Toshiba’s press conference at CES broke the news of the company’s new KIRA2 TV, intended as a grand step up in company’s display offering. The LED HDTV will apparently include 3D video, video conferencing, media sharing over a home network, internet access and video-on-demand content too.
As well as being able to view 3D content, the KIRA2 promises real-time conversion of 2D video to 3D video, advanced DVD upscaling, smooth motion display at 480Hz, video conferencing via bundled video camera, mic and video chat software, internet access via the walled garden of Cell TV, initially planned to include Netflix, Vudu, CinemaNow and Pandora, plus access to media on your home computer via a home network connection.
What makes it all possible is the small box attached to it called the Cell Set-Top Box which contains a specially developed computer. It’s powered by the CELL Broadband Engine which the company claims is up to ten times faster than the average desktop and includes eight processors, each clocked at 3.2GHz, leading to an output of 200 GFLOPS (floating point operations per second).
Also included is a 1 terabyte hard drive, 802.11n Wi-Fi with support for DLNA and Wireless HD for connecting box to TV in wire-free stylee.
Toshiba were a bit vague on prices and dates though, besides saying that the KIRA2 will make an appearance this year.