Toshiba Announces New CELL REGZA 55X1 HDTV

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Toshiba has a new high-end LCD HDTV for us and it’s coming with some amazing features. The CELL REGZA 55X1 HDTV will boast a 55-inch LED-backlit panel, the Cell Broadband Engine capable of offering up to 8 simultaneous time-shift channels, 5,000,000:1 contrast ratio, 240Hz refresh and DVR recording.

Well look what I did there! I have thrown some nicely arranged specs at you hoping to impress you. And I have a feeling that I have succeeded! So let’s take things slow and really explore this CELL REGZA HDTV. Before thinking about features we have to concentrate on Toshiba’s CELL platform which brings this beast to life. The platform itself is a “combination of the high speed parallel processing of the Cell Broandband Engine 2” which basically means that you will be able to enjoy a much better image quality but that’s not enough to describe its performance!

The display is split in 512 distinct LED areas and each one offers individual controlled lightning capable of offering you a brightness balance that will improve your whole TV watching experience. The most important feature this improved CELL platform brings to the table is the capability to record up to 26 hours of programming for up to 8 channels. That way you won’t miss your favorite shows even if they are all scheduled at the same time on different channels. The whole thing is possible thanks to a 3TB hard disk drive. Two thirds of that hard drive are dedicated to the time-shift machine powered by the CELL platform and described before. That takes DVR recording to a whole new level, wouldn’t you agree?

The CELL REGZA is made of a slim monitor and a tuner which incorporates the 3TB hard drive. We talked about the drive so it’s time to inspect the display! The LED-backlit display delivers a 5,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, a 240Hz refresh rate and a brightness of 1250cd/m2 which is about 2.5 times higher than regular TVs. All this talk makes me want to drop everything I’m doing and go grab a movie and some popcorn. Unfortunately the 55-inch CELL REGZA HDTV isn’t available just yet as it’s coming to Japan only in December. Pricing details haven’t been announced but we can safely assume these kind of features are coming with a higher price tag than usual.

And just to be even clearer, the REGZA comes with YouTube support, full HD browser support based on Opera browser, JPEG pictures display support, Broadband service and DLNA support which makes this HDTV a very connected gadget ready to become the star of your home theater setup. Are you impressed now?