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Published on October 24, 2007

 It is where people can experience all of the recent trends and advances in information technology and electronics, from technologies that showcase futuristic lifestyles to final products.

The seemingly endless competition between plasma and liquid-crystal-display (LCD) television sets provided the main rivals in the home audio-visual arena, because of the differences in their technology.

Pioneer took the main stage to present its latest Kuro range, focusing on the company's latest 1,920-x-1080-pixel flat-panel plasma sets.

The company unveiled the new panel's ability to create deeper black levels. All the new models focus on image quality features by employing advanced crystal emissive layers. So the Kuro plasma displays offer the surprisingly expressive power of deep blacks, ultimately leading to richer colours, sharper detail and unrivalled performance.

Like Pioneer, Panasonic is using similar technology to enhance the contrast ratios in its plasma television sets. It provided one of the highlights of Ceatec when it presented its new 103-inch plasma screen, and it looks like Panasonic and Pioneer are set to lead the field in plasma-television displays for home entertainment. Panasonic has also expanded its production capacity for manufacturing plasma sets.

More than half the show was given over to big-name companies exhibiting high-definition (HD) displays, and while it seems that big-screen displays are going to dominate their future offerings, 32-inch LCD sets are gaining in popularity and perhaps the best-selling screen size in the world. LCD-television promotion groups are also developing 32-inch panels at a lower cost.

LCD televisions have been equipped with a more advanced backlight and LED panels with 120-hertz digital scan to give smoother flow to moving images, reducing the image juddering that has long been a drawback of LCD-based displays.

While the groups promoting

plasma sets came up with a 103-inch plasma panel, Sharp unveiled the world's first 108-inch Aquos LCD

television set at Ceatec, and it looks as if the fierce competition between the two technologies will continue for some

time yet.

Similarly, the two optical-disc storage formats for high-definition video, Blu-ray and HD DVD, are fighting what seems to be a war of attrition for the right to become the format to replace DVD. Because the formats are incompatible, hardware manufacturers, movie studios and consumers are being forced to choose sides. There is the theoretical alternative of high-cost, dual-format players, but at Ceatec there were no such devices on display. Both formats are introducing and supporting products separately in the market.

Although there are many more Blu-ray discs than HD-DVDs, this does not mean Blu-ray has an edge in the survival stakes. Rather, both formats are working on ways to create dual HD DVD and Blu-ray drives to infiltrate personal computers and notebooks.

Hitachi has announced the release of Blu-ray disc digital camcorders. It records full HD video onto a Blu-ray disc with a storage capacity of 50 gigabytes and an internal hard-disc drive. The camcorders also support the old DVD video-recording standard.

Due to the dissimilarity of the formats but the availability of software, many manufacturers have concentrated on producing recorders that use either Blu-ray or HD DVD. The recorders have been very active sellers in the Japanese market, but there appear to be many more of them than there are players.

The HD DVD recorder has the ability to record HD vision directly onto an HD-DVD disc or an internal hard-disc drive. At Ceatec, we saw a reduction in the price of Toshiba's HD DVD player, the HD-XF2, to 34,800 yen (Bt10,300).

This may help the HD side of the format war, but the uncertainty surrounding HD players seems certain to

continue.

By Wijit Boonchoo

The Nation

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