Panasonic's 4K CES: OLED, LCD and Ultra HD Blu-ray
Panasonic stashed its Ultra HD tech in a small corner of the CES booth this year.
At Panasonic's CES press conference we focused on its new SL-1200 turntables, and now we've hit the company's booth to see some new 4K hardware. That includes the 65-inch OLED TV that's supposed to arrive later in the year, a DX900 Ultra HD LCD with Ultra HD Premium certification and there's even an Ultra HD Blu-ray player. While what it has to show is impressive enough, Panasonic squeezed all of its home theater offerings into a relatively small area of its booth -- not like previous years when TVs dominated. Now action cameras, electric vehicles, data storage and home automation are taking up most of the space.
The DX900 is the more production-ready of the two TVs, and Panasonic says it has a new 'Honeycomb' structure local dimming tech that makes sure all the new HDR imagery is bright only where it's supposed to be. Inside there's a newly-tuned video processor that's supposed to bring picture quality reminiscent of studio mastering screens, and it's also THX certified, in case you needed more bona fides about its quality. On the show floor it's always hard to tell how good a screen really is, but I saw the TV in a more controlled environment earlier in the week and it appeared to hold up.
Panasonic is still using Firefox OS on its TVs, and says there will be an update later this year that adds more streaming services. They will come by way of customized web apps, from sources like Vimeo, iHeartRadio, Atari and Giphy. Another feature of the update will be a "send to TV" ability from Firefox for Android that's reminiscent of Chromecast, the cancelled Matchstick device and Mozilla's mockups. There's no word on a price, but 65- and 58-inch versions will be released in the spring.
All the demo content for the DX900 came courtesy of Panasonic's upcoming Ultra HD Blu-ray player, featuring short 4K clips from The Lego Movie and Mad Max: Fury Road. Other than just its Ultra HD Movie playback, the DMP-UB900 will feature 'high-quality audio parts,' 7.1-channel analog audio output and even twin HDMI ports to isolate the audio signal from video. It has support for high-res audio formats, as well as 4K streaming apps and DLNA -- but not Blu-ray 3D. There's no price or release date mentioned for the player, however The Digital Bits has heard it could arrive in April for about $500.
