Kenwood is working with LG and their MPH (mobile video) project team to develop a mobile digital television receiver, and I don't mean a 13" Sanyo on a hospital cart either. Hook up a Kenwood receiver to an LCD in your car, and you'll be able to zoom around the country picking up digital TV signals optimized for easy reception while traveling. I'll know more soon (like what it looks like), but seeing it work in their booth won't tell me how well it works driving around city streets or cruising down the highway. Vroom Vroom.
Panasonic added the DMP-BD50 to their line of Blu-ray players. The DMP-BD30 is profile 1.1 and can decode and output lossless Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio™ (the last is new if it truly is Master Audio and not just the DTS core), but you'll have to wait until I get to their booth to find out if it can <i>pass</i> either of those as bitstreams for decoding in a newer receiver.
Just before CES 2008, just two days before the HD DVD Promotion Group's press conference, Warner Home Video announced they would end their "format neutrality" by issuing Blu-ray discs exclusively. Releases already slated to come out in both formats would continue to do so through May 2008. After that, not so much.
I was actually sad, sad for a consumer electronic company, when I saw what I saw over at the convention center late Saturday afternoon. Toshiba has always been an outstanding company, from the days of making some of the better rear projection (CRT) TVs, to their headlong dive into HD DVD, a format that offered a lot, most importantly, the potential for a single SKU with their Combo format.
Do you find that others in your home don't bond with electronics as well as you do? Do you get calls at work that start with "how do I . . ." and end with "your [optional expletive deletive] [brand and function of your last electronic purchase]?
So here I sit, my furniture all rearranged like an overcrowded antique store, just so I can be in the sweet spot. It is speaker review time again at the Manteghians.' It takes a long time to break out and set up speakers, and you've lots of boxes to deal with. But the simplicity of a speaker is what is most appealing. No HDMI to DVI handshaking problems, no video cross-coding issues, no 3:2 pulldown. You just sit down and listen to music and watch movies. Of course, it's only enjoyable when the speakers in question sound great – like this Definitive Technology Mythos system does.
I remember sitting in a CES press conference sometime in the year $149 D.V.D. listening to Toshiba whine about how no one was making any money selling DVD players any more. But moments later, they were announcing new models with new features and even lower price points. I guess you can't blame them. After all they had a lot of competition back then.