Industry insider

Yes, it's a telephone.

But not just any telephone: this is the Fuji-type phone which in 1935 started Fujitsu. Which is why it now has pride of place in the subterranean Technology Hall at the company's HQ in Kawasaki, which I visited a few days ago.

The company that phone created now has worldwide sales of over $50bn, and with an annual spend on R&D of almost $2.5bn.

After the Second World War, Fujitsu soon found itself moving into new fields, with the development of its first relay-driven computer, the FACOM (Fujitsu Automatic COMputer) 100 in 1954.

The machine in the Technology Hall is slightly more recent - it's a 1960 FACOM 138 - but it still works, the relays clattering as it does its thing.

The programming and storage in those days was impressive stuff, the machine chewing through large reels of punched paper.

By 1965, the company was linking up computers in the first online data system, and by 1975 it had Japan's first supercomputer, the FACOM-230-75 ARU.

Personal computing has also played a major part in the Fujitsu story: this is a 1981 FMB, the first computer to use LSI RAM as its main memory. The capacity? A staggering 64KB - and note the audio cassette on the right used for programming.

As personal computers became popular, so salesmen wanted to take this awesome processing power on the road with them.

The 1985 FM16 weighed 2.9kg and was supplied in a case with a small thermal printer, used for printing out orders. On return to base, the data could be downloaded.

Fujitsu was also heavily involved in mobile phone development, and in the landline world also developed technology for the undersea cables used extensively in the age before sattelite communications, and still carrying much of the world's data.

This optical booster's designed to work at depths of 8000m, and used in the SEA-ME-WE4 cable. which runs from South East Asia, via the Middle East to Western Europe - hence the name.

It can withstand a pressure of 800 atmospheres, the equivalent of supporting a Boeing 747 on the surface area of your two hands, and carries 8.8Tb/s.

Of course, Fujitsu is also known as the developer of the plasma TV, with a team under Tsutae Shinoda having developed the technology despite the company, along with rivals, being unimpressed with the short service life of early prototypes, and trying to discontinue research.

Shinoda, now known as 'Mr Plasma', continued his work, and in 1983 invented a three-electrode surface-discharge structure that overcame the observed short-life issue.

He also invented further vital technologies and successfully developed the world’s first practical video graphics array plasma display panel, a 21in model able to deliver 260,000 colours. He came up with the first 42in model in 1995, and one of the early screens is on show in the Technology Hall.

He's now Chairman of Shinoda Plasma, and also serves as a professor at Hiroshima University.

And Fujitsu's research continues to look into new ways of handling and displaying data - during my visit I was introduced to MIRACLES, which allows data to be searched in the internet by visual as well as text search.

The acronym stands for Multimedia Information RetrievAl, CLassification and Exploration System - and I can't help thinking the name came first and then the developers tortured the words to fit!

But what it does is impressive. It can analyse pictures on the internet and then classify them by shape, colour and so on, meaning it has obvious applications in, say, online shopping - 'Find me all the red handbags for sale', for example.

So what's that got to do with home cinema and the world we live in? Well, the system - which is already being used internally to search for and retrieve technical drawings - can also work with video.

And that means it could soon be classifying all the content stored on your computer, along with that out there on the internet, and allowing rapid search for that clip you wanted without you needing to know what it's called or even where it came from.

 

Friday:- Over the border into mainland China to visit the Shinhint Group factory in Chang An, Guangdong, where NXT's Balanced Mode Radiator drive units are made.

We're driven from Hong Kong by Ernest Ip, Shinhint's COO, and entering China proves remarkably simple, given all the faff involved in getting a visa back in the UK. Another 45 minutes drive north from the border at Lo Wu, and we're at the factory.

Shinhint is the sole licensee for the manufacture of NXT's BR drivers, and while all the research is done back at NXT, the team at Chang An develops new versions of the drive units for customers. Another factory makes finished products such as PC and portable speakers.

The development team is headed by Professor Wei: Wei Shi Xiong was formerly a professor at  Qingdao University, and joined the company five years back.

He has electrical and mechanical teams, an acoustics facility and a rapid prototyping workshop, and the focus is on applying NXT's research into products.

At the moment, for example, it's working on expanding the range of HARP drivers into a variety of different sizes, from the tiny to the large, as more TV manufacturers get interested in the technology.

 

Making the NXT HARPs is a little trickier than with some drivers - glueing the diaphragm in place requires a machine to do a bit more of a bob and a shuffle, rather than just spinning a circular driver.

