CES 2008 finished up in Las Vegas, yesterday and it was a show that saw many an amazing gadget, device, deck, console and set announced, revealed, unveiled, showed-off, demoed, and hands-onned, many of which were some pretty amazing TV-related technology.  In case you’ve been living under a rock, CES is the Consumer Electronics Show and it runs every January for a few days, allowing anyone who’s anyone to show of their electronics for the new year.  Naturally, there were plenty of TVs, video projectors, DVD decks, and more–enough to make a TV Ninja swoon.  But to pick the best?  That’s tough.

Could it have been one of the many projectors unveiled?  Perhaps the crazily-high-priced, uber-high-end, Runco video projector that features Vivix II video processing, O-Path tech, CinOptx lenses, a 4,000:1 contrast ratio, 2850 ANSI lumens really lites your candle?  Or was it the incredibly short throw of the Toshiba TDP-EW25U video projector that can project a 60-inch image with just four feet of distance between it and the screen?  Of course, Sanyo has a projector that can do an 80-inch throw from just 3.15 feet.

Maybe it was electronics grand-daddy Marantz and their six input HDMI switcher?  Then again, Samsungs 82 inch QuadHD TV didn’t fail to impress–that QuadHD brings four times the resolution of regular HD.  Eye-witnesses say it’s like looking through a window.  Then again, the biggest TV moment of CES 2008 had to be Mitsubishi’s Laser TV–a new kind of projection-screen TV that replaces a light bulb with three lasers.

Come to think of it, the most (un)amazing thing seen at CES 2008 was probably PumpTopTVs.  Yep, TVs that are mounted atop gas pumps.  No joke–learn more at PumpTopTV.com.

CES 2008 has been a virtual, or rather, a literal playground for any true TV Ninja. Just look at that picture above–LOOK AT ALL THOSE TVs! Between Mitsubishi’s Laser TV unveiling yesterday, Westinghouse’s announcement of it’s ample stack of new LCD TVs or the non-stop flow of TV-related announcements coming out of Las Vegas these days, it’s enough to drive any TV geek to drink! And most amazing of all, there are still two days left in CES 2008–today and tomorrow!

Putting together any truly representative list of highlights would be impossible since there are just too many amazing new TVs, gadgets and miscellaneous devices being presented each day. However, here is a sampling:

1) Myvu and Dreamax revealed their plans for Head Mounted Displays (HMDs), AKA portable video. Myvu, who is already well-known for their light-weight Head Mounted Displays, announced their new Crystal HMD, which looks like futuristic sunglasses but provide VGA resolution (640×480) and allows you to still see in front of you. Meanwhile,Dreamax is releasing their HMD along with their Indicube personal media player (PMP), which doesn’t seem to have a built-in display of it’s own. The Dreamax HMD brings SVGA resolution (800×600) and it’s media-playing-pal sports 20GB of storage (upgradeable to 32).

2) Hitachi announced their affordable 42 inch HD Multi System Plasma TV, Pioneer showcased their Project Kuro flat panel displays that are just 9mm thick, and Panasonic unveiled their LifeWall which, believe it or not, lets you play HD content, surf the web, and more all on a wall of your home.

3) HP demoed their MediaSmart line of media extenders that come with a pocket-size, removable hard drive, a DVD drive and a lot more, Sony showed us all how it continues to dominate the world of electronics, and Sling showed off all of their new streaming-your-video-over-the-Internet boxes.

It’s a crazy handful of days, to be sure. Be sure to stop by TVNinja.com on Friday for a recap of the madness!

(Photo credit: CESWeb.org)

In case you missed yesterday’s post, CES 2008 is here and Mitsubishi has joined Westinghouse and a stack of other companies unveiling their newest TVs at this huge electronics event.   The catch here is that Mitsubishi hasn’t announced their new line of LCD TVs.  Nor have they announced any new HD TVs.  No plasma TVs or flat panel TVs or even old school CRT TVs are they talking about.  Nope, they’ve unveiled a whole new kind of Television–it’s called Laser TV.  The funny thing about it is that it’s not actually all new.  In fact, some of the technology that goes into Mitsubishi Laser TV might sound pretty old fashioned to most of you TV Ninjas out there.

