Cedia Usa 2006
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23-09-2006, 2:17 PM
| #1 |
| Distinguished Member  | Cedia Usa 2006
Well since I’ve been back from CEDIA USA in Denver I’ve been very, very busy so not much time to put down my thoughts. So today I have some spare moments and I thought I might as well give you a British perspective on what was there. For the last three years CEDIA has been at Indianapolis but this year it was in Denver. I have to say, I prefer Denver. Although I preferred our accommodation in Indy….but that’s not why we went. We went to see all that is new and exciting in AV Land. No doubt some of you have followed the day to day reports on AVS forum, I know I did. I find it quite amazing how many folk can view the same thing yet have a completely different experience. Let me start by reminding everyone that I am the distributor for Lumagen in UK. What I will report is what I saw. I do not have daggers out for anyone and I hope folk can understand that I am honest in my comments of what I see. Read on. Denver convention centre is much like any other but they do have nice touches like the statues all over the place. This small one out front was pretty cool.  The first port of call when we got our passes was to nip in to the portable HD-DVD show across the street. I won an HD-DVD…disc, not player though. They had one of the best images of show in there. They had a demo disc playing on a rear pro tv and it looked mental. I suspect this demo disc was made to the very, very highest standards as the KingKong trailer they showed has never ever looked so good to me. Possibly the more interesting thing for man of use was this though.  Back over to the show and we had a wander. I can’t remember the exact routes so I’ll just comment on things I now remember. Pioneer: Stand had the 5000ex and the Elite version playing. Amazingly there were people beside me asking each other if they new when the 1080p panels would be out or shown…they obviously couldn’t see any benefit of the extra pixels on the one they were looking directly at…..or perhaps they couldn’t actually see the sign that said in big letters 1080P….which could explain a lot hahahaha…. Thought that they looked nice, as did the new 7th gen units. As is usually the case with these things they play very specific content to make sure you don’t see any possible issues with the panels. Which is fair enough. Good stand though. Panasonic had their 1080P 65” unit on show but no sign of a 50 that I could see. It is imminent though I believe. Panasonic were showing their own BluRay player as well. Now I am not sure if it was actually BluRay disc they were playing on the panels or if it was a BluRay advert fed of something else. The reason being this was the only BluRay demo that I thought looked good. Everywhere else I saw BluRay it looked really bad. Very noisy backgrounds making everything look nasty and processed. Here it looked good…very weird. Over at Fujitsu they had their 1080p panels. Yes, that’s right…remember how we were told that there is no point in 1080p panels at 50” or below..well have a look at this.  Image quality was as you’d expect. Pretty nice. However, I have to say that whereas the current range are very sexy, these fall in to the Volvo design. What are they thinking…Here’s a closer look at the little one which I think is actually an lcd…Perhaps Graham can chime in and give us the scoop.  Over at Sony I only really was interested in the SXRD rear pro’s. COOL. And the new little Pearl. We went three times to see this thing. Once each day. Day one. They were showing bluray. Looked poor. Noisy nasty image. Put on some video source HD and it looked much better but soft. Next day we went back and they were showing the same and some other video source material and it looked very sharp and good. Then last day we went in again and they were showing BluRay Narnia clip. It showed a very significant Uniformity issue. That is to say that the bottom right quadrant of the screen, when showing snow, was pink. This is a shading issue and I’m sure it’s very fixeable but I was surprised no-one else seemed to be commenting on it as it was not insignificant. So from three short 5 minute stints with Pearl I have to say that it looks like it could be great…looking forward to playing with one very very soon. While we’re on about Sony I should mention the HenryFu stand where they were doing G90 v Ruby. I’ve read the Art review of this and was surprised. When we went in they were playing out the last scene in Riddick. From what I saw for first 5 minutes I couldn’t see why anyone would buy a g90. In fact, I wondered why they were doing the demo. The Ruby had more detail and the contrast