Panasonic is pushing the 3D TV boundary with its all-in-one Viera plasma panels featuring a built-in 3D Blu-ray player and digital video recorder. Out-of-the-box, the new RT2B-series is ready to play back 3D movies through a slot-in disc drive on its ultra-high 5 million:1 native contrast screen in full-HD fidelity. Its 500GB hard drive, on the other hand, records two HD channels simultaneously for up to 364 hours or nearly 15 days.
Inherited from the company's existing offerings is Skype support for making free international voice and video calls, as well as DLNA-compatibility to stream multimedia content over a home network. There's also its proprietary Advanced NeoPDP, which delivers four times the luminance efficiency compared with past models. A 42- and 46-incher are due in Japan on August 27 at US$4,487 and US$5,060, respectively.
No details on pricing and availability were given for other Asian markets. Note that these panels will still require 3D glasses to view the additional dimension, though they now come in three sizes and are rechargeable via USB. Another new addition is 2D-to-3D conversion.
