LATEST ADDITIONS

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 <I>Cars</I> and both <I>Pirates of the Caribbean</I> 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.

Samsung demonstrated its new LED-based LCD flat panels with "Local Dimming." LEDs have the ability to turn diodes completely off in some areas of the screen when needed, current LCDs can't accomplish as their backlights never really turn off. The result is superior blacks and contrast, which is quite evident here, as the conventional LCD on the left is clearly lower in contrast with this low light level material than the LED model on the right.

Luke Rawls of Meridian was showing their new MVP6080 processor in this side-by-side comparison. The MVP6080 works as a scaler but also has some truly advanced motion compensation. The result is a complete elimination of the judder inherent in film based source material. Some of the slow pans taken from movies looked so jerky on the unprocessed side compared to the totally smooth look of the processed side that I wondered how I was ever able to ignore it so well before. The MVP6080 inputs HDMI 480i and 1080i and outputs at the display device’s native resolution but at 48 hz (compatible with most projectors) or 72 hz (compatible with only a few products—CRT projectors and Pioneer plasmas in particular). Perfectly smooth motion is possible because it calculates and makes new frames to fill the gaps as 24 fps (film) is converted to 72. The product is available in April at a cost of $27,000. And you thought Faroudja’s used to be expensive!