Shane Buettner

The BDP-S2000ES picks up where the vaunted Sony DVD players of the past left off. A massively overbuilt chassis, a hermeticaly shielded transport and all other srots of gooodies. According to the Sony folks on site, the player will decode Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD High Resolution audio, but not DTS-HD Master Audio. It is also claimed that the player will output TrueHD and DTS-HD in native bitstream form over HDMI 1.3.

I'll have more on the flat panels later, but again, who cares about that when Toshiba's Scott Ramirez is pulling a Shatner and bringing green hotties from outer space up on stage?!

Before introducing its new D-ILA front projectors JVC offered a fascinating glimpse of what's beyond HD. It showed some flight simulation clips and some native 4K movie material (from and odd movie called <I>The Trident</I>) on its 4k x 2k D-ILA system in a movie theater-sized venue, on a screen not quite movie sized. This is far more pixel density than current 1920x1080 HD, and the depth and dimensionality of the image quickly demosntrated why I believe digital cinema in theaters needs 4K to take off.

<I>UAV</I> will be temporarily relocating its headquarters this week as Tom Norton, Fred Manteghian and I head to Denver to cover the 2007 CEDIA Expo. CEDIA, which is very focused on home theater, has in many ways supplanted CES as the big show in our corner of the industry in recent years. Coming as it does in the fall, ahead of the big holiday shopping season, many companies use CEDIA to launch significant new products.