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HD News: Showcasing much of their high end TV technology for 2009, the Panasonic Z1 Plasma series features amongst other things wireless HD.

The Z1 can transmit a full 1080p HD signal from its tuner box and also supports the Viera Cast feature wirelessly. Working in conjunction with Amazon’s video-on-demand services the Z1 can stream High Definition movies and access Picasa, YouTube, and weather services.

Coming in at a svelte like 1in thick, the Z1 also features Panasonic’s 600Hz Sub-field Drive, a contrast ratio of 40,000:1, THX sound certification along with SD memory card compatibility.

600Hz Sub-field Drive increases the rate at which plasma pixels refresh to improve High Definition motion tracking.

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Electricpig: Panasonic demoed a new breed of TV remote control at CES 2009, featuring a bunch of smart talents including a multi-touch interface.

Dubbed the Easy Touch remote controller, it’s currently just a prototype, but from what we’ve seen this next-gen RF navigator is definitely one to keep an eye on.

Simply picking up the Easy Touch remote controller automatically switches it on, a feature Panasonic is calling Grab n Go. But by far the best feature is the Multi-touch aspect of the remote – those two silver pads are independently touch sensitive, meaning you can hold the remote in landscape mode and control onscreen action with two independent thumb gestures.

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DVICE: After the full day of press conferences preceding the opening of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), there’s one big trend that keeps coming up from every electronics company hawking their wares to the press corps. They all are cranking out TVs that can easily link up to the web.

While we’ve seen a trickle of attempts, plans and half-hearted hookups to the internet in the past couple of years, this year at CES, that trickle has turned into a torrent. Web connectivity is at the top of the hype list for Samsung, LG, Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, and Toshiba. Why are they all so eager to make it easy for TV viewers to access online content from their living rooms?

That’s easy: because viewers want it. A Toshiba executive told that of all the consumers able to connect to RSS services using Toshiba’s Internet-connected TVs, an astonishing 25% of them connected and began receiving feeds. That’s a remarkable acceptance rate for technology that didn’t even exist a couple of years ago. Because of such heightened interest, we think in a matter of two to three years, it’ll be hard to find a TV that doesn’t have these web-enabled features.

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TechRadar: Panasonic is the latest AV heavyweight to throw its might behind 3D Blu-ray content with the creation of the Panasonic Hollywood Laboratory Advanced Authoring Center (PHL-AC), which will begin operations from February 1.

Located within the existing Panasonic Hollywood Laboratory (PHL) in Universal City, California, the new facility has been developed to accelerate and establish the 3D Full HD Blu-ray format, and work directly with Hollywood studios to provide 3D development services for Blu-ray titles.

PHL-AC will feature a Plasma Full HD home theatre system, a 3D-ready digital cinema projector (Theatrical Dolby 3D system) with a 380in screen for picture evaluation and a 3D-ready MPEG-4 AVC High Profile encoder.

“Panasonic recognizes that for 3D Full HD to succeed, just like Blu-ray, collaboration on research, development and production with studios and content providers is absolutely essential” said Eisuke Tsuyuzaki, managing director of Panasonic Hollywood Laboratory.

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The HDRoom: Earlier this week, news broke that Dolby Laboratories is pushing its 3-D Blu-ray Disc technology with content providers in hopes of scoring the prized industry standard when Blu-ray in 3D debuts. Dolby’s standard would utilize existing Blu-ray players, 3-D equipped TVs and glasses with specs determined by TV manufacturers.Today, an article in The Nikkei Japanese newspaper today is reporting Panasonic will be unveiling their 3-D Blu-ray technology, that would be built into software and hardware, at CES this week. It would utilize special glasses viewing alternating left-and-right eye images at 120fps to achieve a 3-D effect on-par with what you’d find in the movie theater today.

These two proposed standards likely won’t be the last. The future of home entertainment, for both movies and videogame consoles like the next iterations of Xbox 360 and PS3, is pointing more and more towards 3-D with each passing day.

The fear many, including us, don’t want to face is another “format” war like HD DVD and Blu-ray where multiple 3-D standards are released to the marketplace. One war slowed the adoption of Blu-ray already. In this economy, the clearer options are to consumers, the better.

