Behind them is the proposed site for the L9 plant.
