Now that we have had some time to collect our thoughts on the recent CEDIA Expo. We'd like to talk about the companies that we visited and what we saw. Use the following as a guide to follow along with the discussion on the podcast. We have provided as many links as we can to help in your information gathering. So here we go in no particular order...
Panasonic
Saw the 103" Plasma with a PS3 connected to it. They were demoing a racing game. It looked lifelike. Also saw the
LIFI TVs. Nice looking cabinet, very good color, but it seemed like it was set up for the show room floor. You could see some Silk Screen Effect. We are certain that if properly calibrated the SSE would be minimized.
Olevia
Saw the 65 inch LCoS (665H). Looked good and with an MSRP of $1999 its a lot of bang for the buck.
LG
The
BH200 will be shipping in Mid October for $999. Both formats fully supported and both looked fantastic in their booth.
Tivo
Multi room viewing will be supported in November at no extra cost. It will work on both wired and wireless networks. Wireless networks may require buffering of content before the recording plays. Rhapsody support coming. Price drop on series three. They announced Crestron support via Ethernet. They are capturing aggregate information about what commercials we are watching and are providing feedback to the industry to help them create commercial that will be more useful to viewers. They demoed the very cool swivel search powered by IMDB (for a description listen to the podcast).
Dolby
Saw a new demo of Dolby Volume. Look for it in AVRs towards the end of 2008. I also found out that all but the first two models of the Samsung Blu Ray players support Dolby True HD. You may need a firmware update so if you have a Blu Ray player (except for the first two Samsung models) make sure you have the latest firmware. We were given three copies of the Dolby True HD samples for HD DVD and Blu Ray. Braden and I are looking into another contest with these Discs as giveaways.
Microsoft
Saw the three new
Media Center Extender devices from D-Link, Linksys, and Niveus Media. These devices look like they fit in a home theater environment. They support Dual Band Wireless N. These boxes are very quiet. They will range in price from a couple hundred dollars to possibly over a thousand dollars. At the high end the Niveus Media has huge heat sinks for quiet passive cooling. It also has the most video processing power so the flow of the menus look smoother. But all play back HD without a hitch. The Linksys and D-Link will release wireless N routers to coincide with the launch of the extender devices. Features include:
- Support for new media formats, including DivX, Xvid, Windows Media Video HD and H.264
- HDMI and 1080p to support HD video
- Support for up to four cable cards (up from two)
