Toshiba CEO Interview: Cell TV

Toshiba's claim is that their upscaling is so good, it'll make a difference, simulating a sort of 4k image from a 1080p source. My biggest beef with current HD TRVs is SD content, the majority, looks a bit rubbish. CRT still looks beautiful, if rather blurry. If they truly can get SD content looking good, it should make the transition to HDTVs an easier choice.

 

I see what you are saying. That makes sense I guess.

 

Video: Toshiba Cell Regza 55X1 and Regza Next concepts hands-on
http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/05/toshiba-cell-regza-55x1-and-regza-next-concepts-hands-on/

 

Picture -
http://www.engadget.com/photos/toshiba-cell-regza-hands-on/2337446/

What is this box doing? It has 3TB of storage for what? Is this a media centre, amp combo, or just a display driver?

 

Woah...the box look rediculously large...a powered fan and heatpipes cooling? even if it is a DVDR still...Why not just put a PS3 Slim pcb inside it or Sony could ship more PS3 compatible DTV tuners if you want Cell TV 48 MPEG2 streams... Cell Regza does not look cheap...and make little sense...Its like Toshiba had to ship out some form of Cell product after their tieup with Sony/IBM...sadly Toshiba no longer shippingtheir 2009 laptops with the Quad HD Cell gestures processor like last year Qosmos range.

 

Apparently this:

link

Pretty neat specs:

But can it do 3D?

 

I wonder if all those tuners can be used outside of the USA and Japan. We got 4 DVB-T channels over "the air" around here (and all of those are crap), cable-users could make use of multiple tuners currently but the providers will disable all DVB-C transmission in favor of settop-boxes somewhen the next two years.

Only leaves up SAT, but does the Cell-TV actually have DVB-S tuners (and how many of em)?

 

Well, according to the BBC (take that how you wish), it will be eventually incorporated into the monitor.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8293889.stm

Seems to me that the box has 3TB of storage for recording 8 channels at once (PVR), the Cell board (I suppose that the SCC is also in there.), and 8 TV tuners.

Direct from the horse's mouth:

http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2009_10/pr0501.htm

What these are exactly, I'm not too sure.

 

It'd be nice if they based a dvr service off of it and allowed it to be bought without the tv. Basically make it a super upscaling massive storage dvr box.

 

Well, without wanting to get into a CE discussion in the Cell board, surely most folk who'd buy this TV already have all singing, all dancing PVRs. Isn't 8 channels at once plain overkill, especially on demand?

The real question is what is the Cell clocked out and how much effort is it having to go to when scaling? Will an upscaling only panel, no fancy extras, need a full Cell or SPURSengine? If it needs a Cell, the addition of a fan would be pretty catastrophic IMO.

 

Sure, but it would be pretty neat to continuously record your 8 favourite channels and keep a buffer of a couple of days, that you can fastforward through, when you feel like it.

 

Do we know what process this version of the Cell is on (it could be also 8 fully functioning SPUs)? Maybe it doesn't need a fan? All I see are pipes. It is however a Cell BE.

 

From report here (Japanese) it's a tuner box. It's also very pricy (about 1 millon yen with the LCD TV). The box has 11 ISDB-T tuners, 3 satellite tuners, and one analog TV tuners. The CELL processor in the tuner box performs basic media processing such as decoding, upscaling, and deinterlace. It's supposed to be able to do time-shift on 11 ISDB-T channels, and allow viewers to switch between the channels and doing time-shift at the same time on all 11 channels.

It also supports IPTV such as Youtube and TV Yahoo! JAPAN. It uses Opera as web browser.

 

Okay, so totally overkill for just driving a TV. In fact it sounds more like a studio box to me than home CE product. 11 tuners?!

The upscaling portion may well fit onto a SPURSEngine. Have they unveiled a TV line yet of different upscaling models?

 

Well, the ability to preview 8 channels at once seems to be a good feature for couch potatoes when trying to find something interesting in 100 channels, it's 8 threads working at once!

Seriously though, I think the problem is that CELL is still too expensive to be justified for just something simple, such as a simple upscaling/deinterlace/denoise box. That's why they make it so big. Personally I'd like to have a simple TV with such processing capabilities, that'd satisfy me enough.

 

I suppose so. But then if their upscaling is that good, I'd have thought the premium they could charge for that feature alone would be well worth it.