THE FRONT LINE: JANUARY 16, 2007
CES 2007: Diamonds In The Rough
This year’s running of CES was chaotic as usual. The crowds were larger, and the cab lines longer. There were more events held at the Venetian Hotel and Sands Convention Center, which turned a difficult-enough round trip from the Las Vegas Convention Center into an almost impossible journey.
Once again, the show floors were dominated by the big boys, who brought along lots of electronic eye candy to keep journalists and analysts buzzing. The “mine’s bigger than yours!” wars continued with Sharp’s 108-inch LCD HDTV, while LG Electronics played the peacemaker role with its dual-format BH100 HD DVD/Blu-ray player.
Figure 1. It’s big, all right. You could use it as a tanning lamp.
But there were a few surprises and some real news to be had. Texas Instruments showed it isn’t sitting on its hands in the flat-panel vs. microdisplay rear-projection TV wars, and two new HDTV trade promotion groups made their debut at the show. In one demo, the LCD camp showed how they’re better than plasma, while in another demo, the plasma camp showed how they’re better than LCD.
Manufacturers of portable hard disc drives (HDDs) and flash memory pushed out to new performance benchmarks in capacities and prices, and there were a few new HD-resolution camcorders to check out. The VSB digital TV modulation system was very much in vogue, with demonstrations of a new mobile receiver system and numerous PC add-on ATSC receiver cards.
Figure 2. Hauppague’s new DTV receiver isn’t much larger than a flash drive.
Alternative illumination systems for rear and front projection were being hawked, including RF-excited lamps, LEDs, and several prototype laser light engines. Warner Home Media showed how a packaged media company decisively straddles the blue laser fence. And the blue-laser format war is being joined by a high-resolution video interface battle.
It took a lot of panning and digging through press kits, press breakfasts and lunches, tabletop shows, and evening receptions to find the real gold, but the effort was worth it. Here are the highlights as I saw them.
Blue laser DVDs: By now, you’ve read plenty about LG Electronics’ “one world” BH100 combo blue laser DVD player. It attracted a big crowd at their booth and also figured prominently in Warner Home Media’s TotalHD demo at the Bellagio. The BH100 is actually a tri-mode DVD player as it plays HD DVD, Blu-ray, and red laser DVDs.
Warner’s TotalHD format is a combo HD DVD and Blu-ray disc that will play nicely in either machine. Indeed, at the Bellagio event, Warner execs showed a clip from Superman Returns on Toshiba’s HD-XA2, then popped it into Sony’s BDP-S1 with comparable results on the huge projection screen.
Figure 3a – 3b. Blue laser format war? What format war?
Funny thing was, the disc didn’t look quite as crisp and detailed when played back through LG’s BH100, an observation shared by a few folks standing around me at the reception. And we all wondered why there was a need for a dual-format disc if a dual-format player was available. With dual-format packaged blue laser DVDs, the ultimate winner is the company with the cheapest player, regardless of technology.
With a dual-format player, the trophy goes to the blue laser disc format with the lowest retail prices and widest availability of titles. Given that the leading proponent of Blu-ray (Sony) also owns a huge library of movies (MGM) and its own studio, hell will probably freeze over before any of those films get pressed onto an HD DVD. My money’s on the dual-format players, particularly if any second-tier Asian manufacturers like Onkyo or Oppo start building them.
For our next trick: My meeting with Texas Instruments was eventful, and not just because the inside door handle fell off our meeting room, locking us in. I’m certain I wasn’t the only analyst at CES to ask where DLP technology is headed as flat-panel LCD and plasma prices drive conventional rear-projection HDTVs out of the market.
TI’s response lies in the design and production of a super-thin, laser-powered DLP HDTV that will have the same relative dimensions as plasma and LCD technology. It won’t be branded as a “rear projection” HDTV, simply as a laser DLP HDTV. The belief is that consumers will give such a product equal purchase consideration as they would plasma and LCD, given the predicted super-thin profile.
You won’t see this puppy for a few years, however. There are still too many issues to resolve before laser light engines can be incorporated into thin HDTV sets. At a Novalux laser demo, I saw a conventional 50-inch DLP set use a laser light engine to produce some amazingly over-saturated colors.
Yes, the images had plenty of contrast “pop” and they were bright. But their colors weren’t accurate at all when compared to the standard REC.709 HDTV color gamut. And the modified HDTV still required a large footprint and power supplies. Lasers still aren’t ready for prime time, but watch out!
Figure 4. These DLP RPTVs are getting mighty thin …
Figure 5. Novalux showed a pocket laser projector.
Pop it in the oven: The ShowStoppers tabletop show featured a joint demonstration by Panasonic and Luxim of what they call LiFi HDTV. It uses a clever, electrode-less lamp that is “baked” by about 250 watts of microwave energy (900 MHz). The argon gas and mercury salts sealed in the lamp lit up like a candle under this bombardment and produced more than enough photons to power the 3LCD projection engine.
