Tom Norton

Atlantic Technology was showing a near finished prototype of its H-PAS speaker, first seen in early form at CEDIA. H-PAS stands for Hybrid Pressure Acceleration System, a fancy name for what is claimed to be a breakthrough in bass loading. It combines several speaker technologies, including bass reflex, inverse horn, and transmission line. The system is purely passive;there is no subwoofer hidden in the box and the only drivers in the design are the two 5.25" woofers and soft dome tweeter seen in the photo (which does not do the gloss black design justice).

Panasonic showed two new portable Blu-ray players, the 10.1-inch DMP-B500 and the DMP-B100 (shown here). They don't have full HD resolution, but that shouldn't be a negative with such small screen sizes. I want one; they looked better, with a BD disc, than any portable DVD player I've ever seen. The one missing feature is an external video input. Why is that important? The player could then perform double duty as an off-screen monitor for use with a big screen projection system when it isn't needed as a portable device. An OLED display instead of the LCD imaging used here would also be nice, but a $3000 portable OLED Blu-ray player might be a hard sell

Toshiba showed a split-screen demo of 4K resolution on a relatively small LCD set. The purpose was apparently to show how their new Cell processing can upconvert 2K sources to 4K. You can't see anything in the photo, but on-scene the 4K was a bit sharper-though the 2K side looked softer than I would expect from good 2K material.

Like other manufacturers at the show, LG was showing off the claimed better blacks of its new sets. TruBlack is the company's designation for the upgraded black levels in its new plasma sets, like the 2010 PK950 shown here. While it wasn't easy to see the improvement on the brightly lit show floor, the new set did look subtly better.