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MillimeterNAB 2003: Where's the Beef?
Jun 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Pete Putman, CTS
You had to look sharp to find the good stuff in Las Vegas.
 A standout among the display products shown at NAB 2003, the NEC WT600 is an XGA projector with a pop-up mirror system. |
The 2003 NAB conference was quite a trip. With concerns about SARS and the military action in Iraq, attendance appeared to be down again from last year, but not significantly. Numbers in the range of 90,000 for attendance were heard from various parties, but there were times on the show floor when it seemed there was either too much foot traffic or hardly any at all — like a herd of buffalo crossing the prairie and stopping to graze here and there.
I can't say that there were a lot of really innovative, cutting-edge products at this year's show. Most of the stuff that caught my eye was merely derivative or only significant due to lower prices. The trend toward more powerful, less expensive video signal processors continues, as does a migration away from tape-based media for recording and playback in favor of hard drives and even memory sticks.
Another trend is that of playing the field with projection and monitor technology, i.e., offering products that are equally at home in the consumer and professional markets. As pricing pressures increase and products become more generic, manufacturers are searching out every possible distribution channel to stay in the black.
I'm also seeing a blurring of the lines when it comes to the makers of A/V control systems and video/audio signal processing, switching, and distribution products. With the growing popularity of IP-based signal distribution and control — and a near-desperate search to find new markets — the temptation to step onto another company's traditional turf is just too great to pass up.
Last but not least, there are hundreds of small offshore companies aggressively searching for North American OEM partners, and they set up large booths throughout the various NAB halls to peddle their wares. From the literature of one of those companies, Topfield Co. Ltd. of Korea, came the phrase “your confidence to the best.” What it means is anyone's guess, but this sharp-looking display featured numerous pret-a-porter set-top DTV receivers, DBS receivers, and PVRs (most of which were designed for DVB formats) that looked quite attractive.
Product highlights
My hands-down favorite product at NAB was the TV One C2-770, a Swiss Army Knife video product that functions as a video scaler, scan converter, seamless switcher, worldwide standards converter, aspect ratio converter, chroma-keyer, lumakeyer, PiP generator, frame synchronizer, TBC, and genlock reference. It accepts resolutions up to 2048×2048, has two high-resolution image buffers, and supports all video formats, including SDI. And it does all of this for $4,500. Look for an updated version later this year with expanded multi-format input capability.
Two more clever products were to be found way back in the far eastern reaches of the South Hall near the Arizona border, or so it seemed. NEC's WT600 is a rather oddball projector that almost looks like a portable overhead display. Instead of a standard lens, this XGA (1024×768) DLP design has a pop-up mirror system and can display images as large as 100in. diagonal from as close as 2 feet. What's more, it has 802.11b wireless networking and a PCMCIA slot built in. Look for it at Infocomm in the $5,000 to $7,000 price range.
Across the aisle, Communications Specialties showed a pair of optical video/audio/control signal distribution amplifiers. (That's right, optical.) The Pure Digital Fiberlink 8000 series has one input and up to four outputs, any of which can be configured for single or multimode fiber. The 8100 series has two to 12 outputs (configured in pairs) and basically works the same way. Price? About $2,000 for the 8000 and $5,000 for the 8100. Wiring up your studio for SDI or HD-SDI? This is an economical way to multiplex your high-bandwidth signals. Oh, and did I mention that these are active, not passive DAs?
 TV One’s C2-770 |
Both Christie and Digital Projection showed 6.6lb. SXGA single-chip DLP portable projectors conceived by Pro-jectordesign of Norway. Christie's is the DS30 and DP's goes by the name iVision. Either one is claimed to crank out 3000 lumens, but they appear to have pretty steep price tags (in the $12,000 range) for now. DP also showed a prototype 1280×720 box using the same housing, as well as its Mercury, a 52lb. XGA three-chip DLP answer to Panasonic's PT-D7500/7600 series. Look for more of these lightweight installation DLP three-chippers at Infocomm.
