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100 entries.  20 finalists.  3 winners.  1 grand award.  And a confused girl.  You might be having a little chuckle over the confused girl part.  But I really am.

Of the 3,162 exhibitors at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair and all their acres of eye-popping electronics, how does a China Blue High-Definition (CBHD) player win the Grand Award and the Gold Award for Consumer Electronics in a competition as highly touted as the HKEIA Award for Outstanding Innovation and Technology?  Seriously?  The most amazing, can’t live without, new electronic of highest innovation in all the world is a CBHD player?

Half of you reading this are saying, what in the world is a CBHD player?  And I hope the rest of you are shaking your heads with me.

See?  I’m not the only one confused now.

CBHD vs. Blu-ray

CBHD emerged about a year ago in China as their presence in the world of HD media.  Players are just recently becoming available.  With HD DVD landing in the cemetery in February 2008, CBHD stands as Blu-ray’s only physical competitor and currently the only HD disk technology available in China as Blu-ray is only recently making attempts to enter that market.

Digital video downloading will probably surpass them both, but I guess it is in a class of its own. 

In cahoots?

The China High Definition DVD Industry Association could be in cahoots with HKEIA.  The head judge made a comment about the competition that really makes me wonder.
“Winners of the Award exhibit an outstanding degree of sophistication. . . . Buyers would pay more consideration on how product could be marketable in this challenging year and that’s why this year our panel put more emphasis on the market value of the entries.”

Seriously, unless it has voice recognition control or runs without batteries and electricity, how sophisticated can a disk player be? 

CBHD and the rest of the world

And marketable?  To where?  China?  Because I thought he meant internationally.  CBHD is going to have a rough go of it with Hollywood already jumping on the Blu-ray bandwagon and no studios hopping at the chance to put out in CBHD.

My argument is this – what does CBHD have to do with me?  Right now, and probably forever, it is only in Asia.  Will I ever even see one of these machines that are apparently so impressive they receive the such honors among a world of electronics?  A basically locally marketable product wins an award for the international market.

I guess if you are in China and you want to watch Chinese movies, the Shinco CBHD-9100 China Blue High-Definition Player might be your thing.  But for the rest of the world already addicted to Hollywood, we’ve got Blu-ray.

My realization: That’s what I should have expected from a Hong Kong association giving out awards at a Hong Kong-based trade show.

Read Gadgetell’s posting for the other winners.
Read HKEIA’s article about the competition.