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OCTOBER 7, 2004
By David Rocks Gifts for the Gilt-Edged Gadget Groover At Tokyo's CEATEC show, the latest TVs are big as houses or small as cell phones, but the price tags seldom vary: They're huge Each January, the world's gizmo freaks, gadget heads, and general arbiters of cool descend on Las Vegas for CES -- the Consumer Electronics Show -- a four-day look at what electronics makers worldwide are planning to wow consumers with and thus fatten their corporate wallets. But those really in the know make a point of dropping in at a similar -- if smaller -- show in Japan called CEATEC, or the Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies, every October. At the Makuhari Messe near Tokyo this week, CEATEC visitors can see a lot of the snazziest stuff that's likely to be on display in Vegas three months from now -- and unwrapped under a Christmas tree near you sometime soon. Judging from this year's exhibition, one thing is for sure: The future is flat -- but very expansive. As in recent years, all of the TV makers were busy flogging superthin, superbright, supersharp TVs. Every year, though, these monsters just keep getting bigger. VIDEO AS FURNITURE. Sharp (SHCAY ) showed off a prototype of a 65-inch liquid crystal display (LCD) TV, a size that would overwhelm most living rooms and might not seem too puny at the local multiplex. Though the company won't say when it's going to release this titanic TV or how significantly each one might pad the corporate bottom line, it will surely be priced well above Sharp's 45-inch models, which run about $8,970 in Japan and around $6,000 in the U.S. Once you spend that kind of money, you might as well show off what it buys. To make sure you do, Sharp is also offering the flat screen as furniture, with several models upholstered in soft black or brown leather or framed in oak, cherry, or super-glossy red and black lacquered wood. Panasonic is exhibiting a 65-inch plasma TV. There's no pricing information for the U.S. yet, but if you want one, think about a second mortgage. In Japan it costs about $18,000, though for that price Panasonic will throw in a six-speaker, wood-grain home-theater system to help you keep the neighbors up at night. GIGABYTES GALORE. Sony (SNE ) showed off the Qualia 006, a 70-inch rear-projection TV that's almost as thin and bright as the LCD and plasma models and goes for a relatively modest $10,000. It also introduced a 46-inch LCD unit that uses light-emitting diodes for illumination, which Sony says shows 1.5 times the color range of regular LCDs. What to watch on those gargantuan screens? Just about every manufacturer is offering DVD recorder/hard-drive combos, which let you record TV shows to the hard disk as you might with a TiVo, then burn your favorites to DVDs for posterity. Some even come with a VHS slot, just in case you want to reduce the clutter under your TV but keep those Disney tapes around for the kids. The roomiest of these machines offer 400-gigabyte hard drives -- big enough to hold more than two weeks' worth of shows -- and cost around $1,500 to $2,000. If 400 GB feels a bit tight, you could also pick up Sony's latest Vaio computer for around $4,675 -- though for the time being it's going to be available only in Japan. It's a PC, and therefore likely a bit more complex to set up than the DVD recorders, but the Vaio offers 1 terabyte (that's 1,000 GB!) of hard-disk space, and it can record up to seven channels simultaneously (Sony didn't offer any advice on where to find seven channels of worthwhile programming at any given time). FORMAT FIGHT. For those who get a tinge of agoraphobia watching TVs as big as Texas, Sharp and Sanyo (SANYY ) are offering a far more compact viewing experience -- cell phones with TV tuners built in. The picture is amazingly clear despite the small size, though a football or cricket match might feel a touch cramped. Several manufacturers also had handsets with 1- and 2-megapixel cameras, many of them doubling as video phones. Before you get too excited, note that they work only in Japan and European countries where Third-Generation, or 3G, wireless service is available. CEATEC highlighted the coming battle for the next generation of DVDs. Both the Blu-ray Disc Assn. and its rival, the HD-DVD Promotion Group have sizable pavilions to plug their competing visions of delivering video. Both technologies hold more than five times as much data as today's DVDs, enough to cram all the information needed for high-definition TV. But the two camps don't agree on exactly how to achieve that feat. The HD-DVD group, backed by the likes of Toshiba (TOSBF ), Sanyo, NEC (NIPNY ), and most of the movie industry, calls itself optimistically "The next DVD standard." Though the Blu-ray folks (including Sony, Matsushita (MC ), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ), Samsung, and Sharp) lack the catchy tag line, they have something better -- actual products, such as the Panasonic's $2,250 Blu-ray burner that can record high-definition programming. 3D VIDEO. Then there's the future. Perhaps the coolest exhibitor at CEATEC is stodgy old Hitachi (HIT ), an industrial conglomerate best known for lots of really big stuff that would barely fit in Yankee Stadium, let alone your living room. Nonetheless, this giant has a good consumer-products division and devotes more than 5% of its $78 billion in revenues to research and development. This shows up in nifty concepts such as a 20-GB hard-disk drive that comes in an ultra-slim cartridge and can be swapped in and out of various devices, much as with floppy disks today. Hitachi also showed a concept for a cigarette-sized methanol fuel cell that can power a mobile phone for about twice as long as today's batteries (though it's not quite ready for prime time, requiring an adapter twice as large as the phone itself). Even better is the 3D video Hitachi has on display. Sure, the picture is only about 10 inches high and is pretty dim when compared to the huge LCDs elsewhere at the show, but it's live-action, 360-degree video being beamed from a studio just behind the company's booth. You're unlikely to be unwrapping one of these babies this Christmas or next (or any time in the next decade, to be truthful). But it sure is something to boast about to the gadget heads, gizmo freaks, and cool hunters you'll run into at CES early next year.  Rocks is BusinessWeek Asia editor, normally based in New York Edited by Beth Belton
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