It stands for Surface-conduction Electron-Emitter Display. Canon INC are the innovators of this display technology, they first began SED research in 1986. With advancements over time, they were able to conquer a milestone a historical turning point for television industry; one that is comparable to the initial introduction of CRT based televisions.
SED Panels will be able to deliver amazingly clear and vivid pictures with insane contrast ratios (up to 100,000:1) this is due to their light-beaming technology, which is somewhat similar to that of old-school Cathode-Ray Tube TV’s. They’re also thinner and have less power consumption compared to other displays currently available. The screen provides high brightness, similar to CRTs, but in a flat-panel form factor similar to plasmas.
SED is a promising new technology, but it’s actually more of a mixture of old and new technologies. It takes all the conventional characteristics of a CRT television and applies them a very thin flat television set. Just like a CRT, it uses a screen coated with phosphors. The phosphors emit light when they're hit by electrons which are accelerated by a voltage in the electron gun. A CRT usually does this with an electron gun that quickly moves the electron beams back and forth to paint a picture onto a screen. Unlike a CRT, which uses a single gun for this purpose, an SED display uses millions of very tiny micro-emitters. These are called surface-conduction electron emitters (SCEs). These microscopic emitters consist of a carbon layer that connects to a cathode and anode layer. When 10 Volts are applied to an SCE, the electrons excite the phosphor particles, those pixels will glow red, blue or green. Thanks to the persistence of vision...your brain combines these pixels of color to form a picture.
One of the very nice advantages about SED is that their screen sizes are not limited....as long as the display is able to maintain the integrity of the flat panel glass so that its strong enough to withstand the vacuum pressure that exists inside the set, its possible to increase the size to well over one hundred inches.