But some things remain the same: this guy is taking magnets and - umm - magnetising them:

 

Stacks of finished drivers build up at the end of the production line - the company has some 1200 staff working at the factory, under the eye of the jovial but clearly no-nonsense Senior Operations Manager, Suzanne Lo.

 

 But Shinhint also takes the product further, building the drivers into completed speaker housings for a TV manufacturer

 

each one of which is subjected to a listening test before being packed for dispatch

 

Other products being made at the factory include speaker systems for a mobile phone manufacturer, and a whole floor dedicated to making drive units for in-car use, servicing the likes of Ford, GM and VAG.

Or, as the sign over the entrance to the production floor says,

 

 

Anyone who tells you that two-channel audio is dead, and home cinema is the new black, only needs wander into one of the several consumer electronics stores stacked above each other in the Yau Shing Commercial Centre here in Kowloon.

Step out of the tiny elevator, turn right and this is what you see.

 

Row upon row of speakers, lined up and waiting for audition. And they range from the JBLs, Sonys and Mordaunt-Shorts of this world through to Tannoy-made TEAC Esoterics, big Tannoy Prestige models, ProAcs, NEATs, PMCs, Harbeths, Spendors and more. They just go on and on, and not just in one store:

 

Each shop has a similar array, all set up and ready to go on the shop floor.

They're all connected to racks and racks of equipment, ranging from high-end  Esoterica  to Cambridge Audio, Musical Fidelity, Creek and Myryad, not to mention a scattering of Arcam.

 

Patchbays allow any player and any amp to be connected to any set of speakers - you can see the plugboard to the right of the shot below

Each shop has a couple of good demonstration rooms - this one is one of two at the Famous Audio and Video Company on the 11th floor

 

and each also has a clean, tidy main showroom layout for instant buyer appeal. This is Famous again:

 

There's plenty of stuff you'll never see in most British stores, too. Here's a pair of brand-new 60th anniversary Rogers LS3/5As

 

while mixed in with a whole load more equipment in a small demonstration room at another shop on the 16th floor is the kind of range of Naim equipment you'd normally only see in a truly dedicated UK retailer:

 

If you're after a serious two-channel system, I know just the place to go...

 

Worked out what it is yet? No, it's not a UFO over Causeway Bay here in Hong Kong, but a floating speaker from JVC, deisgned to deliver bathtime music. It has a built-in MP3 player and amplifier, and at its heart is a a speaker driver from NXT.

Yes, that NXT - the company founded amidst all that hoo-hah back in the days when it was under the same roof as Mission and Cyrus, but now doing its development work here on the shores of the South China Sea, just a couple of blocks from the former home of Bruce Lee. That home's now not a museum to the martial arts star, by the way, but a 'rent by the hour' love hotel. In Hong Kong, things move on...

And NXT finally moved its operational base here three years back, after an earlier relocation of some key staff a few years earlier, although the pure science is still done in the UK.

Here, among design and advertising companies in the Innocentre in Kowloon Tong, is the compact lab, design and sales operation of NXT, with the staff just about equally split between ex-pat Brits and locals. Other offices are in Japan and California.

Why Hong Kong? Well, for the same reason there are those other satellite offices - to be close to the customers, and where the products are produced. For as well as licensing its technologies, which now go far beyond the original 'Flat Panel' speakers, to manucaturers, NXT now designs and develops products sold as own-brand models through a wide range of distribution channels, and works with factories in mainland China to make drive units for both off the shelf and custom applications.

It has getting on for 15 licensees for its original SurfaceSound Distributed Mode Loudspeaker technology in China, and its products and technologies, covered by around 350 patents, find applications as diverse as advertising billboards and in-car audio.

Some Citroen vehicles, the C4 and C5, use its Audio Full Range drivers in place of conventional in-dash drivers, the speakers veing developed in association with Philips, while Toyota uses Distibuted Mode Loudspeakers in the headlining of vehicles such as the Alphard mini-van (above) in Asian markets, and its Tacoma and FJ Cruiser in the States.

NXT works closely with a wide range of manufacturers and brands including Hitachi, Maxell, Philips, Parrot, Revo, Targus, TDK and  TEAC, along with some undisclosed major names. For some of these it develops entire products, while with others - such as Revo - it's a matter of joint development of products.

There are also less expected applications for its technology. 3M uses its bending wave touch screens in the development of advertising and kiosk touch panels, while with its partner Qinetiq NXT's producing solutions for use in transport applications such as high-end executive jets and even some locations on the London Underground.

Work is also going on with printed electronics and other unusual applications: luxury birthday cards from Hallmark now use NXT technology to play high-quality greetings music when they're opened!

