We liked Panasonic's focus on HDTV solutions, and their first progressive DVD player. We also liked the concept devices shown for use with Panasonic's new SD flash memory format, as well as their portable DVD player lineup.

Overall it was an excellent show for Panasonic, and 2000 should wind up being just as impressive in terms of sales for the company.

All first generation DVD players that have been sold worldwide over the past three years offer a maximum onscreen resolution of 480i, or 480 lines, interlaced.

At this year's CES however it became clear that the year 2000 heralds the dawn of the next evolutionary step in film-like visual quality for the home, and it comes in the form of DVD Progressive Scan, or 480p.

In order to understand the improvement that 480p progressive scan DVD video offers, it's first necessary to examine the history of interlaced video, which has been the traditional method of delivering a picture to a television set thus far.

With interlaced video, half the scanning lines of a complete NTSC broadcast picture are displayed in the first 1/60th of each second, while the other half of the lines are displayed in the next 1/60th of a second.

Complete video images are created by rapidly displaying two distinct fields of information in succession. In the first 60th of a second, the electron beam used to create the picture scans all odd lines (1, 3, 5, 7, 9…) on the screen. On the next pass, the electron beam scans all even lines (2, 4, 6, 8, 10…).

The end result of this interlacing technique is the creation of a completed frame of picture information with every two fields scanned. In total, NTSC broadcast Video is made up of 60 fields or 30 complete frames displayed every second.

interlaced video has a number of technical shortcomings including image flicker and visible scan lines. Due to the limitations of the analog NTSC format, it hasn't been possible to display a progressive scan TV image from any source until the recent advent of today's digital video and display devices.