Event Coverage

CES 2008: Home Entertainment Galore

By Terence Ang & Zachary Chan - 15 Jan 2008

Hitachi, Toshiba and Canon's Booth

Hitachi's Booth

 Hitachi demonstrated a wireless HDTV distribution display between two of its Reel60 HDTVs (up to three units stream from one single source is possible) based on the 802.11n wireless network with MIMO protocol. Using a sliced-based technique applies more error-correction towards high priority components in the MPEG stream while the picture quality is said to improve by up to 3dB signal-to-noise ratio.

 One demonstration at the Hitachi booth is a Similarity-Based Image Retrieval System. According to Hitachi, with image data in our hard disk drives reaching levels unseen in as many years as we can remember, the Similarity-Based Image Retrieval technology is a search engine that allows users to search for high-definition image and videos. Using information such as color, shapes and forms, a match is quickly found – be it a specific movie scene, the face videos or shots of just one particular person or a specific venue like say "all Eiffel Tower photos and videos".

Toshiba's Booth

 With all the buzz about Blu-ray and HD DVD, Toshiba lowered the starting price of its HD DVD notebook line to US$899 starting with the Satellite A205 notebook. Not only that, it has given the Qosmio G45 an upgrade making it the world's first notebook with a HD DVD-R/RW optical drive, pricing it at US$3,200. The HD DVD-R/RW notebook, model AV690, has a recording speed of 1x for HD DVD-RW (single layer) and 2x for HD DVD-R (1x for double layer). Not only that, it also comes with an external High Definition TV Tuner, 17" diagonal 1080p display, PCI-e NVIDIA graphics and four built-in Harman/kardon speakers. Oh, did we mention it also comes with a REGZA Link HDMI port?

 First unveiled at CEATEC Japan in October 2007, the Toshiba SpursEngine chip is a co-processor derived from the high-performance Cell Broadband Engine processor found in the Sony PS3 such as the Synergistic Processing Element (SPE) cores. The SpursEngine is designed to take video processing to extreme levels of realism and image quality.

 The new co-processor integrates four of Cell/B.E.'s high performance RISC core SPEs plus hardware to decode and encode MPEG-2 and H.264 video. The prototype operates at a clock frequency of 1.5GHz and consumes 10-20 watt power.

 Toshiba showed us a hand gesture control demonstration with a QOSMIO notebook equipped with the SpursEngine co-processor. By gesturing in a certain direction in front of a cam-equipped QOSMIO built with SpursEngine, users can play or pause video. Not only that, Toshiba also showed real-time face morphing, video indexing and high-speed video editing and transcoding from MPEG2 to H.264 when editing and recording HD videos to HD DVD discs on the QOSMIO.

Canon's Booth

  The Canon VIXIA HF10 records to either a 16GB internal flash memory or SDHC Memory card while its lesser brethren – the HF100 – records to just the SDHC Memory card. Both camcorders use the Canon 3.3 Megapixel Full HD CMOS Image Sensor (1920 x 1080) and feature a 12x optical zoom. Both the HF10 and HF100 (pictured) are expected to be available in the US from April 2008. They will be priced at US$1,099 and US$899 respectively.

 The Canon VIXIA HV30 is Canon's HDV-based consumer camcorder that supports Canon's 2.96 Megapixel Full HD CMOS Sensor and Canon's 10x HD video lens. It is expected in US stores in February and costs US$999.

 

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.