Live coverage of Philips' CES press conference

It's big, it's blue, and it's surrounded by Ambilight. It can only be live coverage of Philip's press event in Vegas baby, Las Vegas. The room is filling up with the world's press. Andew Goldman on stage with the welcome. CEO not with us due to ski accident.

11:09 Talking up innovation and all the awards won by philips.

11:13: Stewart Muller, President CE North America on stage to carry us through the rest of the show. Ambilight is now the subject at hand. Announcing Philips' one of a kind, 2,000 diamond slathered LCD in celebration of their 1 millionth ambilight TV -- no, it's not for sale. So much for sense and simplicity, eh? Continue reading for picture.

11:18 Processing power of the Perfect Pixel HD Engine being talked up. Forget pixels -- they're important -- but if you want "amazingly sharp" and lifelike colors that "pop" you need their image processor. 4-ms panel response coming this year on a full 1080p, large panel.

11:19 42, 47, 52-inch (a first) Ambilight LCD coming this year. Integrated LED light source which consumes less power than current Ambilights in a slimmer design for slimmer TVs.

Ambisound bar (a la JVC) is also coming. "Booming surround sound" in a simple and slim design. Comes with high-end DVD (not Blu-ray) player with DiVX support.

11:22 Ambisound with Ambilight demo running now using Fantastic Four 1080p content. Yeah, it's booming, turned up to 11 booming, but it's not running off the sound bar presented up front. Thanks Philips, the ballroom's sound system rocks!


11:24 New amBX gaming demo using Supreme Commander now. amBX is their fully immersive experience for gamers. Honestly, it's hot, but they're using the ballroom's sound system again. Still we get the idea. Broken Sword the Angel of Death is one of the first games to support the amBX technology. That's a trio of Ambi-products now on offer by Philips for what they call an immersive media experience.

11:28 Blu-ray 50GB disc launching the US in "near future." Blah blah blah, that's it, 5 minutes on Blu-ray. A lot changes in one year, eh?


11:30 Philips proprietary, high-def VoIP sound technology integrated into their Skype-based VoIP phones. Should deliver much better quality. Their Digital Photo Frames now ship with new software to add transition effects to slideshows and ease moving photos to and from the frame. Also discussing their portable DVD products including the industries first to include "video iPod" docking.

11:35 Wireless HDMI (yes, version 1.3 supported) device announced, the world's first "and only" solution for transmitting uncompressed HDMI over the air. It works at a range of about 25 feet -- short range cable replacement solution folks. They achieve 1080p lossless transmission without interference due to operation in the UWB frequency spectrum. No release date, maybe Q3, no pricing. Will be offered in a couple of flavors: single-input and multi-input. Pricing in 4-6 weeks.


11:37 That's it, Q&A.

11:44 No combined Blu-ray and HD DVD coming from Philips (who are Blu-ray Disc parters with Sony.)

[ben furneaux @ Jan 7th 2007 5:43PM]

Excellent, I start working at amBX in June for Philips so always good to read what the company are up to.

[briankeith @ Jan 7th 2007 6:17PM]

why oh why can't others copy this light tech? :(

[Perry @ Jan 3rd 2008 6:37PM]

I don't know, but I'm excited to see that some companies are coming out with both formats of HD. Not to mention the wireless capabilities is the wave of the future, but I would like to see them using the newer wireless N draft format which has larger bandwidth and better streaming.