Geoffrey Morrison

While there was no pricing or availability info, Hitachi’s 65-inch 1080p plasma sure was pretty. They also were showing a 42-inch 1920-by-1080 panel. While the necessity of that resolution in a panel that size is dubious at best, it was cool none the less. It uses ALiS, so it’s possible to call this a 1080i plasma.

Perhaps even cooler than the $999 720p Optoma (see below), Mitsubishi revealed a $4,495 1080p projector, called the HC5000BL. It’s going to use the Reon VX chip from Silicon Optix and have a claimed 10,000:1 contrast ratio with a dynamic iris. No DLP here, it has 3 LCDs inside. They’re hoping to ship later this month.

Like I reported on a month ago, Samsung announced at the show the running change and update “fix” for the BD-P1000. Look for it in players and available for download at the end of October.

Planar showed off a prototype LCD panel that is the coolest thing I’ve seen so far at the show. It’s a normal LCD panel with 800 individual LED backlights that are on an active matrix back plane. What that means is that each LED is individually addressable depending on the video signal. Want a section of the screen to be dark? Dim the backlight in that area. The result is a fantastic legitimate contrast ratio, and actual blacks (cause the light is off). The picture above is just what the backlight is doing with the LCD “off.” It’s at least a year away from a real product, but it looks amazing. More on this in the future.