The popular Hitachi AX-M133 system was the first to hit the shops using NXT's Balanced Mode Radiator speakers, which are now being made available to a wide range of manufacturers.

The BR High Aspect Ratio Panel, or HARP, at the top of the picture above, is particularly well-suited to use in flatscreen TVs, and NXT is working with its driver manufacture licensee, Shinhint, to develop this driver in a variety of sizes to suit different requirements. There'll be more on the Shinhint link in a later blog.

The drivers are already in flatscreen TVs from the fastest-growing company in the US TV market, Vizio, and Viewsonic models. What's more, to make sets even slimmer the dispersion characteristics of the driver allows them to be angled or even used in a downward-firing orientation.

While I was with the NXT team, there were ongoing discussions underway with some of the biggest names in TV manufactuing about the use of versions of versions of this driver in their products.

NXT's original technology is now found in a variety of applications, the company having found that the EVA foam used in bag manufacture makes a good diaphragm for the speakers. Targus backpacks are made with an amp and stereo speaker panel, while the SoundBags below combine an iPod case and speaker.

 

Similar technologies are applied to a wide range of standalone speakers for use with computers and personal music players, with the company having a wide range of designs available to customers.

 

And it also has a variety of designs aimed at the 'road warrior' wanting to use the laptop for entertainment as well as work. This model is designed as a 'soundbar' to clip on the top of a notebook display

 

while these can be used freestanding, or clipped either side of the screen.

A variety of connection and power options are being investigated, from USB power and connectivity to conventional 3.5mm jacks and batteries, and even Bluetooth.

The company is also working on devices to drive the displays of laptops and handheld devices directly, turning them into speakers.

I was shown a development implementation for one current ultraportable computer, and it was explained how this SoundVu technology can not only save precious space inside a product, but also deliver stereo sound where previously there was only room for a single conventional mono speaker.

Parallel research is also going on into a side benefit of this technology, which allows screens to be touch-sensitive and also provide feedback when used. This 'haptic' technology allows the sensation of writing on a screen to be akin to that of writing on paper - instead of a stylus skidding on plastic, the screen appears to produce a degree of drag, just like paper.

But for all this, NXT still considers itself a hi-fi company, and is proud of its UK audio heritage. It's developed these ultra-slim speakers from its experience with the Hitachi system:  book-sized, they sounded very good indeed on the brief demonstration I heard, and i could imagine them slipping between the volumes on a shelf to give an all-but-invisible small room/second room hi-fi solution.

The company's circular BMR drivers have already become familiar from their use in the new Revo BLOK iPod dock, and NXT and its manufacturing partner have developed these little cube speakers.

With drivers just 4.5in across, and no crossover to sap power or create phase problems, they again sounded very convincing on the end of some Cyrus electronics, and could be an interesting add-on for small systems.

Other developers are also workjing with the BMR technology: I had a brief listen to a pair of the speaker on the right below, which combines the small square driver and a passive radiator, together with onboard amplification and a metal housing designed to act as a heatsink.

On first seeing it, the NXT materials and engineering people were intrigued that the external designer had used a  transparent material for the passive radiator diaphragm. 'Why?', they asked, 'Does it sound better?'

The answer was somewhat more prosaic - the designer had run out of space on the housing for an receiver for the infrared remote control, so putting it behind the radiator panel seemed the logical solution.

 It's just one of many designs which will be featured on the NXT stand at the massive Hong Kong Electronics Fair, which opens here on Monday, and the company has been working on prototypes right up to the last minute.

Having spent a day visiting the Shinhint speaker factory in China with NXT Sales and Marketing Director James Bullen and Matthew Dore, who overseas sales and marketing of the Balanced Mode Radiator technology,  we retired to a local watering hole for a few cold ones.

I suppose I shouldn't have been too surprised when Bullen produced from his bag some more designs for portable player speakers, freshly arrived from the builders. Earlier in the day the two had explained to me that one of the advantages of their current location is how fast products and components can be taken from idea to existence - here was all the evidence I needed of that process in action.

It's clearly needed: on this showing, the small but highly innovative team at NXT has a lot more ideas on the way.

This little unit could revolutionise the way you think about iPod speaker systems. At first glance it looks like a conventional iPod dock, and you wonder why Yamaha didn't simply build it into its new PDX-50 speaker system (below), on the way for next year.

 

Then it's explained to you that the wire is simply there to charge the iPod, and that the unit attached to then player is a wireless sender, using the company's AIR Wired radio technology to transmit music and control signals back to the speaker unit.

It's at that point your jaw drops a little.

Powered from the iPod, the Yamaha unit lets you play music through the system across the room, while also controlling the volume of the sound from the touch wheel on the player. You can even turn the system on and off from your iPod.

