Sony's Brain Drain May Stall a Rebound

To hear engineer Yoshinori Onoue tell it, designing the perfect television requires more than just engineering skills. It also takes the eye of an artist. “There’s a canvas on which you paint the picture, and that’s the panel,” the veteran of Sony explains. “Then you apply the colors,” he says, describing the three-year process to bring picture quality up to the exacting standards of Japanese consumers. “You can’t write an equation for it.”

The 32-inch model of the TV that Onoue and his handpicked team of engineers—many of them Sony veterans—developed was this summer rated best-in-class for picture quality by HiVi, Japan’s version of Consumer Reports. That was a big victory for Sony engineering. But not for Sony: The logo on the set belongs to LG Electronics.