The advantage to the Luxim technology is the predicted lamp life. Without electrode and contact deterioration, Luxim expects the lamps to last at least 20,000 hours (verified through actual testing) before reaching half-life. Color quality was excellent as the spectral output of the Luxim lamp runs a bit on the warm side.
The immediate problem I see for this technology is the cost of the lamps and the finished HDTVs. They’re about 50% as efficient as a conventional 120W UHP lamp, which will increase power consumption. There can’t be much of a price premium placed on sets that use the lamp, 50-inch 720p RPTVs are readily available for $1,200 to $1,500 and 1080p versions dropped below $2,000 in December.
In the meantime, 50-inch plasma HDTVs can easily achieve 20,000 hours before half-brightness and several models are currently advertised for less than $2,000. It may be a case of “too late to market” for the Luxim technology — particularly with RPTV manufacturers turning to more eco-friendly LEDs, and eventually lasers if all goes well.
Figure 6. It’s Luxim’s light engine, not a popcorn maker!
Figure 7. Samsung proved you can drive and have your ATSC, too.
Here, there, and everywhere: Samsung showed a very impressive demonstration of Advanced Vestigial Sideband (A-VSB) modulation for DTV signals. One demo took place in a van driving around Las Vegas while receiving A-VSB content from local UHF channel 22. The other took place in the Samsung booth and simulated varying multipath and echoes from a moving receiver.
A-VSB incorporates lots of forward error correction and “guidance” data and signals to ensure the received SDTV program has little or no dropout. That also means lots of latency — about 8 to 10 seconds when compared to a real-time analog signal. And it also needs about 6 Mb/s to deliver a SD channel.
That would make multicasting HD and SD channels over mobile networks a difficult task unless a more efficient codec (AVC MPEG4, anyone?) is adopted. But the screen sizes on the mobile TVs are so small that HD doesn’t really come into the equation, particularly with a pixel resolution around 320x180.
In any event, the demos impressed a lot of people, including some TV network engineers who never once saw a dropped signal, even when driving through parking garages and underpasses. The A-VSB demo compared favorably to DVB-H and proves that VSB can work just as well as its proponents claimed a decade ago — it just needed some tweaking to get there.
Figure 8. JVC’s Everio 1080i HDV camcorder looks like a winner.
Figure 9. DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI — confused yet? (Image courtesy VESA)
Not so fast, there! The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) held a press conference to announce the long-awaited introduction of DisplayPort 1.1 with enhancements. DisplayPort was designed by VESA committees to replace the venerable 15-pin analog VGA jack so common to desktop and laptop computers.
DisplayPort can also interface with Digital Visual Interface (DVI) and High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) connections, as it incorporates a version of the HDCP copy-protection protocol. According to presenters at the conference (which included Dell, Intel, Samsung Computer, HP, nVidia, and Lenovo, among others), all that will be needed is a simple adapter cable to make the hook-up.
DisplayPort also has one advantage over HDMI, other than being a consensus solution instead of a sole-source interface. There are multiple channels over which video, audio, control signals, and data can flow through a DisplayPort cable and connector. If all four channels are used, the maximum bit rate is 10.8 Gb/s (or 2.7 GHz). That’s enough capacity to show 2730x1536-pixel resolution (WQXGA) with 10-bit color from source to display. Currently, HDMI is capped out at 10.2 Gb/s.
Significantly, Samsung Computer and nVidia are getting inquiries from OEMs and other manufacturers about delivering DisplayPort interfaces in new computers. Higher bandwidth may play some part in those inquiries, but it’s a safe bet that lower royalty and licensing costs than HDMI are the real drivers. You might actually see DisplayPort show up in new HDTVs down the road, too.
Figure 10. Hitachi Storage’s 1 terabyte drive will sell for just $399.
Figure 11. The Advanced PDP Development Center set-up for measuring motion blur.
We’ve got the goods: The Advanced Plasma Development Center Corporation (APDC) had some intriguing demonstrations of motion rendering on LCD and plasma at their suite in Caesar’s Palace. The problems that LCD technology has with motion blur are well known; the difficulty was in quantifying them.
Some clever engineers at the APDC developed a camera system that emulates the performance of the human eye and can actually scan along with moving test patterns to get an instantaneous snapshot of image detail at different speeds. There were several multiburst test patterns used for this procedure, but all of them clearly showed loss of resolution on several LCD monitors and HDTVs.
LCD HDTVs with fast refresh rates (120 Hz) were also used and had somewhat improved performance, but still couldn’t approach the detail seen on a sampling of 50-inch and 60-inch plasma sets. (For more on these tests, go to http://www.advanced-pdp.jp/english/apdc/greet/index.html)
Figure 12. Could Philips’ “calibrate-it-yourself” setup assistant make ISF obsolete?
