CES 2008

Blu-ray's on a roll--but will downloadable Internet video be a bigger challenge than HD DVD?

(Credit: Philips)

What was arguably the biggest story of CES 2008 occurred three days before the show actually opened for business: Warner Home Video went Blu-ray exclusive, leaving just Paramount and Universal (and smaller DreamWorks) as exclusive HD DVD content partners. Indeed, in the days since, the issue of those studios following Warner's lead seems to be one of when, not if. Blu-ray seems on the verge of a complete victory in the HD disc format war to become the high-def successor to DVD. As a result, combo players--including a newly announced model from Samsung--were greeted more by yawns than by "oohs" and "aahs." Even without HD DVD to nudge it, prices for Blu-ray players seem destined to become more affordable, as evidenced by forthcoming devices from Philips and Funai. That said, with the specification still evolving--Panasonic's DMP-BD50 became the first 2.0 player to be officially announced--there's no reason to rush out and buy one anytime soon.

But there's still a big question as to whether or not the future of home video will be one of discs--or, in fact, physical media of any kind. Online delivery of home video seemed to be everywhere: major companies such as Samsung are getting into the game, while upstarts such as XStreamHD are offering intriguing delivery options and increasingly improved video quality. That's on top of existing hardware solutions such as Vudu, Xbox 360's Video Marketplace, and Amazon Unbox on TiVo, not to mention the promise of Netflix stepping up to the plate.

Of course, the potential 800-pound gorilla in the online video space won't be unveiling its plans until next week. That's when we'll find out if Apple plans to ramp up its Apple TV into a serious home video contender. If, as rumored, Steve Jobs and company add some long overdue features--iTunes video rentals, direct access to the store through the TV interface, and improved video quality--it could overshadow nearly anything shown in Las Vegas. And while the sort of full HD video quality delivered by Blu-ray's 50GB discs isn't yet available to consumers via broadband (at least in the bandwidth-challenged U.S.), it's only a breakthrough or two away. In other words, watch your back, Blu-ray: HD DVD was just a battle, and the wider war is still raging.

We're just about 13 months away from the government-mandated digital transition--at which time analog TV broadcasts are scheduled to cease completely. Those who can't--or won't--get cable or satellite TV now have their first non-TiVo DVR to consider in the form of the EchoStar TR-50. That's good, because traditional manufacturers such as Panasonic continue to offer mostly lackluster recorders--either tunerless DVD recorders (which will pretty much serve as "backup drives" for DVRs) or models with hobbled digital tuners that won't deliver native full resolution HD programming.

Elsewhere on the home video front, we saw indications that wireless in-home HD video is getting closer to the mass market. As with wireless audio, standards remain frustratingly elusive, but devices such as the Belkin FlyWire offer the potential for an end-to-end solution to decouple your video sources from your TV--which is increasingly vital to those with wall-mounted flat-screen TVs and projectors. Alternately, companies such as EchoStar's Sling Media are aiming to make it easier to access your home's main DVR on other TVs in the home (via the SlingCatcher), if not outside the home altogether (with the SlingPlayer software coming to BlackBerry smartphones later this year).

Looking at it in the rear-view mirror, you get a strong feeling from this CES that 2008 will be a big transitional year in the home video world. It's clear that the public wants more high-def programming and more on-demand video, as well as the ability to watch it where and when they want. Which manufacturers and standards will deliver on those promises? If we're lucky, the answer to that question may be more in focus by the time CES 2009 rolls around.

Buffalo's new drive doesn't make you pick a winner in the high-def disc format war, and it doesn't make you open up your PC's case to install it. The Buffalo MediaStation Blu-ray HD DVD (BRHC-6316U2) drive is an external USB combo drive that reads and writes Blu-ray discs and reads HD DVD discs. Unfortunately, Buffalo made no mention of eSATA or FireWire, so you're stuck with USB 2.0. It'll cost $649 when it starts shipping later this quarter.

One of our predictions for CES 2008 was that DVD recorders with ATSC tuners would get a couple of key features upgrades that take full advantage of the built-in digital tuner. Well, if Panasonic's new line of DVD recorders is any indication, we were wrong.

Despite some significant clamoring for a DVD recorder with a hard drive, the new Panasonic Diga line of DVD recorders includes only two standard DVD recorders, plus two DVD/VHS recorder combo units. There's also no mention of a few features we were hoping for: true HD output for ATSC programming, an EPG that pulls content data embedded in the ATSC signal, and an IR blaster to control other gear, such as a cable or satellite box.

