Hands-free with Panasonic's Wireless HD
By Erik Hanson 
posted Jan 7th 2008 6:21PM
posted Jan 7th 2008 6:21PM
After attending the kickoff Panasonic keynote earlier today at CES 2008, Engadget headed over to the Panasonic booth to check out the Wireless HD, 150-inch behemoth, and ultra-thin plasmas. The Wireless HD setup was, of course, a befuddling open space between a set-top box of some sort and a TV. A loop video played demonstrating the signal using "beam steering" to bounce around obstructions, much like our cameras trying to get around the gaggle of people huddled around Panny's products.
first comment!!!!!!
Geez, Panasonic is just shaming every other company that even bothered to show (MS, tivo, hitachi, blu-ray, etc.). It's like everyone else showed up for an R&D show and tell session, and Panasonic said, yeah, we've done R&D, and here it is as a slew of products.
So that set top box etc. has to be out in the open to beam the signal to the TV? Who wants that? Why not just hide it in a cabinet someplace not line-of-sight and pull HDMI cable.
And this is supose to help me get what again? a loop video? No thanks. If I wanna see an HD loop video I'll go to Best Buy and see it there for free.
Wasn't this wireless technology developed and incorporated by Samsung last year and everyone trash it because it was actually a good invention but it wasn't developed/released by Panasonic.
This is going to be brilliant for projector setups, power only connection well be hella convenient.
@StaffordshireBT: You cant hide this in the cabinet. It is the size of a mini-fridge that has to exactly at 10 ft, any farther, its outta range, any closer, the beam-steering wont work. It is severely limited by line-of-sight. God save the people who invested in Sibeam (its their chip inside). What you really need is a multi-rrom solution, no line-of-sight limitation and that can transmit uncompressed and ENCRYPTED video like HDMI through-out your home. I've seen this on display at the CES 2008 show and when a couple of guys walked in front of the transmitter (a hulk), the video pixellated and worse, the signal was lost. Why oh why, would someone ever dream of buying such a crappy product. Amimon, for example, has a cool compression scheme, but it doesn't work for encrypted HDMi streams since their tech wotn work on encrypted data - but they still have products out there. God save their customers, and their customer's customers!
There is a need to increase the bandwidth through some out-of-the-box thinking. I came accross one stealth-mode company, Picongen, that has a unique solution that can really solve the wireless HD problem with (pure and simple) increasing the bandwidth. I was intrigued by their solution, but we still need to see their product (or prototype) - maybe CES 2009? Hehehe! Lez C!
sigh!