Toshiba recently revealed the first Cell powered HD TV to hit the market. The Cell technology has been used in other hi-def technology, such as the PS3 for its super-computer-like computational capabilities. This may be the first offspring to come out of the deal between Toshiba and Sony.

Last year Sony sold its Cell manufacturing plants off to Toshiba in a strategic move to keep costs low. The investment that was required to reduce the Cell processor for 65nm to 45nm was too much, so Sony decided to offload the factories to Toshiba by figuring that it would be cheaper to just buy the chips from the company.

Toshiba saw the benefit of integrating the Cell chip with other electronic devices, such as the TV. The company also demonstrated a new Cell-based multimedia coprocessor that would be integrated into the TVs. Resolution+ is the name of the technology used in the TVs.

According to Pocket-Lint, Toshiba revealed that the Cell technology will take average standard definition sources, scan them and upconvert the pictures to high definition quality. Even though there are other TVs out there capable of upscaling, the Cell technology is said to provide greater image detail.

The Regza ZF series has a full range of 1920 x 1080p HD panels with support for movies that have a 24fps rate. The TVs also use Active Vision M100 HD 100Hz for picture processing, which doubles the frame rate to reduce motion blur that is often found in LCD TVs.

There is also a dedicated game mode and high 10-Bit color processing. Another great feature of the Regza ZF series is HDMI 1.3 support. The TVs launched in Europe November 29th. It will be interesting to see how much of a difference the Cell integration makes to upscaling movies.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, November 30th, 2008 at 10:25 pm under Technology.  Print This Post

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