Mitsubishi Plans Television Research Center : Electronics: The $11-million facility, scheduled to open in October, will employ more than 100 people in the county.

CYPRESS — Mitsubishi Consumer Electronics America Inc. said Monday it will open a television research center that will employ more than 100 engineers and other professionals in Orange County.

The company, a subsidiary of Japan’s giant Mitsubishi Electric Corp., said it will invest about $11 million to establish the research center at a leased site that has not yet been chosen. It is scheduled to open in October.

The center will give engineers the flexibility to respond to the demands of the American market, said Jack Osborn, president and chief operating officer of Mitsubishi’s audio-video division.

The parent company historically “has been relatively inflexible in adopting technology for this market,” Osborn said.

For example, U.S. consumers demand better sound in top-of-the-line TV sets than buyers in other markets expect, he said.

The rise of software standards for new programming formats also helped persuade Mitsubishi’s headquarters to shift engineering operations, Osborn said.

In opening the design center, Mitsubishi is following the lead of other Japanese consumer electronics companies who do design work in the United States, including Toshiba America’s Consumer Products group, which has a facility in Princeton, N.J., and Sony Corp., which has about 120 engineers and designers in San Diego.

“It’s perfectly natural to do manufacturing over here, since TVs are big items,” said Gary Shapiro, a vice president for consumer electronics at the Electronics Industries Assn., a Washington-based trade group. “Then companies realized that they needed to do more engineering here as well.”

“All the features that were being added into products left American consumers overwhelmed with features they didn’t necessarily want,” he said.

Craig Eggers, a product manager at Toshiba’s Wayne, N.J., office, cited the U.S. closed-captioning standard as a technology that forced manufacturers to respond quickly. On the other hand, televisions sold in the United States don’t need to process as much text on-screen, as is standard in Europe and the Middle East, he said.

“If you’re going to do business in this market,” Eggers said, “you need to respond to the things that make the market different.”

The Mitsubishi center will open with a staff of 35 transferred from the company’s current operations in Kyoto, Japan. The rest will be hired here over the next three years, Mitsubishi said.

Mitsubishi Electric America has 4,500 employees, 800 of whom are in Orange County.

Besides its Cypress headquarters, the company has a projection TV plant in Santa Ana. It also makes conventional televisions and VCRs in Georgia.