soopa

I've been posting news tidbits piecemeal in here and the gaming forum since yesterday, but news is starting to come in fast and will be coming in even faster tomorrow.

Let's discuss what's on tap for HT & Electronics for 2007 here. Feel free to post any CES news you feel relevant.

First up, Samsung's 2007 LCD/Plasma/DLP/CRT line-up. Highlights include:
- 58-inch 802.11n WIRELESS and HDMI 1.3 enabled 58" Plasma for an amazingly cheap $5699
- "65F" series LCD's will sport HDMI 1.3, USB 2.0 and an AMAZING 12,000:1 contrast ratio!!! That's nearly double what's available now. Available in 40, 46, & 52-inch sizes. Prices announced shortly.
- "UltraSlim" wall-mountable LED-backlit DLP's in 50, 56, and 61-inch sizes

soopa

Sharp want's to remain a competitor with their 2007 TV lineup.

Their D92-series LCD's will feature even more amazing 15,000:1 contrast ratios. 4-millisecond response times, and 120-Hz refresh rates. I'd bet even the harshest LCD critics will be able to find something to snarl at here.

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-...you-226771.php

soopa

WOW, don't know how I missed this, but Samsung is also introducing their 81-Series LCD's with - wait for it - 50,000:1 contrast-ratios.

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-...tio-226715.php

That's just pure insanity. It makes my brand new XBR3 sound quite lousy.

soopa

Toshiba announces yet-another-HD-DVD player, the HD-A20.

This one will be priced in-between their new HD-A2 & HD-XA2 players. Sounds like it basically just adds 1080p output to the A2's feature set. $599.

Scrib

Neat... 'n' wireless really opens up the possibilities. Streaming HD-quality video directly from a PC with no dropouts is VERY cool.

Scrib

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7lhaC9NR_g

soopa

No doubt. Here's some more details. 150Mbps with a 300-ft range. Nice.

soopa

Sony announced a 70-inch Bravia XBR3 LCD.

HDMI 1.3, 7000:1 contrast ratio (not so impressive amongst today's announcements), 120Hz refresh rate, 10-bit processing (currently they're 8-bit), LED backlighting.

No price announced. Available for pre-order soon. Shipping in February.

The big news here however is this seems to have caused a $1500 price drop in Sony's current 52-inch Bravia series.

soopa

Price announced: $33,000

I don't know why in the hell someone would pay $33k for this (if any) LCD. Boooo Sony.

http://news.sel.sony.com/en/press_ro...ase/27466.html

soopa

Sony also announcing an 82-inch Bravia LCD

No price yet, probably $50k plus

They've announced something relevant however, a 27-inch 1080p OLED. No real details yet, but this will be the first production consumer OLED TV I believe.

soopa

Uhh, ok... Sony also announcing "Internet Video Link" for their Bravia TV's. Apparently you'll be able to download "video content" from places like AOL, Yahoo, and Sony Pictures by plugging your TV into an internet connection. No set top box required.

The TV's will feature the same Xross Media Bar interface as the PS3 & Sony's new receivers.

Way to make the PS3 even more irrelevant

soopa

This is more of a GAMING story, but since it's from CES...

Sony SHIPS (but hasn't sold) 1-million PS3's. Apparently, and in contrast, Xbox SOLD over 1.5 million units during its first holiday season and has sold over 10 million since.

Sony, Sony, Sony...

2001AudiS4

Now I see how you got over 135,000 posts Seriously, some cool info, thanks.

2001AudiS4

That is pretty cool. Mostly pointless, but still cool. I thought the idea of using it for a car navigation so the passenger can watch but the driver can't see is pretty interesting.

soopa

OK, apparently there will be a box. But it's included with the TV, and the content is free.

soopa

300 new HD-DVD's in 2007. meh.

Doesn't sound too impressive to me. They already claim to have 300 titles on the market, but after trudging through them all I only ended up finding 30 I cared to add to my Netflix Queue.

On top of that, there's really not much of interest so far as new releases go slated to come from either camp in the first quarter.

I'm really surprised companies are putting so much into next-gen hardware but so little into next-gen content.

iTimmy

Do you already have HD-DVD???

soopa

"As of January 5th, the group estimates there were more than 175,000 HD DVD players sold in America, with an annualized attach rate of 28 movies per player." (via)

WOW...... unimpressive. Hate to say it, but I'm losing faith in HD-DVD quick.

175,000 players is nothing. I thought the 360 add-on had sold more then that on Amazon.com? Are they taking that into account?

soopa

Ya.

soopa

Philips pushing a wireless "HDMI" solution

Basically sounds like an HDMI adapter with 802.11n capabilities. Neat.

SiGGy

I'm most excited about the new LED DLP 1080p TVs. No colorwheel now and true 1080p DLP chips; away with the wobulation.

Removes all my dislikes about DLP. Hopefully the LEDs are good for color. I know samsung has one of these LED TVs out already. I want to see the new versions of it.

astro

nokia dropped a RAZR killer on the market today.

http://www.nseries.com/n76

soopa

Almost all of the new LED based DLP's support xvYCC and have 10-16-bit internal processing. It's pretty safe to say they'll have no problem besting the color output of today's displays.

The much improved contrast ratios will go a long way towards improving the "perception" of color as well.

I too am pretty interested in the new UltraSlim sets. A DLP I actually have the space for. My one concern is the viewing angle. Current DLP's are awful compared to direct-view sets, especially on the vertical axis. If that's improved, these DLP's sound like the best values in displays today.

SiGGy

doubtful, don't forget when they did the same stats of who is actually watching HD with their HD TV. They left out ALL of the people using their built in QAM digital tuners.

