The novel, multi-primary color or MPC chips, from Israeli electronics company Genoa Color Technologies in Herzlia Pituach, are set to deliver a picture that looks more like cinema than video, with truer, more vibrant color and a brighter image.

The first commercial release of the chips will be from industry giant Royal Philips Electronics next year, experts told United Press International.

The basic way color televisions work has not changed much since RCA introduced its first color set in 1954: colors are produced by combining shades of red, green and blue, also known as RGB, light. This is different from the colors on a movie screen, which are created by shining bright white light through colored film. This is why film images have always looked more detailed and natural than video.

It seems a little odd to make yellow by adding red and green together, Simon Lewis, Genoa's vice president of marketing, told UPI.

If you take the most expensive plasma screen, bring it to local cinema, and run the movie beside it, you'd be sick that you spent the kind of money you did on the plasma screen, Mark Bruce, a Genoa spokesman at HiTechPR in Rye, N.Y., told UPI.

The new Genoa chip adds up to three more colors, such as yellow and turquoise.

With this you see all of the colors of the rainbow. As opposed to the normal TV, which shows 55 percent of the color gamut, Genoa can show 90 to 95 percent -- the difference is astounding, Bruce said.

Television broadcast signals carry data on the full range of color in a picture, information that normally gets lost when converted for use on RGB screens. The new chips translate existing video data into pictures made with the additional colors with the help of advanced, real-time algorithms. When combined with new television screens such as liquid crystal displays, or LCDs, the result is images with the extra primary colors in their palette.

We can take any signal -- standard or high-definition, broadcast, satellite or cable, VCR or DVD or TiVo -- and can show that content in advanced form, Lewis said. We're not just adding colors, we're changing the way we state colors. White is not just made of red, green and blue, but all the primary colors, so the balance of white is coming off differently with the multi-primary color technology than with RGB screens.

The result is not only a much larger range of color, but up to 40 percent greater perception in brightness. It is like comparing an RGB array with a rainbow. The one presents only three colors while the other offers a wider selection.

I think it's extremely promising, said Josh Bernoff, a television industry analyst Forrester Research, a technology analysis firm in Boston. There are a lot of ways to improve television, he told UPI, and most of them involve either something extremely expensive for the consumer, such as buying a great big flat screen television, or changing the whole production of television, like the switch from regular to high-definition television. Genoa has done something very simple that can make a dramatic difference in visual technology.

Genoa will ship the first of the MPC chips in the third quarter of 2004, and Philips will introduce a new line of liquid crystal on silicon, or LCOS, rear-projection TV sets with the chips in 2005.

We see the value proposition of the multi-primary picture performance to be thoroughly compelling, said Andre Papoular, Philips Consumer Electronics senior vice president. The company will no longer sell regular RGB rear- projection sets, replacing them with sets bearing the MPC chips.

Though traditional, cathode-ray tube television sets cannot take advantage of the chip, liquid crystal sets are the target. I think you'll see this become a standard technology for LCD flat panel sets within the next three to four years, Bernoff said.

Lewis said Genoa is focused on penetrating the flat-screen LCD TV market, for at least 10 million units -- maybe to go as high as 18 to 20 million units. Leading manufacturers of LCD TVs include Sharp in Japan, Samsung and LG.Philips in Korea and CMO and AUO in Taiwan.

In theory, we expect to see that down the road -- 2006 or so -- multiple brands will be selling multi-primary color LCD televisions, Lewis said, noting his company is in talks with several LCD TV companies regarding the MPC chips.

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