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Toshiba TV adds third dimension to video viewing

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Toshiba this week unveiled a flat-panel television that converts any digital video into 3-D. "With Cell TV, everything is in 3-D," Toshiba America marketing vice president Scott Ramirez said while unveiling Cell TV to the press on the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which this year gathers some 2,500 industry exhibitors. "All the home video games you have right now will be in 3-D," he said.

The Japanese electronics titan's Cell TV is powered by a microprocessor typically used in advance computers and high-end video game consoles and was billed by executives as the future of television.

"We are finally ready for the decade of conversion," Ramirez said. "Consumers are getting more connected. Everything is connected. We are moving beyond just television. This year is going to be all about the experience."

Cell TV technology upgrades digital video content, even adding pixels to enhance low quality streams such as those common in user-generated online video. Cell TV senses room lighting and adapts screen quality accordingly.

Cell televisions are synchronized to an array of online video channels and have built-in cameras, microphones and software for video-enabled Internet telephone calls.

"With video phone capability, you can talk to people anywhere in the world," Ramirez said. "You are going to look crystal clear at 55 inches with our technology."

The 3-D and enhanced Internet connectivity technology will be in a set of Cell TV models this year and eventually will spread to other parts of Toshiba's television line-up, according to Ramirez.

"We see the TV as an engine capable of providing a transformative entertainment experience," said Toshiba America consumer products chief executive Atsushi Murasawa.

Cell TV is at heart at a powerful "broadband engine" processor for multimedia content, according to Murasawa. Cell boasts 143 times the processing power of televisions in the market today.

Toshiba also unveiled a Home Entertainment Server with a terabyte of memory and Blu-ray high-definition DVD player to act as a wireless entertainment hub as well as a massive storage site for digital content.

© Wire reports

©2024 GPlusMedia Inc.

6 Comments
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What is the big deal with this?

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ESPN 3D will be the first TV network dedicated to 3D viewing, starting with the 2010 World Cup.

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Pfff sounds like marketing BS, like when Sony said that all games will look better than toy story on the ps2, and the ps3 will control your home.

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Well said "thepro" sound like marketing for bad shows and to much reality tv. Can't wait till we can watch 3D some lame reality show about scank's living together.

What a day that will be, we can now see in 3D plastic show in all its glory.

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American football would benefit the most from 3D technology since there's so much going on around you in a play in that sport. And American football has been quite embracing of new technology (video replay, helmet cam, film study on laptop/ipod, etc).

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If this is anything like that "3-D" cell phone that Au unveiled last year, then I wouldn't get too excited about this. That phone created a 3-D effect -- and that's the distinction, a 3-D effect, rather than true 3-D -- by using a ridged screen surface that had to be rotated left or right in order to produce the sensation of 3-D. This type of tech was rampant throughout the 80s and 90s, but wasn't true 3-D.

The trick here is the source signal. I'm hightly dubious that Toshiba has latched onto any sort of tech that will take TV signals that weren't originally recorded in 3-D, and through the magic of a "microprocessor typically used in advance computers and high-end video game consoles," tranform those images into any sort of meaningful 3-D that doesn't make our head and eyes hurt after 30 minutes of continuous viewing. What the processor undoubtedly does is a lot of filling-in-the-blank to create what the computer guesses is a close approximation of three demensions when viewed from a particular angle, and that's going to result in some weirdness that our eyes aren't going to be particularly happy about.

The claim of universal 3-D has been made before, and it'll be made again before someone actually achieves it. I'd love to see Toshiba's new TV myself, but I'm inclined to think It's going to be sketchy, at best.

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