Panasonic: professional, polished, and in the lead

Panasonic's video wall of 40 50-inch 1080p panels

Panasonic's 103-inch 1080p plasma display

Is it live or is it Panasonic? The image on this other 103-inch display looked even more realistic than the person standing next to it.

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For me, Panasonic's press conference was the highlight of CES this year. While it was a standing-room-only hour-long event, it conveyed a clear message about Panasonic: that its "ideas for life" are making it the consumer electronics company to beat. Despite having a wide variety of products and initiatives to introduce, the company told its story clearly, dramatically, and from a very human point of view. If nothing else, the company's marketing and attention to detail stood head and shoulders above most other press conferences I attended.

Yoshi Yamada, Panasonic America's CEO, announced a number of products, but the high points for me were:

• A deal with Comcast for one-remote control of home theater systems. Panasonic will manufacture 250,000 cable boxes with digital video recording (DVR) capabilities for Comcast that will allow consumers to control their entire home theater system and the cable tuner with just one remote out of the box. Panasonic also agreed to provide its cable box middleware to Comcast, and the two firms agreed to work together on extensions to simplify how consumers use cable boxes in home theater systems.



• A breaktaking 103-inch 1080p plasma. Last year, Samsung stole the show with its two 102-inch plasmas which were slated for availability in 2006. But this year, Panasonic was willing to up the ante by an inch and actually show the displays working with breathtaking images. The display is a full 1080p panel, which we would argue is a must when your display more than eight and a half feet in diagonal measure. And Panasonic didn't have just one working display there -- there was another built into another part of the booth. Further, the company identified schools and public working areas as target markets for these displays, implying they actually planned to sell them.



• A suite of Blu-ray high-definition DVD discs. Lots of companies including Panasonic talked about introducing Blu-ray high-def DVD drives at the show (more about that in a subsequent post today), but Panasonic actually announced it was making the discs to go into the drives. The company will write once and re-writable discs in both single and dual-layer varieties. It's nice to know that there'll be someone making media when those drives hit the market.



• A football field full of first rate displays. Not only did Panasonic use a video wall of 40 50-inch 1080p panels as part of its theater, but the company filled its football-field-sized booth with nearly 100 other plasma and LCD displays, all of which were clearly tuned to deliver the best pictures available. The sheer quantity of great-looking displays communicated that Panasonic was the largest manufacturer of plasma displays, even if you hadn't read any of the company literature.

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