The circus that is the Consumer Electronics Show is over but I can't say I got very excited about any new television stuff I read about.
The feature I'm most eager to see in production is wireless connection of high definition between the DVD/STB/DVR and the television itself. The concept has been tossed around about a year now, and Westinghouse had a demonstration at CES, but it seems we are not likely to see a wireless HD standard for at least another year. Won't it be nice when we can finally get rid of all those wires!
If I had to bet on the high definition DVD format war, I'd bet on the side of Blu-Ray. The Warner studios announcement to cease production of HD-DVD titles was a deep wound to the Toshiba/Microsoft flesh and it'll take very little to finish them off now. I'll probably wait for version 2 of the Blu-Ray hardware.
I was a little surprised to see that plasma production is not as near death as some had predicted. Panasonic had a 150-inch plasma at CES.
There was an interesting, un-teevee-type device announced at CES... a Taser/MP3 player. Cool.
3 comments:
Les, you're probably right about HD-DVD ..... reminds me of the tussle over videotape - VHS or Beta?
Yeah, in a lot of ways it does seem just like the VHS/Beta war. But, in this case, it's not such a revolution. We still have plain ole 480p DVD and for many of us, that's good enough - even on a HDTV. We might even see a third high def DVD format come along and take it all. And there's also the Internet and movie downloads. The latest version of Apple TV (announced just yesterday) might change the playing field, too.
Les, one reason I would like to see it resolved ..... it's hard on retailers (rental stores, for example)to maintain multiple formats of a single film on their shelves. It seems to me that having regular copies, and one format of high-def copies would be easier.
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