Phil Hinton : David is too tired for blogging tonight and to be honest I feel the same. For anyone who hasn’t been to CES or hasn’t heard how big and busy it is, well it’s very big and this year, very busy.
The show floor today was a nightmare with the sheer number of visitors and this was certainly up on last year for the first day in my opinion. As always we targeted the big names first with Panasonic and LG covered in full for video coverage.
It was also the first chance that we have had to look carefully (in as good as possible conditions) to Panasonic’s new NeoPDP – and who can forget 3D – Plasma’s. We have heard many rumours and spoken off the record on numerous occasions with Panasonic on what these new TVs should feature, and it looks like they have come through with a TV that as soon as David and I saw it, we knew it was Kuro technology behind it. Really it was like looking at our own 5090 Pioneers. When you look at these things in as close a detail as we do and, use a Kuro as your reference, you get so used to the processing and look, that seeing it on a Panasonic screen was pretty weird. We knew it was coming, but even so, seeing really is believing.
Ok, so we won’t give a definitive opinion until we can have the new Plasma’s in our testing environments, but what we saw today did get us excited and some what relieved. You may ask why we would be relieved if we are supposed to be independent in our views. Well, I say that because if Panasonic and LG hadn’t tried to move on the Plasma tech with R&D this year, we feared that Plasma may have been left to gather dust. But instead we are once again happy to see that things are moving forward again and possibly moving ahead of where Pioneer left off. What we saw of the new LG PDPs was also very positive and there is a clear improvement in black levels.
So it’s a brief blog and David clearly cannot take the pace, poor boy. But do check out the videos now being published in this very forum!
See you for tomorrow’s update and I hear you have snow over there at the moment. Nice.
