The last day of the CEDIA EXPO is in many ways the best. Not so much from the fact that you know you'll be going home soon - although that's certainly part of it - but more from the lack of any scheduled press conferences and formal meetings. Sure, some diehards set up meeting times until the bitter end, but I prefer to leave the final day for browsing, wandering, and stopping by the booths I missed during the previous two days.
The days of going to an electronics store, choosing from a lineup of components, and carrying your selection out to the trunk of your car might be fading fast. We now want our entertainment with us all the time, wherever we go, but few of us have the time to wade through the overwhelming proliferation of gear being created to address that desire.
I was in Beijing for work a few weeks ago, and one free morning I wandered down the street toward the Forbidden City to do a little shopping. As usual, a virtual army of street hawkers greeted me with pirated DVDs by the handful. In previous trips I paid no attention, but this time I decided to have a look. After all, they cost just $1 each. So out of curiosity I decided to buy a few as a journalism experiment, since I write about issues like this.
After sitting on your butt for an entire day, it's good to be able to walk around the CEDIA EXPO 2005 floor…at least that's what you tell yourself the first two or three miles. But then you start running across the really cool stuff, and all that walking doesn't seem so bad after all.
First thing Friday morning, the day the show floor opened, I dashed over to Projection Design's booth. The Norwegian manufacturer promised to have something revolutionary. And they did. Their Model Three 1080 single-chip front projector, as the model number suggests, offers a full 1920x1080 resolution. This originates from a brand new TI DLP chip, with full 1920x1080 resolution. That's <I>on the chip</I>, not just on the screen. In short, it does not use the wobulation technology you'll find in all the new 1080p rear projection sets. The latter apparently does not work well with large, front-projection images.
Thursday at CEDIA is press day. The floor isn't open, but the day is usually filled with activities. This year things thinned out with the cancellation of several events, notably Toshiba. I suspect HD-DVD was going to be Toshiba's featured attraction, but
the word is out that this year's scheduled launch of HD-DVD has been put off until spring, where the battle will go toe-to-toe, or bit-to-bit, with Blu-ray.
I was in Beijing for work a few weeks ago, and one free morning I wandered down the street toward the Forbidden City to do a little shopping. As usual, a virtual army of street hawkers greeted me with pirated DVDs by the handful. In previous trips I paid no attention, but this time I decided to have a look. After all, they cost just $1 each. So out of curiosity I decided to buy a few as a journalism experiment, since I write about issues like this.