Unless Sony wakes up and chooses VC1 for their codec, I don't want blu-ray to win. It looks like shit compared to HD-DVD. So much macroblocking.

So sad, current HD-DVD movies have more storage space than current blu-ray movies. To date no 50GB blu-ray disc has been release, all of them are 25GB. Giving the win to HD-DVD with 30GB discs. Then factor in that HD-DVD VC1 can compress the video 2-3x better than BluRay MPEG-2. The HD-DVD discs are essentially what the quality of a 60GB bluray disc using MPEG-2 would look like. Pity blu-ray discs are only 50GB max and current ones are only 25GB.

SiGGy

did I miss anything you posted already on it? I'm eager to read about them. Although I was more referring to the color temps of the Red, Green, and Blue LEDs. Wonder what a calibration looks like on one of these sets.

soopa

Blu-ray is using VC-1 right now. The newest Blu-ray discs are identical to HD-DVD in quality.

The first lot of transfers were rushed, which made them awful. But they did adopt VC-1 just before release.

Edit: Also, 50GB Blu-ray discs & writers have been a big part of CES this year. But yeah, I'm still in HD-DVD's camp as well.

soopa

Some screens of the Xbox IPTV interface: http://www.engadget.com/photos/xbox-...rface-gallery/

INCREDIBLY HOT.

This screen impresses me most: http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.en...xbox-vod-6.jpg

PIP previews of the channels your browsing in the guide while still watching current programming in full screen? Too fucking slick.

SiGGy

All of the blu-ray discs to date are all MPEG-2 that I have seen. Unless something new came out in the past 2 weeks I missed. None of the Sony authoring systems supported VC-1 at time of launch. There might be some authoring systems now, but still I haven't seen a VC1 blu-ray disc yet. Maybe I missed a few releases... I'll go google.

I see there is a handful of VC-1 discs out now, cool! They started releasing them in late September it looks like.

soopa

hehe, Wikipedia FTW. you're semi-right, says the same quote from Wikipedia.

"Initial versions of Sony's Blu-ray Disc-authoring software only included support for MPEG-2 video, so the initial Blu-ray Discs were forced to use MPEG-2 rather than the newer codecs, VC-1 and H.264. An upgrade was subsequently released supporting the newer compression methods so the second wave of Blu-ray Disc titles were able to make use of this."

This explains what I said, the newest discs (2nd gen) are indentical to HD-DVD in quality. They're both using VC-1.

Like I said, the first gen of Blu-ray discs were rushed, but I thought bad transfers were the only problem, turns out you're right they were using MPEG-2

soopa

"On September 5, 2006, Warner released the first 3 titles using VC-1 encoding, Blazing Saddles, Firewall, and Lethal Weapon. A further 6 VC-1 encoded titles, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, Swordfish, Space Cowboys, The Fugitive, Lethal Weapon 2, and House of Wax, were released on September 26." Wikipedia

SiGGy

Cool, they are on equal codec grounds now! Now I guess I'll just wait and see who wins. The only issue I had with blu-ray was the use of MPEG-2 and it's higher cost. Time will drop the price, I wonder who will win now... Besides being cheaper to produce, HD-DVD doesn't have much ground to stand on now. Besides "HD-DVD" sounds better IMO.

SiGGy

Wow, ya that looks cool. Whats the bandwidth requirements for those channels?

soopa

Same, I remember you & I bashing Blu-ray over MPEG-2 before release. But I thought they had squashed that totally before launch. I didn't realize a dozen or so titles used MPEG-2. Lame, but explains alot.

And now with the cost gap closing, it's hard to hate.

I guess the only remaining issue I have with Blu-ray is that it's a Sony backed format, and I have no confidence in Sony as a media company.

Nonetheless, Apple seems to be sticking with the Blu-ray camp so if that remains true I'm bound to be a convert eventually.

soopa

Not sure. Xbox uses VC-1 compression obviously. Current feature length 720p movies on Xbox Live are coming in around 4.5GB on average, I'd guesstimate.

I'm betting the IPTV will be compressed at a higher ratio then those movies though.

You've always been good with bitrate calculations, give us an equation

soopa

P.S. check out the video of the Xbox IPTV here: https://acurazine.com/forums/showpos...&postcount=617

soopa

Looks like the maximum bitrate for VC-1 720p30 is 20Mb/s.

But, that's maximum bitrate. Hard to say how much further the compression would be over Xbox. Could probably get an idea based off one of the movies on Live. I'll get firm filesize/length data from a movie shortly. Should be able to calculate the compression ratio from that.

soopa

Google says "Batman Begins" which is the highest quality HD-DVD movie has an average bitrate of 12Mb/s.

That's quite alot of compression for 1080p!

soopa

Here we go, V for Vendetta is 6.1GB for 132 minutes.

http://www.hidef.com/xbox-live-video...ce-review.html

If my calculations are correct, that's 6.3Mb/s

soopa

Oh wow, Blu-ray FTW in 2007? Buena Vista's 2007 Blu-ray Plans

Cars & Pirates 2. Those two titles alone are a high-def lovers dream.

HD-DVD needs to get some marquee titles for the new year, quick.

SiGGy

When I looked at those pics, I was more thinking Microsoft cable service. Didn't I see a TV guide? (maybe I'm mistaken) Usually "IPTV" is real-time streams.

Are all of those things in the pics HD? wow, that's pretty cool if so. But, ya if it's HD it'll be download and watch, unless your on FIOS

But if it's just SDTV, I bet they can stream those channels live. Guess I need to read some more.