Figure 13. OK, I just don’t have a house big enough for this RPTV …
AROUND THE FLOOR
Sharp’s largest-in-class 108-inch Aquos LCD HDTV sure attracted a crowd, but don’t expect it to be a real product any time soon. It was there solely for bragging rights … Sharp will have a Blu-ray player to market soon. It’s the BD-HP10U, and will ship in 2Q 2007 with an MSRP of $1,199 … JVC showed a CinemaScope (2.35:1) rear-projection HDTV using D-ILA LCOS at their press event as a concept demo … Toshiba unveiled a third HD DVD player, the HD-A20 ($599) which outputs 1080p. There’s a new 57-inch 1080p LCD HDTV to go with it, the REGZA 57LX177 … Philips will have a 63-inch 1080p plasma HDTV for under $3500 in June of 2007. It’s the 63PFP7422D and has a unique “Setup Assistant” that lets you calibrate your picture settings using six high-resolution test images. It works amazingly well, too.
Both Canon and JVC showed compact HDV camcorders at the show. Canon’s XH-G1 and XH-A1 are higher-end products with a full line of accessories, while JVC’s Everio GZ-HD7 uses a 60GB hard drive to record and play back footage. Both cameras capture at 1080i resolution … Samsung’s next-gen Blu-ray player, the BD-P1200, will debut in March and has Silicon Optix’ Reon processor on-board … Optoma now has a 120-inch version of their BigVizion installation-grade 1080p DLP RPTV, making it the world’s largest rear-projection set … Sanyo’s Xacti HD2A MPEG4 HD camcorder now has improved low light sensitivity … Anchor Bay’s DVDO VP50 video switcher/processor is finally shipping and uses the company’s top-line VRS ASIC.
As Garrison Keillor likes to say on Prairie Home Companion, there’s an association for everyone. Two more have come into existence this year, the LCD TV Association (www.lcdtvassociation.org), headed by LG.Philips veteran Bruce Berkoff, and the Micro Device Display Consortium, founded by Philips, Arisama, Epson, TI DLP, and JVC (www.md-display.com) … Pioneer showed a new 60-inch 1080p plasma HDTV with deep blacks and saturated colors. It’s on the schedule for summer 2007 … Hauppauge has two new ATSC/NTSC receivers for Windows Vista and XP computers. One is not much larger than your thumb … Ditto Jensen’s new MPC4000 ATSC/NTSC laptop receiver.
Figure 14. Sony’s AM-OLED HDTVs were drop-dead gorgeous. Too bad they’re not for sale.
Westinghouse Digital showed a portrait-orientation 82-inch LCD HD monitor for commercial applications. They also had three new 1080p LCD HDTVs with higher contrast — the TX-42F430S, TX-47F430S, and TX-52F480S, all with four HDMI inputs … Vizio continues to be the low-price leader with their new Maximvs VM60P 60-inch 768p plasma HDTV ($2,995) and the 47-inch CV47LF 1080p LCD HDTV ($1,899). Both are integrated sets with ATSC and NTSC tuners … Hitachi Storage Technologies unveiled a 1-terabyte (1000 GB) hard disk drive for PCs. The Deskstar® 7K1000 will begin shipping to retail customers in the first quarter of 2007 at a suggested retail price of $399. Hitachi also has a 4X Blu-ray read/write drive (BD-R, BD-RE), the GBW-H10N … Maxell’s got the 160 GB iDVRS portable hard drive for recording just about anything.
Figure 15. LG.Philips’ small widescreen AM-OLEDs could wind up in cell phones.
Sony had a few tricks up their sleeve including a 52-inch laser-powered, rear-projection SXRD HDTV prototype, two new designs for their second-generation Blu-ray player, and an eye-catching exhibit of AM-OLED flat panel color HDTVs, with six 11-inch models and one 23-inch offering — none of them products at this time … Hitachi showed a new 50-inch plasma HDTV with (ready?) 1280x1080 resolution. It’s branded as “1080 HD” as opposed to “Full 1080.” Think that’ll confuse shoppers? … Samsung and LG both showed enhancements to LCD imaging technology in terms of motion rendering, wider color gamuts, new backlights, and higher contrast, all to get a leg up on the plasma manufacturers … There were several LED pocket projectors on the floor from LG, Mitsubishi, and Samsung … LG.Philips showcased small, widescreen (16:9) AM-OLEDs for handheld electronics … Panasonic demonstrated a prototype 1920x1080 42-inch plasma HDTV that uses smaller barrier ribs and improved phosphors. The LCD-plasma battle at 42 inches isn’t over yet!
