Las Vegas – Samsung unveiled its second-generation Blu-ray disc player, multiple products with Anynet (HDMI-CEC) to coordinate the operation of multiple-brand home theater components, and a wireless-equipped plasma TV using draft 802.11n technology.
The company also added Bluetooth to select HDTV displays and MP3 players. In TVs, Bluetooth will deliver wireless headphone listening and send images to a Bluetooth-equipped photo printer. Bluetooth MP3 players will offer wireless headphone listening and streaming of music to other Bluetooth devices.
Samsung also outlined multiple new picture-improving LCD and plasma flat-panel technologies here at CES and maintained a selection of DLP DTVs as part of its plan to hold onto the top U.S. DTV share it achieved in units and dollars in the third quarter of 2006. Samsung Electronics president Gee Sung Choi announced the company’s achievement during a Sunday press briefing.
HDTV enhancements include local-dimming LED backlights and light-filtering Super Clear Panel to enhance LCD panel contrast, 120Hz frame rates to enhance LCD TV response time, improved LCD color reproduction, a greatly expanded assortment of 1080p LCD displays, and Samsung’s first 1080p plasma displays. In DLP displays, the company is expanding its percentage of models with 1080p displays to more than half. (See page 8, TWICE, Jan.8, for more details of the HDTV introductions.)
The play-only Blu-ray player, the BD-P1200, is due in early 2007 at a more affordable price than Samsung’s current model, which launched last year at a suggested $999 but retails on Amazon at $589. The new model will add Anynet, Ethernet port, and a Hollywood Quality Video (HQV) processor, said David Steel, VP of Samsung’s digital media business. Like its predecessor, it features HDMI 1.3. Supported surround codecs are 192KHz LPCM, Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, and DTS but not losslessly compressed Dolby TruHD or DTS HD Master Audio, according to company literature.
In other introductions, the company launched MP3 players that uses flash memory for storage, no longer offering HDD music players. One model with 8GB of flash memory is Samsung’s highest capacity flash-memory model to date.
