1080p HDTV

One of the really big (both literally and figuratively) items at CES this year were 1080p televisions. Every major manufacturer was featuring these in their booth. They're pretty impressive. With 1080p you get a progressive scan (non-interlaced) display with a full 1080 lines of resolution. A side-by-side comparison against either 1080i or 780p shows very clearly that 1080p is the winner. These displays are beautiful.

Epson was showing off a technology called 3LCD that is designed to compete with DLP in the projection HDTV market. A 1080p 3LCD TV is shown at left. In a side by side demonstration, the 3LCD products were dramatically clearer with much better color fidelity. Of course, this was all in the Epson booth with products supposedly set to "out of the box" settings, so your mileage may vary. I was pretty impressed with how much progress has been made on the viewing angle problem with these rear-projection systems. Still, it's just not cool to have a TV that's 12 inches deep these days, so the market will probably continue to skew towards plasmas and LCD's.

Speaking of LCD, great progress has been made this year with respect to size and response time. Many manufactures where showing displays in excess of 50 inches with 8ms response times. Given the burn in and brightness problems with plasma, it is great to see LCD technology advancing. I'm hoping for a sub-$2000 HD unit by years end.

On the plasma front, Samsung (who gets the award for the most ginormous booth at the show) was showing off a stunning 102" model. This thing is really huge and was constantly surrounded by a sizeable crowd of admirers.