The final installment of our epic two-part show coverage of the CEATEC show in Tokyo has pics and words on things you can’t even imagine.

Ok, you can probably imagine them. Even thinner LCD and plasmas, the next generation of processing, and apparently the next big thing in Blu-ray: VHS!

Sharp

In addition to the thin LCDs that they unveiled at CEDIA last month, Sharp also had extensive displays of solar panels, a market where they have considerable market share.

Solar panels themselves are nothing new, but Sharp was touting their transparent solar panels. Now I admit I don’t exactly cover what’s new and exciting in the solar panel world, but I had never heard that you could do transparent solar panels. They had a few models of where they see these types of panels working, like as office building windows and such. Pretty cool

They also had some really bright LED lighting, to take the place of florescent lighting in office/industrial areas. Don’t expect them in your home any time soon, as each bank of lighting was around $2,500. For comparison, two florescent tubes for the same space would be about $8.

Blu-ray VHS Combo

Yep, you read that right. Sharp showed off their BD-HDV22, a combo Blu-ray, hard-drive, and VHS deck. It’s Japan market only, but not only was it not their only one, but they weren’t the only company that is making this type of product. Here’s Panasonic’s:

Hitachi

Among a booth of many cool looking LCD bezels that I’m sure we’ll never see in the US, was a new scaling method that Hitachi is calling “Super Resolution Picture Enhancement.” Not much detail (pun intended) was given, but the demo was quite impressive. It was a standard split screen demo where the left side was standard upconverting and the right hand side was this new “SRPE.” I have to say, the demo was quite surprising in how good they were able to make the SD look. Who knows what was going on with the demo, but I’m looking forward to seeing more about this in the future. It’s hard to tell from images, but here’s a few anyway.

Panasonic 3Dⁱ Part II

I discussed Panasonic’s 3D plasma in the last installment, but I was able to find out some more information, and it’s a lot cooler than I originally thought. The 3D TV is just part of this idea. Panasonic wants to help create the entire 3D system, starting with the disc all the way to the display.

Now we’ve heard this kind of thing before, but Panasonic’s approach has the added benefit of using almost all current technology.

The way Panasonic is approaching the 3D is for full resolution HD frames, alternating for each eye. Most other methods are half-resolution per eye. The demo at the show was 120 Hz, as in a full 60p per eye. On the future consumer product, they are saying it could be 24p per eye on the disc, converted to 60i (per eye) for a total of 60p. Now those numbers should all look familiar. They’re what’s already possible with Blu-ray (though doubtless you’ll need a new “3D” player). Because of the beauty of how the current video codecs work, the additional “second eye” information would only add 50% more data on the disc. Knowing all this makes the possibility of 3D in the home a lot more possible, as it would only require slight modifications on the media/transmission side from what we have now.

Here are a few more random pics from the show.

ABOVE: Those tiny green spots are demos of a heads-up field-emmision display. These things are bright.

BELOW: I have no idea what this is. Where does it go? Is this that thing from Time Cop?

If you want to check out more, our friends over at Big Picture Big Sound have also done a show report, including a picture of me that I am not the least bit embarrassed about.