Rear-projection TVs (RPTVs) now provide superior image quality, but the price is still too high, so affordable laser-based RPTVs will not be available commercially for about three years. Companies building solid state lasers for the application are under pressure to make them at less cost and to streamline methods for large volume RPTV manufacturing. Colin Seaton of Coherent says the display is very forgiving in terms of laser parameters, and that those in the display industry are not concerned about beam quality or noise. If a laser has 10% noise, the eye will not see it, so laser design needs only to be as good as it must be for a specific application. Manufacturability, however, is very important. Where the emphasis recently has been on compact blue and green devices, red is the most critical of the three colors in a projection display. What is actually driving the application is development of compact blue and green solid-state technology. Coherent is mostly working on optically pumped semiconductor (OPS) lasers and had demonstrated a compact RGB source for projection displays based on the OPS technology for 460nm blue and 530nm green and a 638nm red diode laser, with each yielding more than 4W. That result is sufficient to light up a large RPTV screen. Coherent says it has developed next generation solid-state laser technology that should apply to various applications, including displays. Also discussed are the development efforts of Novalux, Quinitessence Photonics, Lumileds, and Osram.