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Event Coverage

IFA 2008: The Full Coverage

By Vincent Chang & Terence Ang - 3 Sep 2008

More Consumer Electronics Highlights

More Consumer Electronics Highlights

Not to be outclassed by the rest, Sanyo also added a Full HD 1080p camcorder to their XACTI line-up (finally!). Known as the VPC-HD1010, it improves over the HD1000, which could only manage 1080i, and comes with a special slow motion video function by shooting video at 30 frames per second. It utilizes a CMOS sensor, records to AVCHD and has Face Detection for both photo and video at up to 12 faces.

Moving on to Sharp, the company announced its initiative to go as green as possible by exploring new ways to power down TV sets based on surrounding lighting environments and indirectly 'save the planet'. Announced in concurrent with this initiative was the AQUOS XS1 series of LCD TVs in both 52 and 65 inches and only 0.9-inch thick. Key to this is the pure deep black feature of the XS1, which Sharp hopes would give plasma TV manufacturers a run for their money (or claim). Utilizing a new RGB-LED backlight with a whopping contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1 (comparable to OLED's claims), the XS1 series should be available in European markets by October.

Here's another Sharp initiative to go green. A prototype solar powered LCD TV utilizing the 52-inch XS1 LCD TV. Utilizing polycrystalline solar panels to produce about 200kWh per year, these panels are able to power the TV efficiently to remain carbon neutral.

Over at the Toshiba booth, we saw some pretty amazing innovations. One of them, pictured here, is a vision-based gesture interface to do away with messy remote controls. Another innovation is Toshiba's speech recognition and speech-to-text technologies in a Bluetooth chipset. A third innovation is equally impressive - a '3D photocopier' that can create a 3D model of an object from just a few photographs taken.

Perhaps one of the most talked about TVs at the show is this prototype by Toshiba. Affectionately called the Cell TV, it comes with an integrated Cell Broadband Engine processor that is able to transform standard definition images into upconverted near-HD quality images. Called Resolution+, the technology can also process multiple video streams at the same time, making searching for your favorite channel a snap. This also means easier video and image search functions.

Fans of DViCo's TVIX range of high-quality content playback jukeboxes would love this bit - a highly portable version of the PVR-2000 series now comes in the 2220 and 2230. Equipped with integrated tuners (analog sources only, unfortunately), these models tout USB 2.0, HDMI 1.1 and uses the Scorpio RT262 200MHz processor. It supports up to 1080i resolution playback, plays MPEG-1/2/4, AVI, ISO, VOB, MP3, OGG, WMA, AAC, WMA, and allows for analog TV time-shifting while recording your TV shows.

Of course, on the personal audio side, you've got the Bose, Sennheiser, Beyerdynamic and more but what do we have here - it's Beats by Dr. Dre, produced by none other than Monster Cable. Similar to how the Apple iPod got started thanks to frequent MTV peddling, Beats by Dr. Dre is collaboration between the legendary music artiste/producer and Monster Cable, with the intention to create a high-quality headphone that a music artiste like Dr. Dre would want if he had a chance to make it himself. With its trademark 'B' symbol, and black and red motif, we thought Beats might stand a resounding chance against the playas.

Guess who? It's Head Monster and company founder of Monster Cable, Noel Lee. Lee was at IFA 2008 to share about Beats by Dr. Dre headphones. Having started as a laser-fusion design engineer at Lawrence-Livermore Laboratory, then an audiophile and professional drummer, Lee founded Monster Cable in 1979, establishing an entirely new and unfounded industry in high quality audio-video cables. The move into headphones may seem odd but it stays true to the spirit of high quality audio delivery, thanks in part to its superb acoustic noise-cancelling function and the bundling of Monster's iSoniTalk cable for answer-and-call function for cellphones. Beats by Dr. Dre has been compared with the Bose QuietComfort 3 and is reported to be just as good, if not better. While it is available at most Apple and Best Buy stores in America and Europe, we're pretty sure we'll see it here in Asia sooner rather than later. Price point's currently at US$350.

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