The company claims the system has a latency of just 12ms, so you can even use it when watching movies or video clips on your iPod without lips getting all out of sync.

The PDX-50 launched in Japan a week ago, and will be in the UK next year, along with three other iPod speaker systems.

There's the TSX-130 (above) which combines alarm clock, CD and radio - the UK version will come with DAB/DAB+ reception -, and the TSX-120, which is a similar model but without the CD player. Instead it gets a 3.5mm stereo input jack.

These have a unique Beep + Music alarm mode - three minutes before your chosen alarm time, the system starts playing music, fading it up until the alarm itself sounds. Hit the snooze button and the alarm stops, but the music continues.

Both models use 8cm drive units and rear ports to deliver a superior sound, and on the showing they put up in the Hamamatsu demo room could create some waves in the iPod system market.

They're joined by a simpler dock speaker system, the PDX-30, which will be available in four colours including pink and blue. All four should launch in the UK next April.

 

Piano tuning in hard hats may seem extreme, but when you're stringing a concert grand and working up a tension equivalent to 20 tons, it pays to be careful.

It's just one of the things we discovered during our behind the scenes tour of Yamaha facilities in and around the company's home town of Hamamatsu, taking in visits to the grand piano and brass/woodwind manufacturing operations as well as the company's audio and home cinema divisions.

The company's slogan is 'Creating Kando Together', the Japanese word meaning something like a state of inspiration, and by the end of the tour I was regretting never having been inspired to learn an instrument, so much care and attention was going into making the products.

I guess I'd never wondered how musical instruments were made, let alone imagining them leaving the factory in the familiar Yamaha boxes.

What I discovered was a mix of high technology - robots making one of over 200 different kinds of brass instrument mouthpiece every five minutes - and hand -crafting, with employees beating out trumpet bells by hand from a single sheet of metal.

Mellowing the molecules
It's possible to make the basics of a trumpet by soldering two flat sheets together then spinning them into shape, we're told, but the hand-beating alters the molecular structure of the metal and gives a more mellow tone.

Amazing, too, was the engraving of the saxophones made in the company's Toyooka plant, just outside Hamamatsu: the logo may be put on by a robot, but  the decoration is done entirely by hand, with a tight-knit group of guys working with chisels to carve out the decoration just 0.1mm deep into the metal.

If you want to see them in action, check out this short Yamaha video.

It takes some 4000-6000 strokes to engrave a single sax, over about half an hour, and the company produces around 200 units a day, so the engravers are kept busy.

Work, rest and play
200 trumpets come out of the factory every day, too, each one relaxed, seasoned, played and tested before packaging, and the factory is as full of statistics as it is full of music as instruments are tested.

For example, there's the 0.2mm tolerance on trombone slides, the yellow light used to check for leaks in brass instruments, and the toothpick with a piece of paper just 0.02mm thick used to check for leaks on flute keys.

 

Taking pride of place in the Toyooka showroom is also this lump of wood. 100 year old African Grenadilla wood, in fact, used to make the company's professional woodwind instruments, but only after three years of seasoning to bring it to the right quality. Student versions of clarinets, piccolos and the like are made from ABS resin, which has similar characteristics.

Just not quite the same.

Musical 'Skunk Works'
Toyooka is also home to Yamaha's custom instruments division, which is like a musical Skunk Works, making special instruments for special, un-named, customers. Everything is handmade here, from brass and woodwind to guitars and violins, and the products are each unique, and built to order.

One craftsman works on a single instrument from start to finish, taking a week to build it. No wonder one of the company's custom made gold flutes will cost you 1.5m-4m Yen, or between  £8000 and £20,000. And if you fancy one of Yamaha's custom-made acoustic or electric guitars, count on a wait of anything up to six months.

Pianos on wheels
Back at Hamamatsu HQ, we walk round the grand piano factory, delighting at robotised transporters trundling from one building to another carrying pianos and playing music as they go, and learn some of the fine points of grand piano manufacture.

Yes, they use robots, and laser measurement, but so much is done by hand and eye, from the adjustment of mechanisms with super-thin papter shims to the tuning of the piano and conditioning - picking away at the tightly-packed wool of the hammers with little metal pins to get just the right hardness.

Oscilloscopes, or by ear?
In soundproof booths, employees have oscilloscopes to hand to ensure pianos are tuned correctly, but most do it by ear and experience, and each piano goes into climate-controlled storage several times during it manufacture to season it to its intended delivery location.

Oh, and there's a machine that plays evey key 300 times automatically - pianos, it seems, benefit from running-in.