While that's a lot of doom and gloom about the upcoming units, they'll still work perfectly fine for the standard usage of archiving content to DVD. As usual, all of the Panasonic recorders support all of the recordable DVD formats, including DVD-RAM. Also note that Panasonic is offering two models, the DMR-EA18 and DMR-EA38V, that lack a tuner of any kind--which is a nice option for those who are going to use the units with a cable/satellite box and want to save some money. Additionally, we anticipate that the recorders will include Panasonic's standard array of features, including flexible recording length, an outstanding LP recording mode and chasing playback on DVD-RAM discs.

LAS VEGAS--The winner in the Blu-ray and HD DVD war is the hard drive, according to Bill Watkins, CEO of Seagate Technology.

"People are saying Blu-ray won the war but who cares? The war is over physical distribution versus electrical distribution, and Blu-ray and HD lost that," he said during a breakfast meeting at the Consumer Electronics Show here this week. "In this, flash memory and hard drives are on the same side. The war is over and the physical guys lost."

Bill Watkins

(Credit: Seagate)

Watkins, naturally, speaks from personal interest, but he's got a point. (A former Army grunt and a decades-long Deadhead, Watkins is also one of the more entertaining CEOs in the technology industry to interview.) Consumers haven't been buying Blu-ray or HD DVD players and by the time they do, technology companies will likely be hawking sophisticated on-demand services and Internet Protocol TV. IPTV, in fact, is the dominant theme of the show. Sharp, Samsung, and Panasonic all unfurled content alliances that will let consumers look at headlines or videos from the Net on their TVs.

That's good news for Seagate, because electronic distribution means more hard drive sales. "If (data) is in the cloud I get more storage sales because you have to back up everything," he said.

"Surveillance is a big deal," he added. "You're being filmed right now (we were in a casino) and they've got to store it somewhere."

Hard drive makers are right now living through good times. In the 1990s, excess manufacturing capacity and price cuts led to stagnant revenues and losses for many companies. Since then, many players have dropped out. New markets such as digital video recorders opened up for drive makers. As a result, both Seagate and rival Western Digital are seeing double-digit growth. Seagate has already upped its revenue guidance twice for the quarter that just ended.

And the future continues to look good. Hollywood, Watkins said, will have no choice but to get into home delivery of content in a big way. People are leaving home less and less. And if the movie studios don't deliver their content to their home, people will watch whatever they can find on the Internet. At CES, XStreamHD is showing off a box that gets on-demand movies from a satellite. Actor Michael Douglas is an investor.

"They will watch lousy content if it is easy to do," he said.

Other notes from Watkins:

•  Seagate doesn't have its solid state drive out yet, but it's coming.

•  Flash memory, he added, will never completely take over the hard drive market. The demand for storage is too big. If a flash maker wanted to provide just 15 percent of the world's market for storage in 2012, it would have to invest $50 billion this year alone.

"And right now, no one has made that investment," he said.

He further argued that flash memory gets too much attention from Wall Street. "I'm making 75 cents a quarter, and I get half the valuation of SanDisk or Micron," he added.

•  Consumers still seem buoyant in Europe and Asia, so a lengthy, full-blown global recession may not occur. Admittedly, he adds, that's his own spin.

•  America has got to reform its immigration laws by letting in more immigrants. Nearly 60 percent of the companies in Silicon Valley were founded by people born outside the U.S. Last year, close to 70 percent of the students getting Ph.D.s in engineering were from other countries.

"And none of them got a green card," he said. "Because of this, U.S. companies will have to put R&D overseas."

•  Speaking of foreign lands, the government-to-university-to-private sector triumvirate (the government provides grants, universities invent stuff, and the private sector sells it) that helped build the tech industry in the U.S. no longer works as well as it once did. However, they have copied it pretty well overseas.

"They are following the made us successful and here it's broken," he said. "We used to say that what is good for GM is good for America. Now, what is good for the stockholders is not necessarily good for America. That drives me crazy."

Toshiba's Qosmio G45-AV690

With Intel's new Penryn series of laptop CPUs, PC makers, including Toshiba, are revamping their lines to offer the new parts. You'll be able to find the new chips in the Toshiba Qosmio line, the Satellite X205, and select Satellite U305 laptops.

One of the more impressive new Toshibas is the Qosmio G45-AV690, which the company calls the "world's first notebook to feature an HD DVD-R/RW optical drive." Although we admit, that might have been more impressive news before last week's Warner/Blu-ray smackdown.

Toshiba's Qosmio systems are still among our favorite multimedia desktop replacements, featuring 1080p-compatible screen resolution, an HDMI output for sending those HD DVD movies to your big-screen plasma or LCD TV, and most exciting, an external OCCUR TV tuner -- also known as CableCard. Setting up CableCard, for recording hi-def TV signals with your computer, is still a major pain, but it's a vast improvement over old-fashioned TV tuners. You also get Intel's new Penryn T9300 Core 2 Duo processor, and a decent Nvidia GeForce 8300 video card.

