Preparing for year in tech
20 000 GADGETS ON DISPLAY: THE WAR BETWEEN AMAZON AND GOOGLE WILL BE PLAYED OUT
The annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week promises to be the runway for the take-off of thousands of new gadgets, as well as the ancient technology called voice.
battlegrounds of CES. In the last few years, Samsung and LG have slugged it out for boasting owners for biggest, sharpest, brightest, thinnest, smartest and other adjectives that serve as a proxy for technology leadership.
This year they are rejoined in earnest by Panasonic, which is both competing with and collaborating with Samsung, among others. In one of the early announcements of CES, the two companies agreed with 20th Century Fox to update the High Dynamic Range platform called HDR10+, which will allow content creators and device manufacturers to offer a premium experience for viewers.
Not least, Panasonic’s own devices will benefit from the new specifications. On Monday, it unveiled a 2018 line up of eight new TVs using the OLED format, light-emitting technology that allows for thin, flexible and vivid displays. Four of these – the FZ950 and FZ800 ranges, in 65-inch and 55-inch screen sizes – will be the first OLED screens that support HDR10+.
There is a strategic advantage to what seems an esoteric technology enhancement: Amazon’s Prime Video movie-on-demand service has a catalogue of several hundred hours of HDR10+ content.
Panasonic claims line honours also for another esoteric area of TV display competitiveness: the quest for a better black. The blacker the blacks in an image or video, the more realistic the colours overall.
This year, Panasonic’s OLED screens introduce an Absolute Black Filter, which it says helps ensure the purest, most accurate black levels by absorbing ambient light in order to eliminate reflections. This comes into its own in brightly lit rooms, when the level of reflection often makes big screens more of an irritation than a pleasure.
It is perhaps no coincidence that Panasonic has teamed up with Amazon in automotive technology, a category not normally associated with either company.
Panasonic has announced it is integrating the Alexa voice service with the next generation of in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems, which will allow users to interact with the smart assistant inside the car, with some not needing any internet connectivity.
At Panasonic’s CES press conference, Amazon’s Alexa Onboard technology was demonstrated with the Panasonic Skip Generation IVI technology released last year. Drivers and passengers can use their voices to control car features like air conditioning, entertainment systems, communication and navigation.
“When drivers have access to familiar Alexa contextual commands and responses from inside the car, it opens up a new world of experiences,” said Tom Gebhardt, president of Panasonic Corporation of North America.