No trip to CES is complete without stepping through the booth of a TV maker. Wandering around looking at gigantic TVs you’d have to build a house around is always a trip, and MiniLED panels and projectors as far as the eye can see always give you a sense as to not only how far the technological limits can be pushed, but just how few large blank areas of wall you actually have in your own home. In short, this is a very good opportunity to live vicariously for a few minutes in front of some of the largest and most glorious moving picture boxes you’ll see. Of course, sometimes there’s more — here’s what Hisense brought.
In one of its more impressive demos, Hisense brought what it’s calling the “First 8K Sonic Screen Laser TV in the World.” Now, there are a lot of caveats in that statement –”8K,” “Sonic Screen,” and “Laser” — but it’s the middle one that’s the most notable. Hisense has been known for selling “TVs” that are actually ultra-short-throw projectors with screens designed for optimal optical performance. That’s what this is, but Hisense goes a step further.
Here, the screen doubles as a speaker handling the high and mid-range audio, with a separate subwoofer handling the bass. That, in and of itself, is cool, but this screen almost creates a sort of sound bubble that helps drown out the sounds of the show floor around us and gives listeners an almost spatial audio experience. When a leaf fell from the tree and crinkled a little bit, you heard it coming from the left side of the screen. It was quite the experience.
