WirelessHD, Blu-ray and Web-connected set-top boxes all shined at this year?s CEDIA conference.
Attendance at the just-concluded CEDIA (Custom Electronics Design & Installation Association) Expo, held at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, was down for the second straight year to around 20,000, and the number of exhibitors shrunk from 500 to 400. But the good news for home theater enthusiasts is as follows: What the various exhibitors that remained actually exhibited was a considerable amount of ingenuity.
Amid the myriad goods being shown including high-end projectors; flat-panel HDTV mounts; pull-down screens; hydraulic projector lifts; decorative technology; reclining theater seating; tube amplifiers; cables; ridiculously pricy speakers; and everything in-between, it seems everyone was hawking some new connectivity scheme or other. For example: There were a plethora of HDTVs not connected to high-def sources via the emerging HDMI-cable-replacing WirelessHD standard. And, of course, all these new WirelessHD-enabled HDTVs include an external box to which you connect all your HD sources (cable box, game player, media server, et al) or an A/V receiver. A sudden burst of connected HDTVs (and, of course, Blu-ray players) that can also pull content from your home PC likely signals the coming death of dedicated media servers to boot. In addition, there were also new affordable wireless home automation schemes replacing typical expensive, wall-bursting, wire-pulling methods via the ZigBee wireless control specification.
But out of all these clever inventions, which are most worth keeping an eye on? Here are (in our humble opinion) the top products unveiled this past week.
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