Geoffrey Morrison

The war begins. . .with a whimper.

With more than a little excitement, I hooked up the Samsung BD-P1000 Blu-ray disc player. Here it is, the first Blu-ray player to hit the world. I put it right on top of the Toshiba HD-XA1 HD DVD player, which I'm sure the Blu-ray people would love to hear, and the HD DVD people not so much. I ran the HDMI cable to the virtually reference-quality Yamaha DPX-1300 projector, put in my old standby The Fifth Element (of course), and sat back, ready to enjoy. The disc started up promptly (take that, Toshiba!), and, within seconds, there was Blu-ray. It only took a few seconds more before I uttered something along the lines of, "What the hell?"

Hitachi has a line of products in Japan called WOOO. You read that right. The WOOO line of DVD Recorders with hard drives is about a stylish product I’ve seen. It looks like a BMW M1. The shot here is the version with a Blu-ray drive. I doubt we’ll see either here.

The most surprising demo at the show was a demo of a next generation Pioneer plasma that stole quite a bit of SED’s thunder. It had legitimate blacks (seemingly as good as SED). They’re claiming a 20,000:1 contrast ratio, and from the demo it sure looked like it could be close to that. I’d love to tell you more, but the entire presentation was in Japanese. I’ll put up some photos later of the Powerpoint, and you can try to translate them. At the earliest, it may be a model for next year. I’m sure we’ll hear more at CES.

CEATEC is an interesting show. The portion that deals with the stuff we cover is rather small. The rest of the show tends to be manufacturers that make the parts of the stuff we cover. I’ll take some pictures of those bits tomorrow.