At a presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2010, Toshiba has announced plans to introduce its new Cell TVs in Europe this autumn.

January 12, 2010 — Toshiba’s European marketing manager, Sascha Lange, gave a presentation at the CES 2010 on the company’s new “Cell TVs”. Cell is a new range of TVs that boast massive processing power in comparison to today’s standard HDTVs: The “Cell Broadband Engine” in the new models uses an eight-core processor, with each core running at 3.2 GHz. Cell TVs will offer a range of spectacular new features, but Toshiba hasn’t yet finalised the specification for the European market.

Toshiba’s Sascha Lange gave a talk on Cell TVs at the CES 2010.

But the Cell TVs will still have plenty to offer. They’ll enable 3D TV, for example — and not just with actual 3D content. On top of that, the Cell processor is so powerful that it’ll be able to convert 2D signals into 3D in real-time. To do this it will generate depth information by detecting differences in sharpness, colour, and other picture characteristics between foreground and background objects.

This will allow users to watch anything in 3D — even home videos, for example, said Lange. Cell will also add powerful recording capabilities: In combination with the built-in hard disk, it’ll be able to record eight channels simultaneously, so viewers will be able to go back and watch earlier programs from eight of their favourite channels. In Japan, the current Cell TV model has a 3 TB hard disk, while the planned US model offers 1 TB — either way, that’s a lot of space for recordings.

The panel that Toshiba plans to introduce is known as the “Kira 2”. This uses a locally dimmed LED backlight with 512 clusters of LEDs — compared to just 96 clusters in current Toshiba models. This should all but eliminate the halo effect seen on today’s local dimming TVs. Kira 2 will also offer increased brightness and, Toshiba claims, phenomenal contrast ratios of up to 9,000,000:1. Lange concluded his presentation with an announcement that the Cell TVs should be available in Europe from autumn 2010.