CES Unveiled, the Consumer Electronics Association’s promotional run-up to the big CES International show to be mounted in Las Vegas in early January, was held in New York’s Metropolitan Pavilion on Tuesday. There wasn’t a lot of meat there for display watchers but, to slightly misquote Spencer Tracey’s character in Pat and Mike, "what was there was cherce."

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

JVC, not known as a leader in consumer television, showed its recently announced Model LT-32WX50, a super-thin and super-light 32-inch LCD TV monitor that is also being touted for commercial applications. The top two thirds of the monitor is a startlingly thin 6.4mm (0.25 inches), and the entire unit weighs only 5.7kg (12.5 pounds). The bottom third, which contains electronics and connectors, more than doubles the overall thickness, but is still quite thin. A JVC rep said the monitor has Full HD resolution and, not surprisingly, LED edge lighting.

With a native contrast ratio of 4000:1 and a color gamut that covers 100% of sRGB and 90% of Adobe RGB, the monitor is designed for high performance as well as an impressive look. Colors were nicely saturated and blacks were dark. I didn’t see objectionable motion blur, but the program material being shown wasn’t very demanding in that regard.

In addition to striking design and good image quality, JVC was underlining the monitor’s ecological creds, including the fact that it uses half the "material resources" of convention designs and eliminates the use of mercury (as does every other LCD-TV with an LED backlight).

A press release said the unit would be available this month for less than $3,000, but the booth rep quoted an MSRP of $3,500.

Steve Venuti, President of HDMI Licensing, was staffing a booth for HDMI along with Marketing Director Charlene Wan. They were there to promote HDMI 1.4, the new version of the now ubiquitous high-definition interconnection standard. When people at Insight Media (and beyond) heard I would be speaking with Venuti, they gave me several notebook pages of questions to ask him. I’ll boil the questions, answers, and Venuti’s background comments down into a couple of hopefully coherent paragraphs.

In seven years, Venuti told me, HDMI has gone from nothing to the primary standard for HD interconnections. In 2009, HDMI has 100% penetration in digital TV sets. The reasons for HDMI’s success, he said, is the convenience of one cable for video and audio, delivery of uncompressed signals, and the ability to give studios the confidence their content will be protected.

The Version 1.4 spec, which was completed in June and has just finished compliance testing, is ready to roll as far as Venuti is concerned. He expects the first products containing HDMI 1.4 to be announced at CES and introduced in H1′10.

HDMI 1.4’s payload is 10.2 Mb/sec, the same as HDMI 1.3, Venuti said, and that’s enough to support two 1080p/60 data streams for 3D, as well as 4k x 2k images. Blue-ray Disk 3D’s native format will be 24 fps. If somebody wanted to triple that frame rate to deliver 72fps to the set, HDMI might be over-taxed, but 1080p/60 is fine.

Silicon that supports 297Mhz is needed for dual 1080p/60 streams, and that doesn’t exist now, said Venuti. Current silicon maxes out at 225MHz. Therefore, the initial 3D-TV products that come out in 2010 will not support a full dual 1080p/60. The 3D BD spec is due out in December, and that should indicate how initial products can implement 3D.

Among the new features of HDMI 1.4 are the addition of an Ethernet data channel to the HDMI cable, so connected devices that support it will be able to send and receive data at 100Mb/sec for IP-based applications. There’s also an audio return channel that will allow audio to be delivered upstream for processing and playback without a separate cable.

As already mentioned, there is support for 3D over HDMI, with Ver. 1.4 defining common 3D formats and resolutions for HDMI-enabled devices, and support for 4k x 2k resolution. Supported formats include 3840×2160 at 24, 25, and 30Hz; and 4096×2160 at 24Hz.

Also defined is a 19-pin Micro HDMI Connector for portable devices. The micro-connector is about half the size of the current HDMI Mini Connector. There’s also a cabling specification called Automotive Connection System that will give automobile makers a convenient solution for distributing HD content within a motor vehicle.

Finally, on the applications side, Rand McNally was showing its IntelliRoute TND 500 GPS device designed specifically for truckers. The device incorporates 13,000 truck-related geo-coded points of interest and tools for managing regulatory compliance and calculating profitability. Product Management Director Dave Marsh (whose business card includes the latitude and longitude of his office) said the TND 500 had been refined with truckers in mind. For example, the vibration in a typical truck cab makes double touches on a touch screen likely, so the response of the touch screen was optimized to minimize unwanted responses. Similarly, hard and soft buttons are larger to make actuation easy in the presence of vibration, but also because a trucker is often reaching farther to actuate his GPS than a car driver is.

This extends to the selection of the display, which is sourced from Innolux. It has a large 5-inch diagonal and 480×272 pixels. The backlight is dimmable to lower luminance levels than is true for most car GPS devices, necessary for truckers that drive long distances along roads far from built-up areas.

Look for more info at CES in January.