Toshiba adds Cell to its TVs

Toshiba announced at CES that it has added the Cell Broadband Engine processor to a line of televisions.The company's CellTV sets will add media centre features to HDTVs powered by Cell chips like those that run Sony's Play Station 3 consoles. Toshiba said the Cell CPU will increase the power of its TVs by about 133 times to provide sharper displays and enable advanced features.

The combination TV and media centre systems will gain picture quality improvements along with media streaming and 3D features. The sets will be capable of showing 3D images in HD and Blu-ray formats and converting 2D images to 3D in real time.

 

Toshiba TV group marketing vice president Scot Ramirez claimed that adding the Cell processor will facilitate development of new applications for the company's displays. "It is not just a television any more," he said. "The possibilities of what we can do with this chip are endless."

Toshiba points to better connectivity and more functionality as major features of the sets. The CellTV will have a built-in 1TB hard drive and a DVD player, plus USB drives and 802.11n networking, features that the company anticipates will enable the system to act as a media streaming hub for other TV sets and devices.

Toshiba's CellTV also promises a clearer 2D image. By operating at a scan rate of 480Hz, the displays will be able to adjust picture quality automatically for light levels and room colour temperature. Furthermore, the CellTV will include Toshiba's Kira2 OLED technology that delivers a 9,000,000:1 contrast ratio.
The CellTV sets will also have LED backlit screens, and Toshiba predicts that by 2012 all of its LCD television sets and displays will be lit by LEDs

Reference: theinquire