Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment

We already saw Panasonic’s 50-inch TH-50PZ80Q plasma doing the tru2way thing at CEDIA 2008, but the official lever has just been pulled in Denver and Chicago. As of today, Comcast’s tru2way platform is active in the aforesaid cities, and the very first tru2way-capable HDTVs are arriving to retail. Eager consumers in the Windy or Mile High City who are ready to ditch the set-top-box altogether without sacrificing VOD and such can polish off their wounded credit cards, as both a 42-inch (TH-42PZ80Q; $1,599.95) and 50-inch (TH-50PZ80Q; $2,999.95) VIERA plasma will be on sale by “late October.” As for the rest of the US anxious to dip in the cool, cool waters of tru2way? A few undisclosed locales should be going live with the service “in the coming months,” though your guess is as good as ours as to what exactly that means.

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Filed under: Displays, Home Entertainment

They said they were going to do it, and do it they did. While Samsung’s tru2way “demonstration” was barely more than a hack job used to show off what the technology was about, Panasonic demoed the real deal at its CEDIA booth. The 50-inch TH-50PZ80Q plasma contained a real CableCARD (yes, we checked) and was receiving a live signal from Comcast. Denver is just one of a few markets where tru2way is theoretically ready to rock, and according to a Panny rep, the set we saw today is a production unit that will ship sometime “later this year.” The idea here is to provide buyers with the ability to insert any CableCARD from any carrier (if you move, for example) into an HDTV, thus eliminating the cable company’s stranglehold (best known as a “carrier-issued set-top-box”) on you. The demo we saw went over very well — everything was responsive and image quality was excellent. See for yourself in the gallery at Engadget HD.

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