Panasonic CES 2008
Visiting the Panasonic booth at CES 2008 proved to be an interesting experience. The most popular product had to be their 150″ advanced HDTV (pictured above).
This plasma TV is absolutely massive. It was said that nine separate 50″ TV’s could fit in the same space as this behemoth takes up.
Picture quality was stunning with 4K resolution. The demo feed looped through various scenes of cityscapes, action scenes, people and nature. One of the most impressive scenes was the panda bear footage. The bears were presented in almost life-like scale. The advanced high definition video made it look as though the pandas were right there in front of you. The city-scape scene also impressed by showing off the enormous amount of detail that could be seen with the high definition roll.
Panasonic Blu-ray players: leading the way
Panasonic was the first to bring a profile 1.1 (Bonus View) player to the market with their DMP-BD30 and they are also the first to produce working standalone units of a profile 2.0 (BD Live) player, for use at CES 2008. According to a Panasonic representative, the DMP-BD50’s will be available in 2-3 months, but there is no estimated pricing at this time. I’m betting it will take longer than that to hit the market.
Other Panasonic products announced
Panasonic also announced a slew of other interesting products. Some of these included a 32GB SDHC card, a WiFi enabled digital photo camera that can upload pictures directly to Picasa Web albums and a 3 CCD HD video camera that records to SDHC cards. I’m sure there is much more, but I didn’t get a chance to see all of their new offerings.