It's all come a long way since medical instrument service technician Torakusu Yamaha, passing through Hamamatsu in the 1870s, was asked to take a look at a broken reed organ at a local school. At the time such instruments were in demand with the growing popularity of western music, but were all imported, and thus not to many people knew how to fettle them.

Yamaha fixed the school instrument, and decided to set up a company making reed organs in Japan.

One of the first is in the Yamaha showroom, along with an early grand piano made by the company soon after, and having had a number of illustrious owners, including  - allegedly - the Emperor.

 

Proudly displayed on it is the original name of the company, the Japan Musical Instrument Manufacturing Co..

 

These days Yamaha makes everything from a huge range of instruments - it claims to be the only single company able to completely equip a symphony orchestra, and as official supplier to the Vienna Philharmonic, that includes some old-style instruments not used by any other orchestra - to the familiar hi-fi and AV equipment. And that's before you get on to the range made by sister company Yamaha Motors.

But there are also lesser-known Yamaha products, including routers, interior design solutions and the speakers you're likely to find inside many mobile phones. It even uses the same woodworking skills it's developed over many years of making instruments to other fields. If you drive a Lexus, a high-end Nissan or an Audi, and it has wood trim, it will have been made by Yamaha Fine Technologies, or FineTech as it's known internally.

So when a Japanese businessman drops his child off at Yamaha music school with her Yamaha flute, then drives his Lexus to the Yamaha golf centre, enjoying his mobile phone's polyphonic ringtones, before unloading his Yamaha clubs, maybe - just maybe - he's getting his head around the Kando concept.

Last night, I attended a recorded panel discussion organised by speaker manufacturer B&W. The  discussion was about surround sound and its importance to listeners, and it will be posted on the B&W website at the beginning of October. So, just one day after the fabled What Hi-Fi Sound And Vision Awards ceremony, I dragged my weary, tired body – and the attendant hangover that loomed over me like Javier Bardem in a foul mood – down to the Strongroom Studios in Hoxton.

 Danny Haikin of B&W provided the room (along with beer and cocktail sausages), while the opinions were provided by the following:

Martyn Ware chaired the discussion. Martyn is a musician, artist and record producer. He was a founding member of both Heaven 17 and The Human League, and through his company, Illustrious, is the designer and developer of revolutionary new surround systems. Andrew Walter is the Surround Sound mastering engineer at Abbey Road Studios. Verbally sparring with these lumninaries were three journalists: David Price, John Bamford, and yours truly.

 It was a fascinating and enjoyable evening: Martyn and Andrew banged the drum for surround sound in all its forms, while David Price and I expressed a certain sceptcism about whether the public is yet genuinely enthused by the idea of multichannel music.

But we all agreed that surround sound points to a future of genuinely immersive listening, and if there's enough appropriate content available (and hardware, and all of it at the right price),  then multichannel music might take off a a great deal more than it has already.

 As I say, the podcast will be up on the B&W website in a week, so head over there around the first of October to listen to the discussion in full. In the meantime, what do you think? Do you use your surround system just for movies, or do you use it for music, too? Is music simply better in stereo? Or do some genres of music suit multichannel while others get turned into a dog's dinner by the transfer into 5.1?

Let us know what you think.

 

 

There are many things you’d expect of a consumer electronics company celebrating its 90th anniversary – but changing its name and predicting a radical reduction in the range of products it may eventually sell aren’t necessarily on the list. Yet that’s precisely what Panasonic has just done.

Until now, Panasonic has been just one brand name of the Matsushita Electric Industrial Company – founded in 1918 by the 23-year-old Konosuke Matsushita, his year-younger wife and teenage-prodigy brother-in-law (15). 

The company began making attachment plugs to make the most of light-sockets , and now sells everything from white goods and fitness equipment to industrial machinery and even houses, under sub-brands as diverse as National and Technics. As from this year, it all becomes Panasonic, from flatscreens to fridges.

Panasonic and the future of consumer electronics

The man driving these changes is company president, Fumio Ohtsubo – with whom we recently enjoyed an exclusive, hour-long interview.

Firstly, we asked him what the singular Panasonic brand will stand for around the world. He says: “Panasonic sees everything from the point of view of the consumer – making their lives more comfortable and more practical”.

 

“I don’t think there’s any consumer electronics company that’s closer to the consumer’s everyday life in its consideration of development, manufacturing and service”, he claims.

Mr Ohtsubo recognises that pricing plays a major part as well as branding, but stresses that Panasonic aims to offer “quality and service at the lowest price. You need to cover that whole range to deliver true value to the consumer”.