For starters, it’s technically a rear projection screen TV.  Another oldie-but-goody in the Laser TV’s tech department is the Texas Instruments DLP chip that has held the standard for quality video projection for years.  However (and it’s a big however), both of these technologies used to use very old-fashioned light bulbs as their light sources (and later bright white mercury lamps).  Sure, bright lamps could provide a great picture, but these new Laser TVs replace those old bulbs with semiconductor lasers.  These red, green and blue lasers are said to be able to create much more vivid colors, higher contrasts and better pictures inHD resolutions.

Yep, that’s right–the Laser TV is an HDTV, too.  So, it’ll be able to pump out 1080p.  The truly weird thing about these Laser TVs is that despite these babies being “rear projection” TVs, because the light source is three lasers, the thickness of the TV is surprisingly minimal–in other words, it’s not a thick TV.  While it won’t be as thin as your average LCD TV, it will be a great deal lighter because the LCD screen is so heavy on it’s own.  The LaserTV’s screen isn’t a giant glass-and-LCD panel.  Along with the weight improvements, you’ll also see Laser TVs that have almost no bezel–just the tiniest of frames for the screens on these TVs.   This maximizes screen size without minimizing your shelf space.

Laser TVs are reportedly to be available later on in 2008.

In case you haven’t been keeping your finger on the pulse of electronics, today is the first day of CES 2008 in Las Vegas and Westinghouse has loosed a stack of LCD TVs on us, as well as a bunch of other goodies. CES, by the way, is the Consumer Electronics Show which you can check out for yourself here: www.cesweb.org. In short, it’s a massive convention where all the hip electronics companies show off their wares for the new year. For the gadget-minded, it’s Christmas all over again just a few weeks later. For theTVNinja, it means a LOT of new TVs.

Cast your mind back to one of the original Television makers in America–Westinghouse. Originally founded in 1886, they were the first company to use AC current (that stuff coming out of your wall outlet). Nowadays, they make light bulbs, various home appliances and some various other consumer electronics involving screens (like TVs). This year at CES, in just the first day, they’ve announced a short stack of huge LCD TVs, medium (”portable”) sized LCD TVs as well as smaller LCDs in the form of LCD picture frames.

Sadly, limited pictures are available so far, but check out the specs on their largest (as reported by Engadget), it’s a 52 inch mammoth called the TX-52F480S LCD HDTV. The TX-52F480S brings you a whopping 4 HDMI inputs and 1080p along with a few more bells and whistles. Pretty impressive, even at the price of $2500. Meanwhile, the smallest LCD TV announced by Westinghouse this morning, pricing in at around $330, is their 16 inch PT-16H610S, which is part of their new “PT” or portable line. Since we don’t know what these babies look like we’ll just have to take their word for the “portable” part. However, they are being described as being “light weight” and having a “super thin profile.”

(Pictured: Westinghouse TX-52F480S)

Slingbox, the grand-daddy of the streaming media has finally gone HD. What more could you want from a machine that streams your media from your home to your favorite portable devices? The Slingbox, for anyone who’s not in the know, is a device that’s sort of like you in device-form. It controls your video recording and playback decks. From there, software on your laptop, tells your Slingbox to tell your VCR, DVD player, DVR (or other media-playing device) to play. The video plays into your Slingbox across it’s Ethernet connection out onto the Internet where your laptop, PDA or other Sling-enabled device can pick it up (BlackBerry support coming soon). This means that where ever you are on the planet, if you can get to a wifi connection you can watch your home video.

Until recently, the Slingbox couldn’t do High-Definition–with the new Slingbox Pro HD, that has changed. The Pro HD, which will be the high-end of the Slingbox line–when it drops later this year–allows you to connect to four different media sources featuring an HD input, coax, regular video-ins, and S-Video, of course. One wonders if the analog cable tuner in the current Slingbox Pro will be available in the Slingbox Pro HD what with the American change-over to permanent digital TV signals coming in 2009. With any luck (or thought), the Pro HD will have a digital cable tuner.