Panasonic Technology: Highlights

Panasonic Technology: THX certification

Some Panasonic TVs offer so-called "THX certification". THX is the technical wing of US company Lucasfilm, whose founder George Lucas, became famous for the "Star Wars" movies. Earlier, THX stood for "Tomlinson Holman's eXperiments", after the company's technology boss at the time.

Lucas used the four-channel Dolby Stereo sound system (the consumer version was known as Dolby Surround) way back in the first Star Wars movie in 1977, but was frustrated with the poor audio technology in movie theaters.

Holman developed a set of specifications that projectors, speakers, and amplifiers have to meet in order to play back multichannel audio in optimal quality. Theaters that meet these specifications, and which are subject to regular check-ups, are allowed to wear the THX logo.

In the early 1990s, the first home-theater components with THX certification appeared. This range was extended, and for some time now THX has also been dealing with picture quality. Here, again, THX-certified displays must reproduce the original signal as accurately as possible.

Panasonic Technology: Viera Cast

The ‘splash' page of Panasonic's Viera Cast portal reveals the variety of content that the system provides.

Panasonic wants to bring the Internet into the living room in a way that's tailored to TVs. The manufacturer therefore goes to extra effort: It maintains its own portal that provides access to services such as Bloomberg TV, Euronews, Eurosport, photo-service Picasa, Twitter, the "Weather Channel", and YouTube.

Other manufacturers with similar concepts do this using CE-HTML - this is a version of the page-description language HTML, well known on the WWW, but which is optimized for consumer electronics ("CE"). Panasonic technology, on the other hand, uses its own language - the developers promise less crashes than in competing systems.

But for the people offering the content, this means they have to prepare their pages for the conventional Web browser, for CE-HTML, and for the Panasonic system. How long they'll bother doing this for is anyone's guess - at the time of writing, competing manufacturers are showing a clear trend toward CE-HTML.

Panasonic Technology: Wireless HD
One innovative extra in the Z1 series is the wireless transmission from the separate tuner/connections box to the screen. The Panasonic technology transmits in the 60-gigahertz band - that is, at an extremely high frequency. For comparison: cordless telephones and typical wireless PC networks work at 2.4 gigahertz; newer WLAN routers run at 5 GHz.

Televisions.com has already tried out Wireless HD: The picture and sound quality is perfect, and the system is highly practical. This is to do with, among other things, the sophisticated antenna construction in the transmitter - it's got dozens of them. Cordless telephones and PC wireless networks do not interfere with the reception, but if someone walks across the room (specifically: through the line of transmission), the picture can sometimes flicker briefly - but this person is also probably standing in front of the screen, which is bound to be more annoying.

The following were involved in producing this article on Panasonic technology:

Author(s): Karl-Gerhard Haas
Editor in Chief: Florian Friedrich
Photos: Manufacturer and AV T.O.P. Messtechnik GmbH
Last update: September 2009