As well as a vision of a single-brand company to bring the business in line with mono-monikered rivals such as Sony and Samsung (the key two manufacturers Panasonic benchmarks as competition), Mr Ohtsubo has plans to streamline his customers lives – and their power consumption – too.

TV and mobile takeover

He predicts a consumer electronics future where a multi-tasking TV does everything in the home – including recording and playback – and a multimedia smartphone informs and entertains you everywhere else. It’s no coincidence, naturally, that Panasonic plans to re-enter the European mobile phone market sometime after 2010, “with an incredibly advanced offering”.

In the meantime, its TV-as-the-hub-of-the-home concept is even more advanced, with the European introduction of internet-enabled VieraCast flatscreens in Spring 2009. Such sets are already available in the US and Japan – and in the case of the latter are already interfacing with other web-friendly systems such as security cameras.

“Before, TV was passive: it was broadcast and you watched it. Now, the TV is becoming an interface to link home with society,” says Mr Ohtsubo.
He strongly believes TVs will remain the key viewing medium, despite the rise of people tuning in an increasing array of devices.

“Yes, you can watch anytime, anywhere, but TV’s main place is in living rooms – laptops and mobiles are just satellite products,” he says, adding that he feels younger viewers who now consume large amounts of TV via PCs and mobiles will migrate to traditional TVs as they get older.

The rise of ever-larger, ever higher-resolution screens - check out Panasonic's prototype 150in Super HD plasma below  - should only cement TV's central role.

 

Technology with an environmental conscience

Even with larger screens on the menu, Panasonic plans to be the most eco-friendly electronics manufacturer, too – by making the manufacturing process for its products – as well as the products themselves – more energy efficient.

As Panasonic builds the machines that make the products (not to mention the factories themselves), it’s able to apply energy-saving measures at every stage of the process – and even at the end of a product’s lifecycle, via a growing recycling division that’s even starting to take in other company’s kit.

Panasonic’s 350,000 employees also have to get in on the act – each wears an eco badge (see Mr Ohtsubo's below) to remind them of their responsibilities, and is expected to contribute to the company’s aim of cutting its carbon emissions by 300,000 tonnes by 2010, plus get involved in other environmental projects such as tree-planting or river clearance.

 

All very admirable, obviously, but does the average consumer care? Mr Ohtsubo admits they might need some persuasion: “Consumers are already in the eco mindset, but manufacturers have to push it. We’re planning more marketing and education on the issue”.

Super-slim, energy-efficient plasmas

Doubtless some of that marketing will accompany Panasonic’s key 2009 launches, which will include ultra-slim (24.7mm) plasma TVs that’ll use just 100W of power (the average 42in plasma currently uses 180-200W).

Those sets, which will also boast Wireless HD connectivity (using RF – so you can bung that Blu-ray player in the cupboard), should be in the shops by next Christmas.

 

Panasonic is also launching a range of energy-efficient white goods (fridges, freezers and washing machines) into Europe next March/April – though sadly the Panasonic fuel-cell-powered bike won’t be pedalling its way over from Japan just yet.

Panasonic's plans with Pioneer

Returning to TVs, 2009 will also see the first Pioneer Kuro sets using Panasonic plasma panels. Mr Ohtsubo says all of Panasonic’s panels – including the new slimline designs – will be available to Pioneer and there’s “no deal” as to the Kuros keeping to different market sectors than its own, Viera TVs.

He added that from next year, Panasonic will also start to supply screens to further manufacturers, but he doesn’t know how much longer so many TV rivals can remain competitive – something already borne out by recent market withdrawals. “Whether it’s plasma or LCD, manufacturers will definitely decrease over the next few years,” he predicts.

He has no worries about Panasonic itself, however, despite refusing to be drawn on just what technologies the company is working on to keep itself at the top of the TV tree. “OLED, LCD, plasma – it’s less important than the role of TV itself, that of being an interface between home and society. Panasonic will be number one in TV – whatever the technology”, Mr Ohtsubo bullishly believes.

To see more of the manufacturer’s 90-year milestones, you can visit the dedicated Panasonic Design Museum website for a showcase of legacy lovelies - such as the dual light-socket adapter below.

 

 
We're also expecting some more 90th anniversary announcements later this month at the CEATEC Show in Japan, from which we'll be reporting live on the plans, predictions and innovations of Panasonic and many other of its rivals.

Yesterday, we reported on the new deal on net piracy between the BPI (British Phonographic Industry), the Motion Picture Association of America, and the six biggest Internet companies in the UK.