and punch was there a plenty. It looked nicer than the G90 physically. Then the credits came on and you could see the significantly darker blacks the G90 afforded. The demo was supposed to compare these two set up optimally so I asked why they weren’t using 48Hz to feed the Ruby. They got Roger Galvin to come and explain why. From what I remember of our conversation it went something like. Roger: “ 60Hz is optimal for that projector” Me: “No it’s not, it will run at 48Hz genlocked from 60Hz film. You can set the scaler to do that. You’ll get much smoother motion image” We then had a discussion about flicker and 50Hz and in the end it was obvious he was a CRT guy and had limited expereince of Ruby and Lumagens. So while it was entertaining it wasn’t exactly both devices set up for optimal playback. I’m sure that Roger is no fool and that he did a top job on the G90 but on that showing, even with the Ruby not optimised, I wouldn’t have picked a G90 myself. Before everyone starts on about how black is much blacker with CRT I know, I saw it. I’ve seen it. I’m just telling you my thoughts from what I saw in that single demo. MORE TO COME….. Last edited by Gordon @ Convergent AV; 23-09-2006 at 4:24 PM. |
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23-09-2006, 3:43 PM
| #2 |
| Distinguished Member | Re: Cedia Usa 2006
SIM2 stand was busy as always. Unfortunately Alan wasn’t there when I popped around. They had an off site demo though where they were showing the cheaper 1080p single chipper and the new big 3 chip unit. The chap over at that location played us some nice video footage on the big unit. It was BRIGHT. Easily lit up the very large screen they were using. Unsurprisingly it was quite loud. This is another one of the demo’s I saw where I am at odds with some of the other comments about what was seen. I can only presume that there were changes to set up of the device or some other environmental factors changed from what I saw and what others have said they saw. To me the big three chipper looked like it was a work in progress and just didn’t have the contrast punch you now expect, especially after seeing what the C3X and the HT3000 can achieve. Both excellent devices. Very friendly folk though. Optoma: The H81 was playing on a large screen in a closed off room. This was a great demo. I must say I did see rainbows and found it a little fatiguing but the picture was nice. Not sure why they’ve gone backwards in the sound output of it though. Louder than we have come to expect from H78/H79. I also stuck my head in to look at the other unit they are doing in US. Don’t think it’s coming to UK. Just as well, it wasn’t great. Runco: Showed their autoscope anamorphic lens tricked up 1080p unit. Very disappointed with this. One of my mates is the Spanish distributor for Runco and I think he wasn’t pleased when I told him it was pants. Just looked un-dynamic and noisy. Turns out that they’d had a problem with a unit just before we went in and they’d had to cobble together a replacement after knicking a loan unit from another manufacturer. So I’ll let them off as usually their demo’s are entertaining and set up well. JVC: We went off site to find the HD1K. Sure enough we got a nice tour of JVC’s room from a guy. Their broadcast monitor rear pro looked really very good to me. Ugly, but great image. Then we got shown in to look at HD10K and HD2K in a large venue screen. It was really very obvious how much better the HD10K was. Lovely image. JVC do three different scalers to work with their units. Obviously I’d recommend Lumagen hahaha but you can choose from rebadged VP30, Faroudja1080 or the Whitehorse OEM Silicon Optix HQV platform that many folk now rebadge. The latter is a scaler in a box designed and built by SO that manufacturers can just rebadge as their own. There were quite a few of them around the show….forgotten where I saw them now though! HD1K. Well this thing was a star for me. It was pretty obvious that it has a very very good contrast range. It was also pretty clear there was no dynamic iris involved. I was impressed. I have no idea how much this will be compared to a Ruby but I look forward to it coming out and having a play with a real production model and not a prototype. While we were over at this location we stuck our heads in to the Silicon Optix ballroom. As usual they had a MASSIVE screen being lit up by the QX1 Lcos unit, fed from Terranex Xantus processors. They also had 50 different curtained off areas showing their manufacturing partners products. ie Denon DVD player with Reon, Vantage scaler, Brillian displays etc etc. They also had some demo’s set up showing before and after processing. I have to say that there was only one single