Last January, at the Annual Las Vegas Consumer Electronics show, a handful of companies announced and displayed a variety of High Definition displays running at the once-futuristic native resolution of 1080p. They were not the first to do so; super-premium niche displays had been available at extreme prices for years, and Sharp Electronics had been marketing a high-end 45″ LCD display with that same native resolution for months.

What made the new displays at CES notable was that they were intended to sell in volume at the same prices as the currently available 1280p models of similar size. In other words, these new models are intended to mainstream native 1080p displays; a pretty tall order at a time when even true 720p content is far from common and the content in native 1080p can be easily listed on a few sheets of paper.

One of the displayed models in particular drew skeptical looks because of the listed specs, the pricing, and the source: Westinghouse Digital was promising to deliver by mid-2005 a 37″ 1080p LCD display for under $2500, the same price-point of its previous 32″ 720p offering.

[Read A Harbinger of Things to Come: Westinghouse's LVM-37W1 LCD TV]

[tags]digital media thoughts,ces 2006,lvm-37w1,westinghouse,1080p[/tags]