The worker bees at Toshiba have been hard at work during 2008. Despite a devastating failure at the beginning of the year when the HD-DVD format collapsed beneath it, the company has redirected its efforts toward a number of new technologies that will be appearing in its TV sets in 2009. The company’s vice president of marketing for its television group, Scott Ramirez, made these technologies the highlights of Toshiba’s CES press conference.
ClearScan 240 and FocaLight will be the keys to improved image quality in upcoming flagship TVs from the Regza line. Much like LG’s TruMotion 240, Toshiba’s ClearScan 240 will bump refresh rates to double its previous best, supposedly helping to reduce motion blur even further in LCD TVs. To enhance contrast ratios, FocaLight full-array LED backlighting will light up segments or blocks of the panel individually, allowing darker sections to remain unlit for blacker blacks without compromising peak white brightness.
Instaport will reduce the lag experienced when switching to an HDMI input on a TV by performing the necessary signal “handshake” at boot up instead of on demand, and Expert Mode will give home theater installers access to the panel’s deepest configuration settings. Toshiba has also followed the lead of other TV manufacturers by introducing USB and SD Card slots on its Regza TVs, which will display photo slideshows and play back video in a variety of formats.
Stylistically, Toshiba has seemingly taken a page from Samsung’s handsome “Touch of Color” scheme by introducing Toshiba “Deep Lagoon” bezels. Available only on high-end Regza sets, Deep Lagoon will emulate the feeling of depth experienced when looked to the bottom of a deep pool, hence the name. Another new look, dubbed “Infinity Flush,” makes the whole front of the TV a solid pane, without the offset bezel usually found on LCD TVs. Toshiba will only include it on the flagship SV670.
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