By David Ponce

It’s no news that the LCD playing field is getting increasingly crowded. Yet, that doesn’t stop newcomers from trying to make inroads in what was a $14billion market in 2006, with varying levels of success. One company that recently caught my eye is VisionQuest. I happen to have visited a friend of mine that owns a Visionquest LCD, and I got curious: the thing is gorgeous! Sleek, sexy and better yet: pretty cheap. It made me want to buy one, but I decided to do some research on the company first, and this is what I found.

Visionquest is a Singaporean company who recently chose Jimmy Davlouros as their General North American Manager. Davlouros is BenQ Canada’s former COO, who brings his years of experience to the table and hopes to push sales to $100million within the first year. How? Well, for starters, their products are hot. Take the sub-$1,000 LVQ-32EF1A (pictured above), from their higher-end Rembrandt line. It’s a 32inch HDTV LCD with more connections than you can shake a stick at: 1 HDMI, 2 HD Component (Y Pb Br), plus standard component and S-video inputs and PC/Mac VGA. This way you can connect anything, be it your old VCR, your PS3 or even your computer.

With display capabilities of 480i, 480p, 720p, and 1080i and a 1,200:1 contrast ratio, the image looks great, and a quick 8ms response time makes for blur-free action sequences. The panel is encased in a piano-black finish, which also happens to be a touchpad that allows you to control volume, channels and power. Finally, it comes with HDCP so you wont be locked out of any DRM-laden DVD releases. All this for under $1,000? Yeah, that’s right.

But how can Davlouros be so confident to reach $100million in sales in the first year? Well, his strategy is to focus on and cater to the independent channel. There are about 12,000 independent resellers in Canada alone, and by taking care of them, Davlouros hopes to make inroads. Specifically, he plans to offer these resellers margins in the 20% range, in a market that is used to getting below 5%. That alone should give his product line a shot in the arm.

With a solid product, and a reseller channel finally excited to be selling something, you can bet that you’ll be seeing more VisionQuest products on store shelves in the months to come. Right now however, the panels are a little hard to find. You can visit the link below to find a retailer near you.

[ VisionQuest ]

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