Yesterday, Panasonic sold its first 3-D HDTVs at Best Buy in New York. For about $3,000, you can get a 50-inch 3-D plasma TV, a 3-D Blu-ray player and one pair of 3-D glasses (additional ones are available for about $150). Just the day before, Samsung announced that it will be selling three versions of 3-D TVs within the month and Sony stated that it will roll out 3-D TVs this June in Japan.

Samsung's sets will range from $1,699 to $6,999 and it will offer more versions in the spring and summer (some versions are already offered in South Korea). To coincide with the release of its first 3DTVs, Sony plans to release 3-D gaming software, most likely for its Playstation 3 system.

3-D Home Theaters have been available from Mitsubishi since 2007, at prices ranging between $1,500 and $4,200. Mitsubishi has also recently demoed a Nvidia driver that converts PC games in 3-D on its screens.

With so many 3-D TVs on the way, viewers will need something to watch. Satellite TV service DirecTV confirmed that it will offer three 3-D channels in June, while sports network ESPN plans to broadcast the soccer World Cup in June on its new 3-D channel.

The research firm DisplaySearch predicts that 3-D TVs will grow from the 0.2 million units sold in 2009, to over 1.2 million units this year, to 64 million units by 2018, with revenues forecast to reach $22 billion dollars by then. Currently, 3-D TV sets require viewers to wear 3-D glasses, but at some point in the future, consumers may be able to watch 3-D TV glasses-free.

Last night, at a Consumer Electronics Show event at the Palms Hotel, in Las Vegas, Mitsubishi gave a first look at its forthcoming line of flat-panel, high-definition displays. The company claims that the display "delivers a range of color never seen before in home entertainment." The display, called laser TV, uses laser as the light source, unlike liquid-crystal displays, which use a white backlight, and plasma displays, which use cells of charged gas to illuminate the screen. Mitsubishi representatives didn't supply a lot of details; they said only that the TV will ship to retailers later this year.

At the event, Mitsubishi showed off three 65-inch laser displays, which are currently being manufactured. (Gadget blog Engadget posted nice pictures here.) In addition, the company demonstrated how its laser TV could be used as a 3-D home theater. The company played clips from Beowulf, a football game, and U2's 3-D concert on its laser display. Viewers wore shutter glasses from RealD, a supplier of 3-D technology. Shutters on the lenses switched on and off--imperceptibly--60 times a second, synchronizing to a signal emitted from the display. (See "Hollywood's New 3-D Age.")

The basic premise behind laser TV is not entirely new. (See "Ultra-Colorful TV.") It's essentially a variant of digital light projection (DLP) technology developed at Texas Instruments. DLP chips are in most of the projectors used in business presentations, and they're found in home projection displays. A laser display is built a little differently, however. Instead of projecting light onto a screen from the front, lasers and the DLP chip are in the rear of the display, which allows it to be manufactured thinner than traditional front-projection systems.

The main difference with a laser display, however, is that it uses lasers as the light source. Usually, projection displays shine white light through a color wheel, and then it's projected onto the screen. This approach is inefficient, filtering out much of the original brightness. Laser displays use red, blue, and green lasers to directly deliver the color to the screen. Lasers not only have a brightness and color advantage over filtered white light, but they also have an advantage over light-emitting diode (LED) technology, another up-and-coming display backlight. The color produced by a laser is much more pure than that produced by an LED because the former allows for more-precise color combinations. The net result is an extremely crisp, lifelike image in which white is many times brighter than standard high-definition displays, and black is many times darker.

The laser displays at the Palms looked impressive to me, although Mitsubishi didn't show a side-by-side comparison with other displays. One of the more exciting aspects of these new displays, however, is that they use much less energy than other flat panels do, and they should quickly become less expensive than plasmas since the lasers can be mass-produced in semiconductor facilities.