Dr. Yoshida was also was involved as one of the scientists when the first 45-inch full-spec HD TV was born at the Kameyama Plant in 2004.
He tried to render the R (red), G (green), and B (blue) of each color using a finer resolution of 1,024 color gradations (10 bits) rather than the conventional 256 color gradations (8 bits).
At the time, he dared to insist on 10 bits even in the face of a majority of voices that said 8 bits was enough.

In his school days, he majored in image processing.
Dr. Yoshida says, “It was hammered into me to optimize by evaluating with my own eyes.” So he put an 8-bit monitor on his desk and stared at it for a long time.
Ordinarily, it wouldn’t matter, but in dark areas of video images, such as in a movie, the color gradations weren’t rendered smoothly and uniformly. To his eyes, they appeared banded on the screen.
Dr. Yoshida’s eyes told him that 8 bits were not enough.

Dr. Yoshida has two kinds of “professional eyes.”
One is the eyes that look at video images.
And the other is the eyes that look ahead three years into the future.
What technology will come to dominate then?
If you misjudge the future, it’s likely you will fall behind rival manufacturers.
In 2004, at the point when full-spec HD TV had been perfected, Dr. Yoshida suspected that, in three years, double-speed 120-Hz technology would become the mainstream.
Every manufacturer was beginning to work on technology to eliminate motion artifacts, and a variety of approaches were being studied.
But no one dared to take up the challenge of developing double-speed 120-Hz technology for full-spec HD TV, which was extremely difficult.
“I wanted to do it to live up to the name of Sharp in LCDs.”
He set a clear-cut goal.
“Let’s tackle squarely what is most difficult, what no one has ever done before. I thought this is what I would do.”
Thus, development of Double-Speed Full-Spec HD LCD Technology began.

Certainly, it was a difficult goal to achieve.
First of all, the cost barrier stood in the way. For a full-spec HD TV, component costs would be twice or more compared to conventional models. Under such circumstances, it would be completely impossible to make a product for consumer use in the home.
And his stubbornness as an engineer made development still more difficult.
“Just saying, ‘Look, we got an image twice as beautiful by doubling the number of frames,’ is not enough to get attention. To surprise or impress consumers, we have to at least be able to say, ‘Look, we got four times better performance by doubling the density.’”

Dr. Yoshida says that new technologies first get launched by surprising someone.
If you don’t surprise your colleagues and shock your boss, your project will go nowhere.

This was the case with double-speed full-spec HD technology.
He had to use his eyes to keep looking for that surprise and shock because neither measurement methods nor measuring equipment existed.

The only thing he could rely on were his eyes. The development team worked hard to chase down and solve problems with full-motion video.
“Just doubling the number of frames improved image quality, but that wouldn’t be enough. We had to do something more.”

The reality was that LCD TVs had been advancing rapidly over the pervious several years, and motion artifacts had nearly been eliminated. Therefore, just doing that much wouldn’t be enough of a surprise.

What he focused on, although it may seem a bit surprising, were captions or subtitles on the screen.
He uncompromisingly stuck to the development of a special algorithm that did not simply increase the number of frames but would also eliminate the motion artifacts from crawling text titles.

Three years passed.
Sharp’s Double-Speed 120-Hz Full-Spec HD LCD Technology was perfected. The engineering team had incorporated ingenuity and innovation in a way that not only made text crawls beautifully legible without annoying the viewer, but also enabled the optimum image rendering for all kinds of video content.

Dr. Yoshida laughs. “What is it that I’m actually doing?’ It’s a secret...but what I realized is that double the density, and you get four, no, six times better performance...”
The persistence behind Dr. Yoshida’s eyes once again boosted LCD technology one step higher.

Dr. Yoshida has had many invitations to present technical papers to international academic societies.
People say that there was a tremendous response when he announced this Double-Speed Advanced Super View LCD Technology in May.

“I actually felt that international attention was focused on Sharp more to see in what direction digital imaging would be moving rather than on any individual technology.”

So then, what kind of era will we be entering in the future?

“For example, monitors at TV broadcast stations are still CRT-based. These will change to LCDs, too. When that happens, the way of shooting images itself will change. It feels like a new image culture centered around large-screen LCDs is about to take off, and I am standing on its starting line.”

What Dr. Yoshida’s eyes are seeing now is the digital imaging of the future in 2010, three years hence, and that could be something we’ve never seen before.