LATEST ADDITIONS

Those small OLED displays that impressed everyone who saw them in the Sony booth (see the above), shown here in a side view, weren't much thicker than a piece of cardboard!

Like many manufacturers, Toshiba is now emphasizing flat panel displays. These two RPTV DLPs were seen, lonesome and hungry, in one corner of Toshiba's booth.

I was going to give you the specs for Toshiba's new HD-XA2, but why don't I just show them to you? Notice that while the player supports Dolby TrueHD, it only supports the core track of DTS HD Master Audio. That is, the player will not decode DTS HD Master Audio to full resolution multichannel PCM for transmission to your audio system via HDMI as digital PCM (or convert it to analog for extraction from the player's analog outs in full resolution). Instead it will play back such a track as standard DTS. Presumably it will transmit DTS HD Master Audio in its native form through the HDMI 1.3 link, but we still will need AV receivers or pre-pros that will accept and decode that form of signal from an HDMI 1.3 connection. As yet, none will do so, but we expect to see them within the next year.

In addition to a wealth of impressive title announcements, the Blu-ray association adopted the sternest language I’ve yet heard in offering some very compelling sales numbers and statistics to state its case that Blu-ray will be the decisive winner of the format war. According to the BDA’s stats, the war is already over in Japan with Blu-ray scoring 96% of the high-definition player market there.