Blogs / Discoblog

As Stephen mentioned yesterday, 3D HD TV is a big theme here at CES this year: Multiple manufacturers, including Sony, LG, Samsung, and Panasonic are all showing products. Panasonic is using LCD shutter glasses to make it happen–the glasses receive IR signals from the TV and alternately blacken each of the lenses to give each eye a slightly different perspective, and that binocular difference creates the 3D effect.

But perhaps most importantly, the glasses remind me of the classic 80s sci-fi B movie They Live, with super awesome wrestler-turned-actor Rowdy Roddy Piper (and one notoriously, ridiculously long fight scene) . Before The Rock, there was Roddy, God love ‘im.

By the way, there are apparently plans to remake They Live. This could end in disaster.

Today Panasonic showed off a new television that is really really skinny (”flat-out skinny” might be more appropriate): the 54-inch TC-P54Z1 is just 1 inch thick, which beats out even the thinnest LCD screens on the market.

The key to making this all work is that Panasonic pulled the tuner out of the TV entirely and moved it into a separate box, which transmits the full, uncompressed 1080p HD signal to the screen using a proprietary format called (cleverly) WirelessHD. This frees up a lot of room on the display, which Panasonic’s taken full advantage of. Funny to think that in an era when Internet is converging like mad with TVs, here’s one TV that’s diverging from itself.

Beyond the wow factor of having a really skinny screen and the ability to hang the thing on your wall relatively easily (it’s 67 pounds, which is pretty good for that size), this new screen is a welcome development for those who have long been waiting for wireless HD to appear. In fact, LG also displayed a wireless HD TV here at CES, and they’ve also joined up with Amimon, Sony, and other companies to create a new format called Wireless Home Digital Interface, or WHDI. But ultra wideband, which once seemed to be the leading candidate for wireless HD, still hasn’t come to fruition.

Panasonic also says that they’ve improved the cells that hold the phosphors in this TV, allowing the screen to be 1/3 brighter while using 1/3 less energy. The TC-P54Z1 is due out this summer, with more models in the super-thin Z1 line to follow.

Update, Friday, January 9: Here’s some video I shot of the TV spinning around so you can really grok the thin-ness. If you buy the Z1, you might as well show it off by putting it on a rotating spit like this:

Who knew sharper images and clearer sound would be good for our feathered friends? Come January 15, Hawaii will be the first state in the U.S. to switch over to digital TV, a month before the mandatory nationwide conversion on February 17. But the interesting part about the switch isn’t so much when but why: Federal wildlife officials suggested tearing down the old analog transmission towers earlier to avoid interference with the nesting season of a bird, the endangered Hawaiian petrel.

Petrels, also known as the ’Ua’u, are only found in Hawaii, and more than 1,000 of them nest on the slopes of Maui’s Haleakala volcano, where the analog towers are currently located. The nocturnal species, which reportedly has a chirp that sounds like a yapping puppy, is not adapting well to urban sprawl: The birds are disoriented by city lights and sometimes get caught on wires. Officials think rebuilding the towers at a different location, away from the petrel’s nesting sites, will give them some peace to nest, and help the species’ survival in the long term.

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Do you dream in color, or black and white? The answer may depend on the TV you watched as a child. New research shows that baby boomers who grew up watching black and white TV still often dream in grayscale while their kids dream only in color.

Eva Murzyn of the U.K.’s University of Dundee asked 60 people, half over age 55 and half under 25, to keep detailed dream diaries. She also collected information about the kind of TV and films they watched as children. More than 20 percent of the older group reported having black and white dreams, but less than 5 percent of the younger group reported them. A few of the older subjects who’d been exposed to color film and TV as children also rarely dreamed in black and white. The shift in dream palette directly coincided with the popularization of color TV in the 1960s. (It also means that pre-TV generations would have dreamed only in color.)

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