The deal obliges the web companies – BT, Orange, Virgin, Tiscali, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse – to “work towards a significant reduction” of illegal downloading of music and films. This will be achieved, it seems, through sending letters to the most “prolific” illegal downloaders, informing them of certain legal objections to their behaviour.

After last night’s by-election catastrophe it seems harsh to stomp on the broken bones of a dying government, but it's somehow appropriate that the government was the only organisation yesterday hailing the new deal as a success and actually seeming like they meant it. Idiots.

The new deal is not a success. It’s a fudge, a cop-out and a compromise – a toothless technique for avoiding the real issues raised by downloading (illegal  and otherwise), and its effect on the content industries.

Let me spell out what’s really happened here, and why the extensive coverage for this deal in yesterday’s media was a bit like suggesting a state funeral after the death of a particularly uninteresting duck:

First, as a result of downloading, the music and film industries – despite being continually advised to pack their bags and emigrate to  the 21st century – are fluctuating between fits of strenuous denial and lying on the ground crying like the victims of a particularly brutal game of sudden-death hop-skotch.

They’ve been crying to teacher – or in other words, whingeing at the government.

Secondly, the government wants to do as little as possible. Or rather, it wants to make a nice, media-friendly announcement that looks as if it's doing something, while actually doing nothing at all.

In this, the government has been successful. Unlike, say, last night’s by-election.

Lastly, the internet service providers are in the unenviable position of having a toothless government sidle up to them like some kind of deranged Uriah Heep, telling them to do something, anything, to get those annoying music biz types off their back. “I mean, they keep going to the toilet and coming back talking too fast: we can’t keep up!”

Sure, the government has “threatened” legislation to deal with illegal downloading. But it’s completely obvious that ministers would rather eat their own knees than bring in actual laws making criminals out of large swathes of the otherwise law-abiding population, while at the same time severely restricting and censoring a new and hugely positive technological development that they just about appreciate but barely understand.

The internet companies have said, quite reasonably: we do not want to punish our own customers, and we shouldn’t have to act like policemen anyway.

The government has said: But…. PLEASE!

So the web companies said: Oh, alright, you sniveling little gits.

And as a result, we have this pointless "deal". To avoid the threat of legislation that might out-do even the poll tax for rank stupidity, the ISPs have agreed to do the something that is nothing. No-one knows exactly the wording of the letters they will send out to prolific downloaders, but if you read between the lines, the underlying message will certainly be this:

“Dear Valued Customer,

We are writing to gently inform you that while you were downloading 1,250,000 MP3s over the last two years from various file-sharing sites without paying a penny for them, you were…, well… how can we put this… breaking some silly old law or other.

We know! We couldn’t believe it either.  Now don’t you worry, you dear valued customer, you. You lovely, cuddly, always-paying-your-steep-monthly-subscription-via-direct-debit-exactly-on-time, gorgeous and highly valued customer. Oh no. Don’t you worry about a thing.

Because, we’re not actually going to do anything about it.  Not only are we not going to punish you for downloading copyrighted material without so much of a by-your-leave or eight quid off your debit card; other than sending you this carefully written and delicately-scented letter, we’re not going to actually do anything at all!

In fact, dear valued customer; oh lovely and sexy user of our service who contributes so fabulously to our staggering profits. You may wonder whether there was any point in sending you this letter at all.

And the answer is... no. There wasn’t.

So, as you were, dear, wonderful valued customer. Carry on, safe in the knowledge that despite the astonishing hype and waste of paper caused by this new ‘net piracy deal’, you can now be more certain than ever that nobody is going to stop you from downloading whatever the hell you want, however and whenever the hell you want.

Yours Sincerely,

A Very Large Internet Service Provider”


People will continue to download, often illegally. The music business will continue to whinge and gripe, while holding on to a completely outmoded business model and losing out massively as a result. And an intelligent debate about the effects of the internet on content, copyright and intellectual property will remain as elusive and far away as ever.

 
What a triumph.

This just in from Tannoy.

In the new film The Edge Of Love, which tells the story of the two women in the life of writer Dylan Thomas. Keira Knightley, as cabaret artiste Vera Philips, is seen singing into a vintage Tannoy ribbon microphone.

Apparently, ""Produced from 1939 until well after the war and possibly even into the 1950’s, these microphones were available for both stage and desktop use. Its presence in the new movie underlines the long-standing heritage of the Tannoy brand."

The Edge of Love is in cinemas now. Microphone-spotters should form an orderly queue.

I think I've just about got my head around what '3LCD' means in projectors – three LCD imaging panels, one for each of the primary colours. Makes perfect sense, so what's 4LCD all about? Has someone come up with a new primary colour, maybe?

