Irvine-Based Mitsubishi to Develop Fully Digital TV

Irvine-based Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America will develop a fully digital television that will allow people to perform some computer functions on a TV but at super-high resolution, the company announced Tuesday.

Mitsubishi, which makes large-screen projection televisions and has a large part of the nascent high-definition television market, said it plans to debut its first completely digital television late next year. The high-end sets, which will sell for about $9,000, will feature Texas Instruments Inc.’s digital light processing technology.

“There are a lot of functions today that we consider to be computer functions that will be migrating to the television,” said Robert Perry, Mitsubishi’s director of marketing.

Among those functions are Web-browsing and e-mail, although the television will never take over all the roles of a computer, Perry said.

Mitsubishi’s new televisions will also cut in half the footprint taken up by the large-screen television, Perry said. A 50-inch projection television is 29 inches deep.

Current technologies that use televisions for Web browsing, such as WebTV Networks, convert the digital signal from the Internet into an analog one to be displayed on the television screen, reducing the resolution of the image.