At a last-week joint news conference at the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce, Sony Corp. President Kazuo Hirai and Olympus president Hiroyuki Sasa announced that Sony's three-dimensional (3D) imagery and super-clear "4K" display technology will come aboard the endoscopes and other surgical tools manufactured by the scandal-hit Olympus.

With the newly-announced Sony-Olympus alliance underscoring plans for having both `3D and 4K' technologies in Olympus' surgical tools, the deal will essentially have Sony as the foremost shareholder in losses-ridden Olympus; with an 11 percent stake, resulting from an investment of nearly 50 billion yen ($640 million).

Noting that Sony - which already has a noteworthy foothold in the consumer electronics, movies, music, and games arena - had decided to team up with Olympus in its attempts to extend into the medical-equipment business, Hirai said that the Sony-Olympus collaboration in the digital-camera sphere is also apparently in the offing.

Though Hirai refrained from disclosing the precise timeline for the release of the first medical-equipment products of the Sony-Olympus alliance, he did admit that the companies will have to go through a long regulatory approval process pertaining specially to medical equipment.

In addition, Hirai also added that Sony's collaboration with Olympus marks a "challenge in a new sector," and revealed that Sony is looking to grab over 20 percent of the medical-equipment-for-surgery market by 2020, when the sector will likely experience a growth of up to approximately 330 billion yen ($4 billion).