Are you crazy?  Sony and Panasonic are bleeding money.  Samsung posted a record $6 billion profit including a 20% rise in TV panels.  They're the ones sucking out all the oxygen away from the others.

Oh, so this is another "deferred tax asset" thing, where they're not actually taking the loss, they're just losing a tax write-off that they could have made, which they have to report as a loss.

oh rlly? didnt know that lol

we have a couple months to go then, they have already lost billions already, this quarter is at least a little positive.

Ouch.

Sony TVs if you look around where I live are still somewhat not that rare to find (they are becoming each day more rare, though)

But a panasonic tv is rarer than a 3 Dollar (in this case Real) bill. The brand simply vanished.

Because LED-LCD TV panels are expensive to make and sold for cheap.  They don't sell enough high end panels whose only benefit is basically more HDMI ports and faster processor. I bought a 32" Samsung LED for my PS3 over the summer and payed only $280 or something insane like that.

Not to mention all the research costs needed to stay alive. They are dumping tons of resources to Ultra HD (3840x2160 aka 4K) which is coming quickly and just got its official name of Ultra HD. Then they are spending on OLED research which is also the future.

Ok now im just giddy with curiousity for Sonys report!

@Khan, on 3DO. The more you know.

Interestingly, when we bought out first widescreen TV, it was a Sony. Then, when we first jumped on the HDTV bandwagon, it was a Panasonic. The last 3/4 HDTVs that we have purchased have all been Samsung.

Our phones all used to be Sony, now they're Apple or Samsung (or RIM... but only until their contracts end).

Although our family have always been multi-console families, generally, the primary consoles were Sony, now it's Microsoft.

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And none of this can be blamed on anything other than being out-competed on product design.