CEDIA 2009

At the end of the day, I stopped by the Digital Projection booth to see its new offerings, which I blogged about before the show. The M-Vision Cine LED was being compared with an iVision 30 lamp-based projector on adjacent screens, and while the iVision was brighter, even on a larger screen, the Cine LED exhibited better color saturation. In another part of the booth, the HighLite 3-chip DLP looked great, with excellent color and detail.

The newest addition to Samsung's stable of LCD TVs is the LN65B650, a 65-inch monster with conventional backlighting that will list for $6000. Of particular note is a picture mode called BD-Wise, which is found on select 2009 TVs and all of the company's '09 Blu-ray players. BD-Wise lets the TV and Blu-ray player communicate and automatically set their parameters depending on the content. A satellite feed looked quite bad with lots of artifacts, but Blu-ray looked <I>much</I> better.

I already blogged about the Lexicon BD-30 universal Blu-ray player, but no one outside the company knew before the show that it has received THX certification. At the Lexicon booth, I also learned that it can decode DVD-Audio and SACD and send multichannel PCM via HDMI, a great feature in this $3500 player. The BD-30 is pictured here with the MC-12HD pre/pro, which just received a firmware update that lets it accept a 7.1-channel PCM bitstream from Blu-rays that offer it&#151;the previous version was limited to 5.1 PCM.

Audio Plus’s John Bevier totally brown-bagged me. He grinned unabashedly and led me to a darkened demo room. To see what? To hear what? Soon, I was watching a 2.35:1 image on a really big screen. Universal’s Wanted on Blu-ray, an absolute guilty pleasure, roared into its dynamically brutal train crash sequence. The sound was spacious, articulate, and punchy. You figured it out before I did, but the cute little Dome system pictured above, with speakers the size of grapefruits, is where all that sound was coming from. Walking among Focal’s impressive (and sometimes imposing) line of speakers had been a setup from the start. The Dome costs $2,500 for a 5.1 channel system, and in addition to the splashy colors, they can be mounted on stands, on wall, or plopped onto a piece of furniture. They can be swiveled any which way for optimal sound. This is a design solution that rocks!

Leon speakers are all about audio- audio for your video. The company custom builds speakers around video displays of all kinds, there is nothing off the shelf about any Leon system. On display at CEDIA was this whopping 140” wide Stewart CineCurve screen (that’s almost 12 feet wide for those of you keeping score at home!) with accustom built Leon speaker system tracing the screen. I'm cheating calling it a soundbar, but I don't know what else to call it and I'm lazy. I don’t know how much the speakers cost, but if you can afford a CineCurve that size, and a projector to drive it, you don’t care!

If money really is no object and you want a true digital-cinema projector in your home theater, this is the only game in town. The CAT MBX 4 is a 3-chip DLP with a resolution of 2048x1080, the same as you see in digital cinemas. It also provides D-Link decryption in order to display DCI (Digital Cinema Initiative) files. Other standard features include 3-kilowatt xenon lamp, dual power supply, custom lenses, anamorphic lens with sled, custom irises, and a plenum enclosure with a cooling system that keeps the internal temperature within 3 degrees of the target at all times. The projector is fed by an outboard processor via two dual-link DVI connections, each of which provides a higher bit rate than standard DVI. If you have to ask how much, you can't afford it, but I'll tell you anyway&#151;$208,000 with the standard processor (10-bit processing, 12-bit output) and an extra $32,000 for the 12-bit processor. Heck, why not buy two for 3D?

The folks from Accell make great HDMI switchers and splitters, but they also do cables, and while I visited there they handed me a sample of their new locking HDMI cables, a relatively new category and one long overdue.