THE BIG PICTURE

As many of you know, the CEDIA (Custom Electronics Design and Installation Association) Expo is this week, so I'm on my way to Atlanta, Georgia, which, by all accounts, will be hot and muggy the whole time—yuck! Oh well, the show must go on. I'll be blogging throughout the convention, but before I start, I thought I'd preview a few of the trends I expect to see there...

I've always been a bit bummed that plasma TVs hold such a small market share compared with LCDs. And it doesn't help when companies like Vizio and Pioneer drop out of the plasma business altogether. Yet when I visit my local CostCo, I can see why—the LCDs on display are definitely brighter than the plasmas, which is why they fly off the shelves while the plasmas languish.

Several months ago, I <A href="http://blog.ultimateavmag.com/scottwilkinson/050408pain/">posed a question</A> in my blog, asking you how high gas prices had affected your entertainment activities. Now, of course, things are much worse as the entire economy circles the bowl, even while gas prices ease up a bit. So I thought it would be interesting to revisit the question in light of the worsening economic crisis.

It's really strange&mdash;and a little unsettling&mdash;being without Internet access, though it's also kind of refreshing to unplug from the constant torrent of incoming information and spam for a little while. After a long day of bus rides, factory tours, and presentations by Epson execs, we ended up at a hotel in Matsumoto (near Nagano) with futons for beds on woven-wicker <I>tatami</I> floors.

<I>I am building a dedicated home theater, and I have completed most of the design work. One of the last details is the projector position. I have a 100-inch 16:9 screen and the Panasonic PT-AE3000.

Last Sunday, my wife and I joined 25.8 million of our closest friends to watch the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards on CBS. So why am I writing about it here? Because this is <I>Ultimate AV</I>, and the Grammys are all about the best in audio <I>and</I> video. The audio part is obvious&#151;this is "music's biggest night" honoring the best recording artists, and all the performances are live, a technological tour de force in its own right. But the show is no less dedicated to video, both on stage and in the home.

At SID 2011, LG Display had an interesting demo in its booth—a series of flat panels of different sizes and resolutions to show how these two parameters are related. To maintain a given amount of detail as the screen size increases, so must the resolution, even as the number of pixels per inch decreases. The two largest screens have 4K resolution, while the two smallest are 720p (roughly 1K). I was unable to find out why they had such different color profiles.