Sanyo begins making LCDs planned for FC in Tijuana

Liquid crystal display televisions that were expected to be built at the Sanyo plant in Forrest City are now in production at the companys Tijuana, Mexico facility.

In December, Sanyo officials announced that the increasing demand for flat screen televisions was forcing the company to lay off more than one-third of its local workforce because the plant has traditionally produced cathode ray (picture tube) televisions (CRT), which are becoming obsolete. Orders for those have declined from 1.5 million in 2004 to less than an anticipated 300,000 sets for fiscal year 2007, which begins April 1, company officials have said.

When the layoffs were announced, company officials said they were negotiating a collective bargaining agreement with the International Union of Electronics, Electrical, Technical, Salaried, Machine and Furniture Workers-Communication Workers of America (IUE-CWA) to cover the new operations.

Gadget Guy: Buying Affordable HDTVs

Has the high price of high definition television kept you from making the plunge into HDTV? The prices are coming down, but you need to be careful about what you get for the money.Walk into any TV showroom and there will be big screens in all price ranges. One growing segment caters strictly to the budget conscious.A lot of companies have cropped up to make discount televisions, said Ryan Brown with Magnolia Home Theater. Personally, I found a lot of those to be somewhat problematic or at least a compromise.Still-- you can get a good picture at a good price-- about a thousand dollars for a 42-inch screen. And, if you can accept a much smaller picture, sets that use conventional picture tube technology can give you a pretty good HD picture for hundreds less. Those TVs have always been less expensive but retained a picture quality that is very high, Brown said.