Toshiba To Showcase Cell-Powered 3D LED TV At IFA 2010

Having made an appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas at the beginning of this year, the Toshiba Cell TV is due to take centre stage again at the company’s booth in the IFA European trade show which will take place in Berlin in September, showcasing some of Toshiba’s state-of-the-art TV technologies.

Central to the Toshiba Cell TV’s video processing prowess (and name) is the impressive Cell microprocessor which powers the Sony Playstation 3 (PS3), purportedly offering up to 143 times more processing power than the engines found in traditional televisions. The sheer efficiency of the Cell engine allows Toshiba to implement multiple picture-enhancing technologies on the Cell TV, ranging from Super Resolution Technology to Net Resolution+ with Compression Noise Cancelling.

With 3D TV being all the rage this year, Toshiba naturally did not forget to take advantage of the Cell microprocessor’s muscle to bestow 3D capabilities on its flagship Cell TV. For native 3D content, alternate frame-sequential system is used; but according to Toshiba, the Cell processing chip can also work wonders with lower-resolution 3D material and even 2D content.

The Toshiba Cell TV would apply “3D Super Resolution Technology” to upscale 3D content of lower resolution to near high-definition. It does this by first reproducing the entire image and then identifying the areas that can be improved. This “Reproduction Technology” is followed by a “Self-Congruency” stage where the pre-processed image is reconstructed with greater detail.

Normal 2D material can also be viewed in 3D at near HD quality, thanks to a Trivector 2D-to-3D conversion technology powered by the Cell engine, which works by analysing and detecting the 2D vectors of moving objects within the image before rendering them in 3D with precision.

These video processing technologies aside, the Toshiba Cell TV also boasts a full array local-dimming LED backlighting system with 512 dimming zones, contributing to a quoted dynamic contrast ratio of 9 million to 1. An integrated 3Tb hard disk drive and a 2.9cm-deep slim design (the video processing hardware are stored in a separate set-top box) complete this technological tour de force.

Scheduled to hit Japan sometime in October (where it will be sold as the Toshiba 55X2), unfortunately Toshiba remain tight-lipped on when the Toshiba Cell TV will be available in the United Kingdom.

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