What's next, a wall-to-wall TV screen?
Las Vegas — TELEVISIONS in recent years have taken over living rooms. Now, they're almost as big as one.
At the annual Consumer Electronics Show here this week, manufacturers showed off ever-bigger TVs in a size race that showed no signs of slowing.
Panasonic this year bragged that billionaire Mark Cuban owns one of its wall-filling, 103-inch plasma displays, which retail for about $70,000.
But Sharp did Panasonic one better, showing off a 108-inch liquid crystal display prototype that it exhibited on the show floor. That's 9 feet, measured diagonally from corner to corner.
The company won't disclose pricing or shipment dates. It's just the sort of attention-grabbing technology demonstration that's necessary at a show that attracts some 2,700 exhibitors, fanned out over 1.8 million net square feet of space.
Walls of flat-panel displays were everywhere, which hardly comes as a surprise as the Consumer Electronics Assn. forecasts a year of record sales of $22 billion, with prices dropping and consumers replacing their bulky old sets with slim displays.
But the gains were measured in inches, not technological milestones.
Panasonic, for example, demonstrated a prototype for a 42-inch plasma display capable of full 1920-by-1080 high-definition resolution, together with new 50- and 58-inch plasma displays. The 42- and 50-inch displays are due out this spring, with the larger of the sets out in the summer. No pricing information was disclosed.
Sony Electronics showed off a slender, 70-inch Bravia display -- the largest of its line of liquid-crystal display televisions. It incorporates new technologies designed to compensate for motion blurring, to expand the color range by about 1.8 times and offer a new form of back lighting.
It goes on sale in February for a suggested retail price of $33,000.
But the big news for the living room came in smaller packages. LG Electronics introduced the first dual-format high-definition disc player. The Super Multi Blue Player plays either Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs in full 1920-by-1080 resolution.
Hee Gook Lee, president and chief technology officer of LG Electronics, said the company wanted to allay consumers' concerns about investing in a player, given the two incompatible formats. But the new player has certain compromises. It doesn't preserve all the interactive features of HD-DVD. Due out in February, the suggested retail price of $1,199 is almost what consumers would pay if they purchased Blu-ray and HD-DVD players.
