Toshiba Shows Cell TV By Mark Fleischmann October 9, 2009 — Toshiba's first TV based on the Cell microprocessor made its debut at a Japanese trade show this week. The DVR-capable product will hit the shelves in Japan later this year and will make its U.S. debut sometime next year.

Four years in the making, the Cell chip was developed by Toshiba, IBM, and Sony and is currently used in the PlayStation 3. It contains a single Power PC core and eight coprocessors.

Using the set's three-terabyte hard drive, the DVR function can use two-thirds of its space to record 26 hours simultaneously from eight channels (the number available in Tokyo). The other one-third of disc space can save other programming separately from the recording function. The Cell chip can also show up to eight channels on the same screen. The broadband-enabled set contains the Opera browser and is compatible with YouTube and DLNA networking.

The prototype shown at CEATEC, the Japanese trade show, was in a 50-inch Regza 55X1 LCD TV. Its LED backlighting covered 512 areas, pushing luminance to 2.5 the level of average LCDs. Toshiba also showed a 3D version of the new product, as did several other manufacturers at CEATEC, though it's worth noting that various standard-setting bodies have yet to come up with a unified 3D standard.

See coverage in TechWorld and This Week In Consumer Electronics.