Adrian Wittenberg reports on Japan’s electronics scene…
It’s no secret that innovation in electronics often begins in Japan and trickles down to the rest of the world. I recently packed my bags to enjoy the culture and the food, and to get a glimpse at some of the current trends in the industry.
Whenever I go to Tokyo, I always spend a good couple of hours in the Akihabara district because the streets are littered with electronic shops that offer everything from cellular to high end A/V equipment.
Here’s a promo booth for Sony’s Blu Spec CD which takes some of the manufacturing processes used in Blu-ray disc creation and applies them to this new high end CD audio format. There’s already a fair amount of titles available at this time.
I stopped by a couple of media shops to see how prominent Blu-ray media was. There were plenty of titles to choose from both in imported titles from the U.S. as well as Japanese originals. Blu-ray is fairly pricy in Japan with most titles priced at around the equivalent of fifty U.S. dollars.
Blu-ray recording is also very big in Japan as many consumers are recording HD television and movies to Blu-ray disks. In fact, many of the Blu-ray players available in Japan double as media recorders with full featured downloadable program guides.
Here, for example, we see Sony’s BDZ-x100 Blu-ray player that features a 1 Terrabyte hard drive, dual tuners for television recording, network communication with other Sony products, and playback of all the latest HD audio codecs. Blu-ray players are expensive in Japan just like they are in the U.S. but the trend is for an all in one solution. Think Blu-ray, plus media server, plus Tivo, plus BD burner. I’m hoping to see these kinds of player/recorders show up in the states relatively soon now that the big digital switch is right around the corner.
In this image is Sony’s gorgeous XR1 LCD display. This display features Sony’s 120hz MotionFlow frame interpolation as well as their Triluminous technology which provides a wide color gamut as well as multi-zone backlighting techniques.
As more and more folks convert their music collection for storage on portable MP3 players or hard drives we can expect to see more innovative products that capitalize on this concept. Both Sony and Panasonic have introduced hard drive based mini-Juke box players.
Here Sony’s NAS-M95HD is elegant, stylish, and just plain cool with tons of storage and a very nice display.
Customization is also very big in Japan, so a lot of the focus from Manufacturers is put on style and appearance as can be seen in this image of various Laptop case designs.
As many people in Japan spend their recreation hours in their homes with their family, the demand for home entertainment products is massive and as such, manufacturers will continue to take risks and create innovative products for having fun in the home environment.
January 29th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Did you get a chance to listen to the Blu-spec CD? If yes, what did you think? I’m not sure if we need another high-resolution recording format, but I’m all for anything that sounds better than CD.
January 30th, 2009 at 4:29 am
Nice article. I have noticed that due to space limitations in Japanese society, that they do not go “big” like we do in the States. Small TV’s, small home audio systems…not many will set up a big HT room or have huge floor standing speakers that we in the Us like to collect. I am somewhat surprised to hear that BD is no cheaper (indeed, more expensive) there. Great idea to combine a media center with the BD player ( again, space saving). A TB of storage…sweet!
January 30th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Alas, the demonstration they had on hand only sported some average headphones which wasn’t enough to get a solid opinion. From what I gathered about the Blu-spec technology though, the discs are playable in any cd player and are not a high storage format such as Blu-ray. Apparently, the goal was to create a much higher quality CD disc, borrowing advanced manufacturing techniques from Blu-ray disks, rather than deliver high resolution lossless audio such as DolbyTrueHD or dtsMaster audio.
February 6th, 2009 at 6:56 am
I have always been jealous of kids who live in Japan (at least from a technology standpoint). They ALWAYS get the good stuff first, sometimes years (decades?) before it trickles down to the western world. Console gaming systems and games are the most visible example (they got the PS3 almost two years before we did). Their processors are faster, their memory is better, their hard drives are immense, their graphics are cooler, etc. Their kids play on cell phones that have higher bandwidth than our government mainframes it seems. It has been said that HD downloads won’t become the preferred method in the US until the infrastructure catches up (no indication of that yet) and Japan has had the capability for a while now. And, I’d be willing to be that they don’t pay a fraction of what the top-tier service providers are charging in the US. I recently went shopping for HD/faster internet and the best HD/internet package from an all-fiber system ran $154+taxes and fees, and only if its available in your area.
I guess its our own fault really, for accepting sub-par services from ALL of our media providers and paying through the nose for it, allowing them to sit on their laurels complacently instead of pushing to implement better services. What I don’t understand is, I know that a fiber network must physically be laid before we can attain much better service, but what baffles me is, the new fiber system will STILL not allow us the same download speeds/HD bandwidth as our Japanese counterparts have had for years (or so I hear from the industry). So, we are spending a ton to install a system that is already obsolete when we should be spending two tons for a system that can meet our demands in 20 years (or even 10). This type of thinking is not what made the US a superpower 100 years ago, too little too late seems a more appropriate summation.