display or room in this hall that had what I would call a good image. That was the Cinetron booth. They had their LCOS based PJ there. Another room where I am in disagreement with some other visitors. This thing was punchy. Great dynamic image, no noise, very very sharp. To me it looked like they had chucked a fair chunk of money at the optics as it looked MUCH sharper than I’ve seen a Ruby for instance. When we saw it they said IRIS was open and lamp was on full power. It wasn’t the darkest room but I was happy with black levels even at that. Of course now I’ve come back I here that they turn all 50Hz material in to 60 internally so I guess I wont be getting involved with this model…..still, great demo from the new guys. Back to main hall. I’ve already written about some things in another thread so we’ll carry on with Algolith. These guys do Noise Reduction devices and an HQV scaler. I’ve seen the Flea demo before and liked what it does. However this time they had a mosquito doing all sorts of nr and the ends result was hideous. If you like posterised image with no detail at all and making folk look like they have put their make up on with a palette knife then step on up. For me I’d probably rather have watched the noisy image. I presume that there is the capacity to vary the severity of the nr but they seemed to have everything maxed I guess as it was BAD. Very disappointed with this and was looking foreward to seeing something special. Dropped by Vantage booth and they were doing pretty much the same thing as last year. Feed direct to plasma and another through scaler to plasma pixel mapped. I think it best I avoid comment on what I saw here. Digital Projection had an interesting room. They had a pile of their PJ’s firing at different sized screens all fed same material. The surprise for me here was the Titan 1080P 3 chip DLP. On paper it has much lower contrast range than the Projection Design OEM unit single chipper. However in this room the Titan’s looked significantly superior. They were very nice. Deep blacks, great colours, sharp image. Bloody expensive though. Nicely done wee demo, thumbs up. Arcam let the cat out of the bag by showing the new Movie Solo  and as I said they had a new remote that’s going to go with all the new equipment. It’s a nice shape and it’s backlit with the light going through the text on buttons so you can actually read what they say!  I’m sure there is more I’ll remember but before I post the images of shame I will just say that there was beer involved on this trip. Nice beer.  |
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23-09-2006, 3:48 PM
| #3 |
| Distinguished Member | Re: Cedia Usa 2006
On to the images of shame. On a thread over at AVS that asked what do you expect to see at CEDIA I replied lots of badly set up displays in the wrong aspect ratio. So, here you go.....this is just a selection. I've cropped out who they were to spare embaressment.      guess there is always next year... |
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| Thanks from: | choddo2006 (23-09-2006), kurtz (23-09-2006), Nic Rhodes (23-09-2006), Russell.Williams (24-09-2006), Welwynnick (23-09-2006) |
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23-09-2006, 4:26 PM
| #8 |
| Senior Member  | Re: Cedia Usa 2006 Last edited by VirusKiller; 23-09-2006 at 4:34 PM. |
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23-09-2006, 4:36 PM
| #10 | ||
| Senior Member | Re: Cedia Usa 2006 Quote:
Quote:
 Edit: Your comments would suggest that not even Lumagen has managed to genlock 24/48/72 from 60i/p. Hence Radiance XG?  Or were you referring to PJs. (BTW, I know you are under NDA...).
Last edited by VirusKiller; 23-09-2006 at 4:39 PM. | ||
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23-09-2006, 4:44 PM
| #11 |
| Distinguished Member | Re: Cedia Usa 2006
Lumagen have genlocked 48/72 out for interlaced 60Hz film sources of SD for about 18months and probably 6 months for 1080i HD. This is in their current Vision range. There will be an iteration of the firmware that will do 24Hz out as well I hope. I cannot comment on what is happening with Radiance range in development. All I said was that no-one has got a product out there with an HQV chip that can remove 2:3 sequence on an interlaced 60Hz source. I'm sure someone will eventually.....  Gordon |
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24-09-2006, 9:12 PM
| #15 | |
| Veteran Member | Re: Cedia Usa 2006 Quote:
I'm curious about your comments on the SXRDs. If you could take front vs rear projection out of the equation for a moment, how would you compare the PQ of the RPTVs with the Ruby? Cheers, Nick | |
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