Sanyo upped the ante in polysilicon with the HD10, another not-quite-ready but intriguing installation LCD projector. It's got four lamps and uses new 1.65in. LCD panels with 1920×1080 native pixel resolution. (Who makes them? My guess is Sony, in which case they're sure to show up in a Grand Wega RPTV.) It's bright, too, at 6000 lumens.
Zenith brought its HDR230 to NAB. Ostensibly, it's a consumer product, combining an 80GB hard drive, a terrestrial 8VSB receiver, and TiVo-like functionality for just less than $1,000. It's got more than eight hours of program memory and a simple user interface.
Analog Way introduced its latest high-end scan converter, the Studio Scan XTD 825 with improved genlock, 10-bit SDI output, 200% zoom, and support up to 1600×1200 input.
Sony's NSP-100 network storage player made its NAB debut and looks like a nice, simple server for a variety of digital signage applications. It boots up quickly and is easy to configure.
Lighthouse unveiled a full line of fine-pitch (6.7mm to 10mm) “TV” LED screens that use tri-state devices. These screens range in size from 56in. to 96in. and are better suited for indoor, closeup display than traditional LED screens using RGB matrices.
Hitachi's AirSho system was in evidence. This technology employs a 40in. or 60in. transparent screen and a high-brightness projector to create the effect of images floating in mid air. It takes up less room than a traditional two-piece projection system, which makes it more attractive to the retail marketplace.
Barco showed the iQ Pro 500 front LCD projector with internal 40GB hard drive and LAN connectivity. The hard drive is really intended for local playback of graphics and video that was downloaded earlier.
Crestron is branching into new product areas with the DVP4 digital video processor. It can accept up to four analog RGB sources up to 1600×1200 (or four DVI inputs up to 1280×1024) and mix them with up to eight composite or four S-Video signals. It's got a seamless switcher, digital transitions, and four video windows.
Kramer unveiled the VP-14T, which links Kramer's VP-720DS and VP-723DS seamless switchers with conventional matrix switchers to expand signal-handling capacity while retaining a seamless fade-through-black transition on every selected signal.
Random observations
This was the first year in many that all NAB exhibits were housed in one building, using the north, center, and south halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center. As a result, those long waits for buses and cabs to shuttle to the Sands Expo Center were a thing of the past. While that was great for attendees and the press, it might not have been so good for companies who had suites set up over on the Strip.
There was so much to see that it was very, very difficult to leave the LVCC show floor and head offsite. But I finally managed to do so on Wednesday afternoon and saw a clever demo of wireless DTV using 802.11 networks, conducted by Roy Stewart of ViXS. ViXS, based in Toronto, manufactures proprietary chipsets to handle encoding of video over LANs, and their system amounts to “variable” variable bit rate encoding.
Given that wireless networks — even 802.11g — are better suited for still images and graphics, it's difficult to maintain consistent bit rates when sending video across these networks. The ViXS process optimizes the video quality for the available bits and constantly adjusts for loads on the wireless network, such as low signal levels or other streams. Look for these chip sets to wind up in several video interface devices for both office and home.
As you entered the center hall, you couldn't help but notice the DTV Drafthouse. This concept pavilion was a spin-off of the HDTV Sports Bar at CES 2003, and featured a working bar surrounded by numerous DTV displays and products. Panasonic, RCA, Sharp, Sony, Zenith, ADB, and ATI all had products with which to receive and display DTV signals.
For me, the highlight of the show was when the pre-recorded 8VSB content was switched off Monday evening at 6 p.m. and every one of the nine displays carried the NCAA basketball championship in HDTV, courtesy of CBS and KLAS-DT (plus some legwork by John Turner of Turner Engineering, who wired up the signal paths to the Drafthouse). The icing on the cake was when Syracuse edged out Kansas in a thriller, 81-78, for its first national championship. (Yep, I'm a 'Cuse grad, MS TVR 1977!)
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