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Here in Tokyo there's much talk about how healthy the state of innovation in the Japanese electronics industry as the newest technologies are unveiled at the Ceatec consumer electronics show.
Ceatec is a great place to see what the Japanese giants of industry having been working away on but
as the Financial Times points out, these companies are getting a run for their money from competitors in the region.
"It was difficult not to feel a bit optimistic for Japanese electronics makers at Ceatec, as onlookers gawked at their newest products. But, a few yards away, bigger crowds congregated at the Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese companies' booths," wrote Mariko Sanchanta in the FT.
I noticed the same thing at Ceatec, but the stand out technologies were nevertheless homegrown ones.
Sony's OLED push
Sony stole the show with its wall of ultra-thin, high-resolution 11 inch TV screens that use a new technology called organic light emitting diode (OLED) and differs from both LCD and plasma screen technologies. OLED's main advantage over LCD which is the dominant flat-screen technology is that it doesn't need a backlight to the screen panel so can be much thinner, even printed onto flexible material and is much more energy efficient.
The problem is that it has a limited lifespan 5000 - 8000 hours currently compared to 60,000 hours as standard for most LCD and plasma screens. It's also unclear as to whether the technology will be suitable for larger screens.
Still, Sony needed to show off something like OLED screens that are ready for market to show the industry that although it was late to the flat-screen TV market, it has been active in trying to advance the industry. Riyad Emeran of Trusted Reviews, who I've been traveling with, has plenty of photos and a write-up on OLED.
Toshiba spurs DVD on
The ever imaginative company that has its hand in everything, Toshiba, showed off a Qosmio multimedia laptop that lets users control DVD playback by simply pointing their thumb at the laptop screen.
The SpursEngine technology, which uses the same Cell processor engine in the Playstation 3, picks up hand motion from up to 3.3 metres away so you on't have to reach for a remote or tap on the laptops keyboard or touch pad to stop, play, fast forward or rewind.
Super-slim Hitachi
I spent a good deal of time at the Hitachi stand checking out the companies new 32 inch LCD TV line-up. The svelte screens are a mere 1.9cm thick and appear to sacrifice no quality in presenting a flat panel that's barely thicker than a magazine.
Hitachi has built the screen's signal processing unit into the base of the screen rather than the back panel and reduced the thickness of the panel itself to get the over-all size down so considerably. Hitachi plans to start mass production of the screens in 2009.
Panasonic's new Blu-ray line-up
If you're starting to chew up a good portion of the space on your hard drive recorder you'll appreciate the storage capacity available in the new line-up of high-definition Blu-ray recorders from Panasonic.
The electronics maker's flagship player has a built-in one terabyte hard disk drive, large enough to store 381 hours of high-definition content. It also has a Blu-ray recorder capable of burning 18 hours of HD content to a 50GB Blu-ray disc.
That starts to become significant as HDTV broadcasts begin to arrive on the Freeview platform next year. Panasonic's new players offer full 1080p playback and also come in 500GB and 250GB configurations.
JVC's new resolution
JCV/Victor has a great stand at Ceatec showing off its new video cameras. Among them is a prototype TV camera that can capture images at incredibly high resolution - 3840 x 2048 pixels at 30 frames per second. Even the highest resolution screens widely available only display pictures at 1920 x 1080 resolution.
The obvious target market here is the TV and movie industries which are already recording at high-definition. The high-definition we currently see built into TV screens will ultimately become higher-resolution and the JVC camera points to where screen resolution is heading. The question then is how much on-screen realism can you handle?