In fact it's a bit of technology just announced by Sanyo, and featured in a new projector designed for the presentation market. And here's one she made earlier...

If normal projector technology trends are anything to go by, and given the fact that 4LCD sounds much more impressive than 3LCD, chances are it'll find its way down the range into home-use projectors in pretty short order. At the moment, though, it's designed as a means of boosting the quality of really big images, or for projection in environments with greater ambient light.

Quick science bit. 3LCD uses a trio of LCD panels, arranged in an open-sided 'box' around a prism, with the projector lens on the open side of the 'box'. Light from the projector lamp is fed to the three prisms by a series of dichroic – in rough terms, half-silvered – mirrors.

Each panel delivers one colour - red, green or blue - and the prism combines all of these into the image you see on screen.

With me so far? Good – except it seems that as brightness increases, colours become washed out, meaning that ultra-bright projectors, such as you might use in situations with high ambient levels, for really big pictures or long throw distances, lose contrast and colour definition.

Hence 4LCD, which places an extra colour control device into the image engine, giving automatic control of the amount of yellow light in the system. Like this, in fact...

The result is a projector able to deliver 7000 lumen brightness and 2200:1 contrast ratio, and clearly the shape of things to come, according to a company spokesman: "This is just the first of many projectors we will release featuring our new 4LCD Engine.

"The increased luminosity and contrast ratio coupled with the dramatically improved color accuracy of this new design is going to revolutionize the capabilities of LCD projector solutions."

Only one downside – the first model, due on the Japanese market this autumn, will cost you 1.89m yen, or about £9000.

But that's just for starters – trickledown effect, anyone...?

You can do a lot with statistics, but some fairly convincing market research suggests Blu-ray Disc players are selling faster than DVD machines did in the early days of that format, and predicting some 45m BD players will be in use in Europe by 2011.

After a slow start in the first year of its availability, with just 1000 players sold in Europe in 2006 (against around 3000 DVD players in 1997), Blu-ray Disc take-up is accelerating ahead of DVD, with 10m players expected to be in use by the end of this year, according to research company Futuresource Consulting. By DVD year 3, 1999, there were just 1.58m players in use.

By the time DVD had been on sale for six years, there were 37m players in European homes, the research shows, whereas the installed base for BD machines is expected to be 45.42m by 2011.

All of that will come as some relief to those who'd been holding their collective breath once the Blu-ray Disc/HD-DVD 'format war' was resolved in favour of BD, and who'd been worrying that the slow sales to date hadn't been about format confusion, but the result of customer disinterest in HD disc formats.

Or, more to the point, mainstream customer satisfaction with the quality already available on DVD.

If Blu-ray Disc doesn't fly now that the HD-DVD rival has been seen off, then the proponents of BD will have a severe problem on their hands.

However, there is one shudder-inducing comment in the report, at least for those of us who still value musical ability in our systems, and it comes from the company's much-quoted MD of Corporate Development. Jim Bottoms.

"Longer term, as player prices continue to fall, title availability grows and awareness increases, BD players will become the product of choice – given the fact that they also play DVD and CD media," he says.

And here comes the killer: "There will come a time when the branded suppliers focus on this higher capacity drive, mirroring the trend we saw with DVD players replacing CD decks."

Do you want to tell him, or shall I?
 

It was a simple clerical error, the kind we've all made at some time or another. A tick in the wrong box, an extra zero on the expenses claim – well, that's my excuse – or a form not filled out properly.

Except in this case, it's the reason why a chain of stores in the Pacific Northwest of the USA is now stocking vinyl LPs again - and by all reports doing rather nicely with them.

It seems an employee of the Fred Meyers chain, which sells everything from food to clothes and electronics, meant to order the special CD/DVD edition of REM's Accelerate album, but instead entered the code for the LP edition. Before long, boxes of LPs started arriving at the stores, and while some managers sent them back, others put them out for sale – and 20 discs were sold on the first day of release.

As a result, the chain is now trialling LP sales in around 60 of its stores in Oregon, Washington and Alaska, and says it's so pleased with the response that it's planning to extend the policy to all of its stores next month.

Apparently the top seller so far is The Beatles' Abbey Road, but discs from the likes of the White Stripes, the Foo Fighters Metallica and Pink Floyd are also selling well, the company says.

So is this the beginning of a major boom for the LP? Don't hold your breath – while US shipments of LPs to the shops were up 36% last year, and set for a similar rise this year, with CD sales dropping around 17 per cent last year, there's still some ground to make up.

Last year around 450m CDs were sold, and the most optimistic estimates suggest 2008 LP sales will be just short of two million.