CEDIA Report Day 2: Home Theater Roundup

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My second day at CEDIA (Custom Electonics Design and Installation Association) turned up a hodgepodge of new gear for home theater enthusiasts. Here’s the 60-second version:

At the Anthem/Paradigm booth, they were showing of the first Anthem multi-zone amplifier, a $2,495, 12 zone amp, with 65 Watts per channel to power music all around a house. Also, for those old-school stereo fans, a new two-channel integrated amp at $1,499—because not every room has to be a home theater. Paradigm showed a number of new loudspeakers, including the revamped monitor series, the V.5 line, which focused its performance on sensitively, however, one of the most interesting things shown there was a prototype of a high-end tabletop AM/FM radio with Paradigm’s HD digital signal processing, a built-in subwoofer, Atomic clock, DVD/CD playback and optional iPod doc. The company is targeting a price of about $450. Look out Bose and Boston Acoustics.

Over at the Vogel’s booth, a company that primarily makes wall mounts for flat panel TVs, there was a product called the Mighty Brighty—a screen paint for front projection screens. While this isn’t the only screen paint on the market, the Mighty Brighty is interesting because in addition to the screen surface paint itself, it comes with a magnetic paint for the screen border and a removable black border that can be attached to the paint. This way then the home owner wants the screen to essentially disappear, he can take the magnetic border strip (basically a piece of magnetic fabric) off the wall. It comes with a top coat and a base coat and additives to create the appropriate gain depending on the projector it’s being used with.

Toshiba predicted that 2007 will be a very good year for LCD TVs, due to the abundance of 1080p resolution in smaller sizes than plasma and price drops since last year. The company expects that next year, in the 40- to 42-inch size, 60 percent of the flat panel TVs sold will be LCD. The company showed new 42- and 47-inch LCD TVs from the new Cinema Series Pro (available only from specialized home theater dealers). The new TVs sport 1080p resolution, 12 bit 333MHz Toshiba Pixel Pure processors and an Ethernet connection with allows the user to check and compose e-mail on the TV screen.

Toshiba also had a bit of news about its HD DVD products. First, the company pointed out that HD DVD is outselling Blu-Ray by 3:1, though with only three products available in the whole high resolution disc market, it’s way too early to declare a winner. Still, Toshiba already is announcing its 2nd generation products. The new HD-X2 at $999 is the first HD DVD to output 1080p and is the first product to use the new HDMI 1.3 interface. The player has a 12-bit video DAC, bi-direction RS-232, Dolby Digital Plus, DTS HD and Dolby True HD. The other player, the HD-A2, at $499, only outputs a maximum 720p/1080i, and otherwise is very similar to the original HD-A1.

Projector company Optoma was showing off a large line of projectors, including the $30,000 BigVision built-in rear projection system that debuted at CEDIA last year, but the newest product was actually something much more down-market—a $999 high def projector. The HD70 is a 720p DLP projector selling for under a grand, making it one of the cheapest HD projectors on the market. It’ll be available at places like Best Buy and Circuit City rather than the high-end CEDIA-level dealers.

Topping the upscale side of the projector business was Runco, which opened up its press conference with two announcements. The first is that the company is offering the first video display products to be THX certified. The THX video certification, like the audio certification, requires that the product meet certain performance standards and characteristics. On the video side, the measured specs specifications include such things as brightness, contrast, uniformity, signal processing, noise reduction and de-interlacing. The second piece of big news is that Runco has purchased the NVision brand. NVision was the first brand to receive TI’s DLP engines in the early days of the technology. The company had since gone into bankruptcy, but Runco plans to use it to increase it’s distribution in both projectors and flat panel products. NVision will be marketed as a lower-cost brand compared to Runco and Vidikron.

In the new product department, Runco showed several, ranging from the $16,999 VX-2000 single-chip, THX certified, 1080p DLP projector to the $99,999 VX-55 THX certified three-chip 1080p DLP that looked absolutely amazing with the CineWide Autoscope function which allows the best reproduction of Cinemascope (2.35:1) aspect ratio material. Runco also showed a couple 1080p resolution LCD TVs that include both NTSC and ATSC tuners and speakers and ISF Day and Night modes.

There’s a lot more, but that’s about all I have time for now. I have to go to bed, but check back for more over-the-top gear.