Sony to Sell Wide-Screen TVs in Japan for $18,000

Sony Corp., jostling for position in the era of high definition TV, Thursday unveiled a wide-screen television it will market next month that will sell for nearly $18,000.

Sony says it is the first on the market with the product, a 36-inch TV with the same 16:9 width-to-height ratio as cinema screens. Conventional TVs have a 4:3 proportions.

The Sony television is capable of displaying high-definition TV images, but is currently not equipped with a tuner to receive them.

It will allow improved playback of laser discs shot in the CinemaScope standard, which has wide-screen proportions but leaves blanks at the top and bottom of normal screens.

Sony expects to sell 100 units a month in Japan at a retail price of 2.3 million yen ($17,700). It has no plans to export the machines.

The public Japan Broadcasting Corp. (NHK) began daily one-hour HDTV broadcasts last year. The government is considering expanding this to six to eight hours a day from December, 1991, with some programming to be produced by private networks, an NHK spokesman said.

Japan, the EC and the United States are split over HDTV broadcast standards and are expected to adopt divergent systems.

Having the most developed system, Japan is aggressively pursuing its own system, known as MUSE. It relies upon broadcast satellites and, unlike the U.S. and European systems, is incompatible with existing sets.

HDTV equipment is too expensive for most consumers, but the cost of an HDTV unit will fall to about 300,000 yen ($2,300) by 1999, predicts Martin Beresford, an analyst at Jardine Fleming Securities.

Japan’s Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications estimates that the Japanese market for HDTV will reach 14.5 trillion yen ($110 billion) by the year 2000.