Spent a good chunk of the morning on the Hitachi stand here at CEATEC, looking around at a raft of new technology the company has to give us better pictures, 3D pictures and of course significant energy savings.
It's kinda familiar stuff by now: the big themes of the show here in Japan are 3D and energy reduction, the latter driven by a government policy to cut consumption by some 25 per cent in the very near future.
So like other companies, Hitachi has low-energy TVs on show, including in this case one conforming to what it calls the 'One Watt, one inch' concept: in other words, a 32in TV consuming just 32W.
It's done by a combination of a high power hot cathode fluorescent backlight, a high efficiency inverter and optimised optical design, but elsewhere the company is employing other strategies including backlight adjustment.
These include a system (above) able to turn the TV to standby when no-one is watching it, using a camera to detect the presence of the viewer. Other companies here have similar systems, but Hitachi's goes a stage further – it can even detect whether you're still sitting there, but have taken your eyes off the screen to read a magazine.
Do that, and the TV goes into standby again.
There's also a slick Intelligent Auto High Picture Quality system, able to detect both the level and colour temperature of the light in your room, and adjust the TV accordingly.
And finally there's Hitachi's home networking system, designed to share TV, video and audio around the home. Taking its cue from the Japanese brand for the company's tellies, Wooo, it's called Wooonet.
Oh, and pronounced Oooonet...
Click on the picture below for a swift video tour of the Hitachi stand.
