The Future in TVs
Today I have been to a conference with all the "major" players in the TV slash home theatre slash Blu-Ray players which gave us a little insight into the future of their products.
"Interestingly" enough, all of them pretty much sang the same song: Ecology.
Sony decided to do it strangely, though, by only putting a lot of the ecological technology in one of their models while the rest of the companies, except Samsung, put in sophisticated and interesting features to take down the watt usage. Samsung is mostly focusing on their new LED TVs, which got a rather low watt from the factory.
Sony did do something quite original. It got a sensor, which detects both movements as well as body heat. If you leave the front of the TV for an extended amount of time, the picture will turn off. When you are back, it turns on in the blink of an eye. If you leave for a longer time, like as if something came up, it will enter standby after a preset amount. An extremely interesting thing for families with children, who'd get up and walk away without turning anything off.
What was kind of an annoying step towards the wrong thing, is that everyone have made some of the same damn thing but called it something completely different than the other company; Streaming of music and videos to other products hooked up to a network, using one remote for several products like TV remote also handles Blu-Ray Player and a means to connect your TV to the internet with sort of "widgets", like RSS feeds, weather, youtube etc. You could just imagine the wasted potentional by not communicating and creating an new open standard. It'll certainly cut down on a lot of extra development hours.
My absolute favorite is Philips new Cinema 21:9 series. Basically it is mimicking the display as seen in cinemas and after having seen it in use, I was absolutely blown away. It is just as amazing as seen on this picture:
