Mitsubishi to make a wireless HDTV
The TV maker hooks up with Amimon to offer a television that receives HD input via wireless HDI technology.
Mitsubishi will be joining the rarefied ranks (in TV anyway) of Sony and Samsung in offering wireless television.
Wireless chipmaker Amimon is set to announce Thursday that Mitsubishi will use its technology to send high-definition TV signals to its latest LCD TV without wires. It will come in 40-inch and 46-inch sizes. The 40-inch model will cost 300,000 yen (or $2,731), and the 46-inch model will sell for 400,000 yen ($3,642).
Mitsubishi's TV will have the chips embedded in the TV, and will come with a separate receiver unit that can send and receive uncompressed HD video signals up to 100 feet away. That means you can keep the receiver in a room downstairs or in a cabinet--no line of sight necessary.
Here's the catch--it's being released in Japan only this fall. However, it's likely Mitsubishi will broaden distribution of this TV. Wireless HD video is a category that Amimon--which heads a consortium of chipmakers and consumer electronics companies pushing for a whole-home wireless TV standard called Wireless HDI--and others have been talking up for a while.
But it's been a long time coming, and it will be even longer before this is a mainstream product category. Amimon said recently it sees that happening in three to five years.