Sony synergy FTW! Sony officially announced Blu-ray-to-PSP movie transfers at CES today. Pop a Blu-ray movie into your PS3, jack in your PSP and download to the portable or a Memory Stick for keeps. It’s sorta like pre-ripped iPod rips on DVDs, but on Sony’s ball field. [Kotaku]
We wonder who came up with this inspired floor plan: The HD DVD booth is in loogie-hawkin’ distance of the Blu-ray booth. But the Blu-ray guys are too busy celebrating to bother.
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We scored a sitdown with DongSoo Jun, Executive VP and General Manager of Samsung’s Digital AV Division. Translation: He’s Samsung’s main man on Blu-ray and HD DVD. We asked him the big question: “Is HD DVD dead ?” His answer might surprise you.
On the Hollywood front, he believes that the Warner announcement was a tipping point. In short, Blu-ray will win. But! HD DVD doesn’t have to slink into a grave next to Betamax yet. It will become the chosen format for “private” (that is, personal) content because the format—ahem, Toshiba and Microsoft—has a stronghold in the PC drive market. He expects Toshiba to really concentrate on the PC HD DVD market since it’s deader than disco if it loses there.
The format war ends. The “divide” begins. And it’ll be even bigger, in a sense.
Is there a difference between 120Hz and 60Hz TVs? Philips proved there is a noticeable diff at CES 2008 today, showing last year’s 60Hz 42-incher mounted below this year’s 120Hz 7403 display. In a moving, panning image, the jumpiness of the 60Hz video was apparent compared with the butta-smooth motion of the frame-doubled 120Hz 7403 monitor mounted above it on the wall. Another astonishing stat of that 7403: its 2ms (that’s milliseconds) refresh rate. However, whenever the image was static, the difference between the two wasn’t noticeable. Available in May, this 42-inch smoothie will be $US1799, its 47″ brandmate will run $US2099, and the biggest one of the Philips 7000 series, a 52-inch display, will be $US2799.
A car with a Mac in the front and a built-in Wii in the trunk. Check it…
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We got a chance to check out the picoprojector that Texas Instruments is working on, both in a mobile phone and as a standalone device. The picture that it puts up isn’t amazing, but you wouldn’t be watching HD movies using this thing anyways. It could be useful for business travellers who want to do easy presentations as well as regular consumers who want to share short videos and pictures with their friends. There are no concrete plans to actually put this tech into, you know, devices you can buy, but hey, they’re working on it so you’ve gotta assume they plan to get paid for it at some point. galleryPost('ces08picoproj', 15, 'Texas Instruments Pico Projector');
Want some perspective on that Panasonic 150-inch plasma display? Here it is with a human standing next to it, flanked by Panasonic’s previous largest TV, a 103-incher from last year. So if you like your TVs as big as a queen-sized bed, capable of displaying an elephant in actual size, you may now begin your five-year wait for it to become available, if you can save your money fast enough.
The Lasonic iPod Ghetto Blaster has been hyped for a while now, but this was our first opportunity to get a look at it up close—and as you can see, we took full advantage. We also managed to score a full-feature list which I lovingly hand-typed word-for-word from a spec sheet (weird errors and all). And for those of you who thought this thing would never see the light of day, we learned that the boombox will be priced at $US169 and it is ready and waiting for interested vendors. You can check out the full specs after the break.
Microsoft will release Power Pack 1 as an update to their Windows Home Server software. It will enable support for 64-Bit Vista and increase data protection. [Microsoft]