The tricked-out Qosmio G45-AV690 is available now for $3,199.

Sony has shored up the problems in its electronics, and will concentrate in 2008 on bringing more video content to its devices and improving its software, said CEO Sir Howard Stringer.

"We will see if we can enter the battle against the software companies. This is probably the year we need to demonstrate that," Stringer said during a meeting with reporters at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Monday morning.

One of the first examples of this strategy will be an expansion of the PlayStation Network. The network now is mostly used by gamers. Sony wants to turn it into a platform to deliver video, too. Sony will hold a press conference in two months to discuss changes to the PlayStation 3.

The world, of course, will wait and see. Consumers and analysts for the past several years have complained about the functionality of the software in Sony devices. The company, along with nearly everyone in the electronics industry, has also been trying to bridge the gap between the PC and the TV for years. But progress seems to be occurring across the industry. Microsoft says it has put nearly a million intelligent set-top boxes into homes, and Sharp and Samsung announced new TVs that serve up headlines and weather from Web sites.

Overall, Stringer seemed to be in an upbeat mood. A year ago at the same press conference, he had recently launched into a reorganization of the company and was in the midst of a notebook battery recall. Stringer and others noted that the software divisions didn't talk with the hardware divisions, and neither had much contact with the movie unit.

Now, all of Sony's divisions work more cohesively together, he said. Sales in many key areas are also up. Blu-ray players outsold HD DVD players during the holiday season, Sony asserted. Blu-ray accounted for 70 percent of the standalone high-def video players during the holidays, according to the company.

"Three years ago, we were not profitable in electronics. Now we are seriously profitable," he said. Observers will "also probably be pleasantly surprised" with results for Sony's third fiscal quarter, which come soon. Recent economic trends could put a damper on sales "but it's too early to be pessimistic," he said.

The reorganization has also allowed Sony to start coming out with more innovative products, such as the robotic Rolly device.

"We are now getting into the rhythm of innovation," Stringer said.

Stringer and other executives touted Sony's OLED TVs. The company, however, admitted that making large OLED TVs (the version on the market measures only 11 inches in diameter) is difficult.

Other notes:

--Stringer wouldn't directly comment on whether the Blu-ray consortium paid money to Warner to put its movies exclusively on Blu-ray. Stringer said Warner saw the value of the format but dodged discussing financial terms. "I think you are going to have to take that announcement at face value," he said.

The HD DVD group paid Paramount to commit to publishing its movies on the HD DVD format for a specified period of time in 2007. It was seen as a victory by the HD DVD group, but Blu-ray backers called the deal a form of a bribe.

--Sony Ericsson is going to concentrate more heavily in gaining market share in North America. Worldwide, Sony Ericsson has seen its market share rise to around 10 percent, but the weak place is the U.S., admitted Dick Komiyama, who heads up the group.

--Sony is also looking at incorporating its Cell processor, which currently sits inside of the PlayStation3, in other products. Cell is particularly good at manipulating video streams. The company even held a contest among engineers to design new applications. However, Sony didn't put a firm date on when some of these devices might come out or what they might be.

--The PlayStation 2 will become the device that Sony will use to take on the Nintendo Wii. Titles like Guitar Hero have sold well with PlayStation 2 and consumers can expect to see more casual games and non-core gamer games coming out, said Kaz Hirai, chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment, which oversees video consoles.

(Credit: Canon)

Canon just announced at CES three new standard-definition DVD camcorders, the latest in the company's DC-series of camcorders.

The Canon DC310 uses a 680,000-pixel CCD, a 41x optical zoom lens, and a 2.7-inch wide-screen LCD. The DC320 bumps up its sensor to a full megapixel and the lens to 48. Finally, the DC330 adds a USB 2.0 jack and a remote control. Canon built the DC330's remote sensor into the pivoting screen instead of the body, so you can use the remote in front, behind, or next to the camcorder, depending on the screen's position. All three camcorders include LCD video lights and SDHC card slots for recording still photos.

The DC310, DC320, and DC330 ship in March, with respective suggested price tags of $350, $370, and $380.

