CES 2009 Panasonic Booth

Here I am, witnessing the next generation of High Definition home entertainment at CES 2009.
Every year, major manufacturers (Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, Samsung, LG, etc.) flock to Las Vegas to strut their wares. They hope to give us, the consumers, a glimpse of their marvelous future. Now is our chance to see who is on the ball with next generation technologies, who stumbled and who churned out more of the same but labeled it with more creative-mumbo-jumbo-advertising-slogans.
Who would have the most innovative technologies? Who would eclipse DVRs by embedding Solid State Drives into their flat panel displays? Who would have the thinnest TV? Who would break ground on the much fabled 2 way cable card? My head was swimming with possibilities as I entered the Las Vegas Convention center and beheld the future of High Def home entertainment.

The Panasonic booth:
I was very impressed with what I saw. Those panels were thin. Very thin. Both their High end LCDs and Plasmas were under an inch thick. The 2 inches that most mounts take up will become a terrible waste of space. These TVs should now be hung on your wall like paintings.


Check out the pictures of a Panasonic prototype, centimeters thick, but sadly will be unavailable until 2010.
This just shows how thin a TV can get.


Here is a profile image of the future panel (which according to Panasonic representatives will not be available in 2009, but perhaps 2010). Which I think shows a real dedication on the part of Panasonic to listen to consumer’s demands and really deliver what the customer wants; thin is in.

As I moved through the Panasonic booth, they showed us what the production model plasmas for 2009 will look like. I tried to get as good a photo as I could. This picture is of a fast moving 360 degree aerial shot with the woman in the blue dress staying in focus the whole time. Due to the fast moving nature of the video, it is difficult to display that the background stayed in sharp focus the whole time with individual details about the desert floor all the while, the image never lost focus or blurred in any way.

Continuing my way through the Panasonic booth, I saw something, which I thought, was very innovative. I saw a moving television, which was on a track wall-mounted to a bookshelf. It was capable of moving both horizontally and vertically. I can see the use for this when it comes to accommodating different groups of viewers, but I can only imagine the headache of what cable management would be like.

I saw was a 103” Plasma, which I imagine is really more of a special-order item from Panasonic. I don’t expect your local Best Buy to stock this one regularly. This is really more of a demonstration of what Panasonic is capable of building rather than a real production-model TV. Definitely very cool, but not really very widely available.


Panasonic plans on having 5 model lines. Panasonic showed off 4 of their 5 model lines with the 5th (their least dollar-intensive line) leaving their cheapest line unrepresented. Each series will have varying sizes from 26” all the way up to 50” and greater.
I also saw some other interesting technologies. I saw a model of 50” Plasma that actually has a 2-way cable card in it. If you are wondering what a 2 way cable card is, I go into a lot more detail in another article, however, the simple explanation is a device which virtually eliminates the need for a cable box, yet still allows you to watch premium channels as well as access Pay-Per-View content, On-demand content, as well as the Guide features. The only thing it does not have is a hard drive for digitally recording TV shows.
In order to circumvent the need for an unsightly cable box, we were shown (in concept) Panasonic’s wall-mountable solution to the lack of hard drive that accompanies a 2 way cable card.

The final feature of having a TV with a 2 way cable card is eliminating the need for multiple remotes, which was demonstrated though prototype form so the final images were subject to change. According to Panasonic, 2 way cable cards and their hard-drive DVR box (which is controlled via HDMI) will be available in 2009, but not at the same time as their regular line of TVs, so we can expect it, in the May to June time period, would be a safe assumption.
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