Sigma Designs was in a meeting room above Hall 1 and we got the latest update from them. The first news was about a new variation on G.Hn which Sigma calls “G.Hn Prime” which boost performance above that of the base G.Hn level. It uses special “acceleration” technology at twice the rate, using the TCP protocol. The Prime technology can be accessed by a firmware upgrade on powerline adaptors that use the CG5200 and CG5300 chipsets. Typical real world throughput is said to be around 360Mbps – although it can be up to 400Mbps under ideal conditions.
Next we moved onto UltraHD and Sigma believes it has a very good share in the UltraHD set market. In particular, its chip is used in the Vizio 4K TVs and the company told us that the M Series is currently sold out in Best Buy (it hit the sweet spot for TVs according to reviewers, CNet, who said that black level was better than Sony or Samsung TV sets). One of the features on the SX6 chipset is a very low latency input for gaming that is said to be around 1.5 frames (and tested by CNet at 20.73ms). The Pro-SX6 chipset, announced in 2014, has support for Dolby Vision, as does the SX7 (STV7701) and the performance of the Vizio set in the booth was very good. Sigma told us that the Vizio set has support for 384 separate dimming zones for optimum HDR performance.