If a standard can be adopted relatively soon and manufacturing gets underway with relatively little issue, the first 3-D Blu-ray hardware, software and TVs are expected to hit the marketplace in mid-to-late 2010

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TrustedReviews: We already heard the rumours that Panasonic was set to buy Sanyo.

Then confirmation was supposed to come on the 7th so it’s a couple of days late but, as predicted, the deal is indeed going through.

The deal will cost Panasonic in the region of ¥560 billion which is a lot of money, especially in this current financial market.

In return for that investment Panasonic gains some 70 per cent of Sanyo’s shares, giving it pretty conclusive control of the company.

The combined force will comprise Japan’s largest electronics maker, which is pretty impressive.

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Electronic House: For a while there, it was easy to get lost in the GPS market. Now the smoke seems to be clearing just a bit. Hot on the heels of Magellan’s announcement, both Panasonic and Harman/Kardon say they are also getting out of the portable GPS market.

Harman introduced the Becker earlier this year. Also, Panasonic will keep its Strada in-dash navigation line, says Twice. The economy has been cited in both decisions.

Earlier this week, Magellan announced it would sell its consumer line to Mitac, the makers of Mio. Audiovox, JVC and Cobra are a few of the others that recently got out of the GPS market. 

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TWICE: The Plasma Display Coalition (PDC), a multi-company body promoting sales of plasma display technology, released the model numbers of 43 flat-panel plasma TV sets that qualified for new tighter Energy Star power-consumption standards.

Under the new system, the PDC said, “it’s now possible to replace an old big-screen color TV picture tube television with a slim profile, widescreen plasma HDTV that actually consumes less energy than the TV screen it replaces.”

Members of the coalition include: Hitachi, LG Electronics, Panasonic and Pioneer, each of which offers models that were among the 43 plasma TVs introduced by its member companies in the last nine months that have earned the new Energy Star rating and have been placed on the EPA official roster of qualifying HDTV sets.

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HEXUS.lifestyle: Despite current high-street prices dropping dramatically in an effort to entice customers ahead of the Christmas season, retailers may soon face further gloom as Asia’s biggest TV manufacturers plan to raise prices.

Sony, one of Japan’s leading manufacturers of consumer TVs, has stated that the plummeting value of the pound against the yen has left it unable to maintain current pricing. In a statement regarding forthcoming price increases, it announced last month that “it is likely that the vast majority of products affected will see increases of less than 33 per cent” and added that “Sony does not believe that it will be alone in taking this form of action”.

Following on from Sony’s announcement, Sharp yesterday announced plans for a 10 per cent price increase and other big-name Asian brands such as Panasonic and Samsung are expected to follow suit.

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SlashGear: Panasonic are withdrawing from the European satnav business, after drastically falling prices have made it economically unfeasible. 

While no official release has been made, UK site The Register is reporting that Panasonic will now instead focus on in-car entertainment hardware that will be marketed at car manufacturers rather than individual end-users.

The standalone satnav business has been highly competitive in Europe, particularly over the past twelve months, with some highstreet retailers halving prices of their entire range in the run-up to the holidays. The proliferation of OEM devices, plus the absence of key differentiation features between models, has resulted in an unstoppable race to the bottom line.

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HDTV UK: Panasonic has announced that its TH-65VX100 and TH-50VX100 (65- and 50-inch, respectively) VIERA plasma TVs will be arriving in the UK from January.

According to the press release, there’s new-generation plasma technology on board including a “Dynamic Black Layer” positioned at the front end of the panel which is supposed to reduce the amount of predischarge to one-sixth that of conventional models.

In English, this means that the contrast ratio is a self-proclaimed 60,000:1, offering deeper, richer blacks and expanding the colour gamut.

Also on board is an 18-bit digital signal processor, “Digital Colour Reality” technology for fine gradation from light to dark.

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Engadget: For those of you plugging your ears whilst humming along in hopes of this whole 3D revolution fading away, we’ve got a rude awakening headed your way.

Just days after hearing that the HDMI specification could be updated to better handle stereoscopic 3D content, along comes word that Panasonic has submitted a proposal to the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) for an official BD standard to store 3D imagery formed of “left / right-eye two-channel Full HD images.”

Panny reportedly made the move early in order avoid a format war.

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