LATEST ADDITIONS

Sharp introduced their first BD player for the US market, the not-unreasonably priced BD-HP20U ($549). The player boasts full 1080/24p output capability via its HDMI 1.3 output. The player also has component output if your high def set is old school.

The BDP-S2000ES picks up where the vaunted Sony DVD players of the past left off. A massively overbuilt chassis, a hermeticaly shielded transport and all other srots of gooodies. According to the Sony folks on site, the player will decode Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD High Resolution audio, but not DTS-HD Master Audio. It is also claimed that the player will output TrueHD and DTS-HD in native bitstream form over HDMI 1.3.

I'll have more on the flat panels later, but again, who cares about that when Toshiba's Scott Ramirez is pulling a Shatner and bringing green hotties from outer space up on stage?!

Before introducing its new D-ILA front projectors JVC offered a fascinating glimpse of what's beyond HD. It showed some flight simulation clips and some native 4K movie material (from and odd movie called <I>The Trident</I>) on its 4k x 2k D-ILA system in a movie theater-sized venue, on a screen not quite movie sized. This is far more pixel density than current 1920x1080 HD, and the depth and dimensionality of the image quickly demosntrated why I believe digital cinema in theaters needs 4K to take off.