Samsung, alone among the major exhibitors, was warning people not to take photos in their booth. I guess they don't like publicity. I snapped this just before I was warned. Fortunately, I had already taken several other shots before I was nabbed. Later in the day we got permission before shooting our first video installment.

Those small OLED displays that impressed everyone who saw them in the Sony booth (see the above), shown here in a side view, weren't much thicker than a piece of cardboard!

I was going to give you the specs for Toshiba's new HD-XA2, but why don't I just show them to you? Notice that while the player supports Dolby TrueHD, it only supports the core track of DTS HD Master Audio. That is, the player will not decode DTS HD Master Audio to full resolution multichannel PCM for transmission to your audio system via HDMI as digital PCM (or convert it to analog for extraction from the player's analog outs in full resolution). Instead it will play back such a track as standard DTS. Presumably it will transmit DTS HD Master Audio in its native form through the HDMI 1.3 link, but we still will need AV receivers or pre-pros that will accept and decode that form of signal from an HDMI 1.3 connection. As yet, none will do so, but we expect to see them within the next year.

In addition to a wealth of impressive title announcements, the Blu-ray association adopted the sternest language I’ve yet heard in offering some very compelling sales numbers and statistics to state its case that Blu-ray will be the decisive winner of the format war. According to the BDA’s stats, the war is already over in Japan with Blu-ray scoring 96% of the high-definition player market there.

Following LG Electronics’ release of the Super Multi Blue Blu-ray/HD DVD combi player come rumblings among members of the press that the player might not be a full HD DVD player. Scuttlebut has it that the player will not be compatible with HD DVD’s HDi interactivity layer, which is the logic layer that supports the cutting edge interactivity features that run in full motion with HD video.

The Blu-ray Association’s CES press conference featured numerous pieces of fascinating information and significant new title announcements that I’ll comment on in subsequent Blogs, but perhaps none carries as much weight as Disney’s announcement that Pixar’s Cars and both Pirates of the Caribbean films will be released by Summer ‘07.

Hitachi was showing the color advantages of their LCD sets using LED backlighting.
This side-by-side clearly showed more realistic colors, especially reds and greens, though the non-LED set had slightly better blacks. In a technology statement off to the side, Hitachi confidently stated that they expect to achieve infinity contrast (meaning a set that can truly go down to absolute black) by the proper application of LED backlight modulation. Looking to the future (maybe next year), Hitachi also showed a new method of smoothing out film judder and a technology to greatly enhance the resolution of lower resolution upscaled images without noticeable artifacts.