PTV

OLED Rapture

Sat, 17 May 2008 14:46 GMT

Slate's Justin Peter's went to check out Sony's XEL-1 OLED television at a Manhattan store and "ended up sitting in front of the tiny TV for five straight hours." He calls it "a little piece on heaven."

Digital Signage Expo 2008: Business Models plus IT, IP and TV

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 10:40 GMT

At the Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas last week, the business models were far more interesting than most of the technologies on display. Everybody uses commodity information technologies, Internet Protocol networks and LCD or plasma flat panel displays. But the businesses they build around these common tools are in turn interesting, exciting, confusing or just a bit nutty. This week, I'll be reporting on the digital signage companies I visited, the conference sessions I attended and the smart people I talked to at the show. (Subscribe at the top of the next column to get the updates.) To a number of us, it seems a bit like the Internet in 1996: a few seasoned pioneers, a lot of sketchy upstarts, and a handful of big companies like Cisco staking out early acreage before the rush. Stay tuned.

Skinny TVs

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 22:57 GMT

You can't be too thin or too rich, they say, and the latest developments in flat panel displays for home TVs illustrate how far things have gotten. At 35mm, Hitachi's UT Series (top) is billed as the world's thinnest LCD. Even thinner is Sony's XEL-1, the new OLED (organic light emitting diode) display.

Glorious Color: The Aesthetic Impact of CES 2008

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 23:34 GMT

I'm mesmerized by the kaleidoscope of spectacular moving images on the big, intense, expensive plasma and LCD screens at CES, the Consumer Electronic Show running this week in Las Vegas. Flat panel display vendors are showcasing higher resolutions, faster refresh rates, thinner form factors and better interfaces.

But the milestone this year is image quality. Sony and Samsung are showing OLED screens, organic light emitting diode products that are spectacularly thin but -- much more important -- that deliver spectacularly glorious color. (We've been talking about OLED for years.)

An LCD screen uses a light source, generally a sickly fluorescent, behind the liquid crystal louvers that let out the pixels. A plasma screen uses tiny cells of gas to excite phosphor dots per pixel. On an OLED screen, each pixel is a diode that lights up as needed; the black is truly black, the color gamut is richer, and there's no flicker.

I'm an HDTV skeptic; I'm a bit too cheap, and I really can't really appreciate the difference between 480 lines and 720 lines of resolution, but this is different, a big step up in the fidelity of the video experience. It's more like viewing a transparency through a light box versus the old days of tweaking the rabbit ears to pull in channel 2.

Engadget has produced a terrific gallery of SONY OLED screens on the web, but you really have to see it to believe it. I'm glad I did.

Theatrical TV: 30 Foot Sex Goddesses Backup Elton John

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 15:32 GMT

The Mitsubishi Diamond Vision video wall at Las Vegas' Caesar's Palace Coliseum is a stunning use of out-of-home video. The $6 million LED screen measures 34 feet by 110 feet, the back wall of the 4,000 seat theater installed for Celine Dion in 2003. I'm sure Celine is wonderful, but I saw Elton John's Red Piano Tour with theatrical videos by director/photographer David LaChapelle.

House-sized images of Marilyn Monroe (portrayed by Susan Griffiths), Pam Anderson (poledancing x 5), Justin Timberlake and an army of buff, scantily clad dancers augment the songs in many different video styles spread across the 110 foot digital canvas. (The Red Piano Tour returns to Caesar's in March 2008.)

View my YouTube playlist of clips from Elton John's Red Piano Tour.

With tickets starting at $250, filling 4,000 seats in Vegas means delivering a lot more spectacle than a singer/songwriter -- even a superstar -- with a six piece band. The wall-sized TV meets our expectations by illustrating the familiar songbook with edgy, sexy, sometimes surreal moving images full of visual references and emotional appeal. It's breathtaking performance art.