>> What, you think Sony just happened to find the "Convert 60 Hz 1080p 
>> signal into 240 Hz" IC in the RS catalogue whilst their competitors 
>> couldn't?
>
> I presumed they were using an off-the-shelf DSP chip with a custom image 
> processing program.

Presumably none are fast or flexible enough within reasonable cost.  Same 
reason why Canon has its Digic IC and doesn't just an off-the-shelf IC.

> Really? There aren't higher-speed CPU or DSP chips you can use?

Probably an overkill (in terms of size, power and cost) if you only want it 
to do a specific task very well.  You don't want a dual core x86 CPU (with 
associated heatsink and fans) inside your HD camcorder just to compress 
MPEG4 video in real time, or inside your TV to calculate in between frames 
:-)

> I wouldn't notice power consumption, brightness and thickness I haven't 
> seen any noticable difference,

Brightness and power consumption are linked, usually brightness is kept 
roughly constant now and power consumption is reduced.  You must have seen 
the new LCD TVs that are only 10 or 15 mm thick?  5 years ago that would 
have been impossible.

> I'd be surprised if a company would pay somebody full-time just to make 
> stuff that they only use to make sure their real products work.

Err why would you be surprised?  It's a necessary activity to be able to 
test your own products!

> Out of curiosity, what's the job?

The electrical version of what I do.  You would like the FPGA/VHDL stuff, 
but it would also involve analogue stuff (EMC issues mainly), talking to 
customers and travelling abroad, so you definitely wouldn't like it :-) 
There would probably also be opportunity to do some research on electronics 
on glass for various display-related stuff, I've seen quite a few patent 
applications about digital circuits come out from that group (eg how to do 
effects based on the previous frame without needing the RAM to store a whole 
frame, novel layouts for bidirectional shift registers, allowing certain 
parts of the circuits to be powered down during certain times, that kind of 
thing).

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