Canon's new DW-100 DVD burner

(Credit: Canon)

Back when all video was recorded to tape, archiving was somewhat simple. If you used a decent grade tape, you could store it for a while and then dub it if you worried about the ravages of time. Now that more video is being recorded to hard-drives and flash memory, computer-phobic videographers find themselves in a slight pickle. To accompany the company's latest HDD and flash camcorders, Canon has introduced the DW-100 DVD Burner. The DW-100 will be able to burn both standard definition DVDs and AVCHD DVDs. The latter can be played back on those Blu-Ray players that support the AVCHD codec. Controls are kept simple, with only a few buttons on top of the burner. When used with Canon's Vixia HF10, HF100, or HG10 camcorders, the DW-100 can also connect to a TV through the camcorder and act as a player. Canon expects to sell the DW-100 for about $270 when it hits stores this April.

(Credit: Sony)

Sony just revealed four new standard-definition DVD camcorders for the new year, including a camcorder with a solid-state drive for discless video recording.

The Handycam DCR-DVD610 and DVD710 present Sony's budget-priced DVD camcorders. The DVD610 features a 680,000-pixel sensor and a 40x optical zoom lens, while the DVD710 features a 1-megapixel sensor and a 25x optical zoom lens, just like its miniDV counterparts the DCR-HC52 and HC62. Both camcorders can record still pictures to a Memory Stick Duo. Besides the higher-resolution sensor, the DVD710 features an accessory shoe and supports 5.1-channel audio compared to the DVD610's stereo sound. For just a $50 premium, the DVD710 certainly seems to be a better deal.

On the surface, the Handycam DCR-DVD810 looks like a carbon copy of the DVD710. Both have the same 1-megapixel sensor, 5.1-channel sound, and other basic features. The DVD810, however, is a "Hybrid Plus" camcorder, Sony's term for a camcorder with both removable media and onboard memory. Besides standard mini-DVDs, the DVD810 includes 8GB of onboard flash memory for recording video. While Sony's hard drive-based camcorders like the 120GB Handycam HDR-SR12 dwarf the DVD810's storage, its 8 gigabytes are still enough for a few hours of footage you can transfer directly to your computer without finalizing and ripping a DVD. If you prefer to edit your videos on a computer before sharing them, the DVD810 offers much more flexibility than the DVD-only camcorders.

Finally, the Handycam DCR-DVD910 presents Sony's high-end standard-definition DVD camcorder. It features a 4-megapixel CMOS and a 15x optical zoom lens with optical image stabilization. A slow-motion video mode can record 240 frames per second with audio, and a dual-record setting can grab 3-megapixel still photos while shooting video. The DVD910 doesn't have the onboard memory of the DVD810, but its various high-end features justify its stop at the top of the Sony's standard-def DVD camcorder pile.

The Sony Handycam DCR-DVD610, DVD710, and DVD810 ship in the first quarter of 2008 with respective retail prices of $350, $400, and $480. The DVD910 ships in late spring with a suggested retail price of $650.

Sony's new HDR-UX20 AVCHD DVD camcorder

(Credit: Sony)

The biggest problem with high-definition DVD camcorders is that the small discs barely hold enough footage to capture your child's walk-on part in a ballet recital. Sony is trying to remedy the situation this year by including 8 GB of internal flash memory on the two AVCHD DVD models in their line. That means that even if you don't have a disc in the camcorder, you can record almost one hour of highest-quality, high-definition video to the internal memory and then transfer that footage to DVDs in the camcorder or offload it directly to your computer. Sony's calling this new feature Hybrid Plus, to differentiate it from the Hybrid recording feature found in some of its other camcorders, which lets you record video to MemorySticks in addition to the native media format of that camcorder.

The pricier of the two new AVCHD DVD camcorders is the $1,000 HDR-UX20, which is the one that includes the Hybrid Plus feature. Other than that, it is exactly the same as the $800 HDR-UX10. Both of those camcorders include 1/5-inch 2.3MP CMOS sensors with Exmor on-chip noise reduction, Bionz processors, and D-Range dynamic range optimizers in an attempt to widen the range of tones in your video. They also use 1920x1080-pixels when capturing footage in high-definition mode and actually produce 1920x1080 recordings. That's a step up from the 1440x1080-pixel recordings previous models have produced, even when capturing video at the higher pixel count. Of course, Sony wasn't the only one to do that, but it's nice to see that that has changed. However, as we've noticed in the past, editing can be tricky when recording in the AVCHD format.

The new models also include support for Sony's x.v.Color color space, can produce 4MP still images (interpolated up from the 2.3MP sensor), 15X optical T* zoom lenses with Super SteadyShot optical image stabilization, 5.1-channel audio recording, 2.7-inch widescreen LCDs, Smooth Slow slow-motion recording, and dual layer DVD support. They also have a face detection feature that can find up to eight faces in your frame and use them to set exposure, white balance, and focus, as well as set flash out put when capturing still images. Both camcorders are expected to be available in February.