Panasonic is the most well known branded name of a large Japanese consumer electronic company known as Matsushita. The Matsushita consumer electronics family includes Panasonic, Technics, and Quazar, as well as a host of other smaller less known companies.
MZ-R90 Recorder: Last, yet certainly not least, Sony displayed their smallest, lightest portable player/recorder for their struggling MiniDisc audio format at CES, and to those who were capable of appreciating the diminutive unit, the small device was a hit.
In terms of overall gross sales volume, Matsushita/Panasonic is the largest consumer electronics company on the planet, dwarfing number two company Sony by several billion dollars in gross sales each year.
It wasn't surprising to us then that Panasonic's CES booth was the size of a city block this year, taking up the entire front portion of the Las Vegas Convention Center from nearly one end to another.
The theme of Panasonic's 2000 CES booth was "The Panasonic Digital Vision, A New Vision for a New Era".
This theme was apparent in the multi-segmented Panasonic booth, as everything from 2.4GHz phones to Secure Digital memory card-devices were presented. Even ex-Baywatch star Pamela Anderson Lee stopped by the Panasonic booth during CES to help promote their new digital VCR, the point subliminally hammered home that the "live pause" and "slow-motion replay" features of the Panasonic digital recorder are ideal for those special Baywatch slow-motion running-on-the-beach scenes....
But we digress.
Let's begin our Panasonic CES 2000 coverage with their massive HDTV introductions.
SD Flash Memory Cards: Sony and Panasonic tend to go together like oil and water or the NFL's New Orleans Saints and the Super Bowl.
When one moves in a certain direction, the other moves the opposite way.
Panasonic Secure Digital Memory Card Display
It's been this way for years, with consumers always caught in the middle waiting for the prevailing format to win, thereby forcing the other company to adopt the same format.
At this year's CES show, Panasonic fired the opening shot in what is likely to be a protracted battle over what memory storage format consumers are going to use for their digital cameras, MP3 players, camcorders, and PCs.
Sony has their Memory Stick, and now Panasonic has their "Secure Digital Memory Cards" or "SD Memory Cards" for short.
Truly the size of a postage stamp with the thickness of a credit card, the SD memory cards are easily the smallest storage medium announced to date, including Compact Flash cards, Smart Media cards, and Sony's Memory Stick.