The Japanese electronic giant, Sony, has brought to the federal capital its latest in the home entertainment and the most "mod groups" and managers of local dealers thronged the Shamadan of the Serene Hotel on Saturday morning to watch the new products and swing with throbbing rhythms.
In the latest, the manufacturers have put on display, are a flat LCD screens that can be attached to "media players" for DVDs' cassettes or TV receivers, flat projection televisions from 53" to flat screened television sets from 38" to 25 inches.
All are equipped with hi-fi sound system, and most can be accessed by DVD and wide mode sources. Several have the tele-text facility in Arabic, English and French.
Those were showing films from discs or cassettes, quality wise, the LCD despite its relatively smaller size than the huge TVs described as "Vega Theatre" had a composite grain and brighter colours. The 007 of yesteryears, Sean Connery and the beard of a villain opposite him in a feature film appeared stretched on the Vega's mega screen.
The presence of a slimmer screen showed that the LCD technology has come a long way from the mini-screened televisions, a Japanese electronic pioneers, Casio had built in wrist-watches or hand-held battery operated two to four inches televisions one could carry on the palm outdoors.
It also proves that the Japanese engineers have broken through the tightly-protected secret behind four-inch thick wall-hanging television developed by British inventor, Sir Clive Sinclair, over two decades ago, but had failed to mass-produce for want of liquidity.
After starting from Karachi early this month, the exhibition has travelled to Hyderabad and Quetta and after Sunday will move to Faisalabad and Multan.
It is titled "Live in Sony-2004" and has a variety of palm held digital movie and still cameras, portable DVD players, disc changers, and numerous accessories to the digital home theatre and mini and micro hi-fi systems, DVD walkmen and mini-disc players and, of course, for the lovers of computer games a variety of play stations.
The Sony catalogue though lists a number of computer peripherals like the flat screens and other accessories, those have not been put on exhibition for want of space.
In a nutshell, the exhibition was summed up by Sony's Tomohiro Nakashima San was "cool affair". He had flown from Dubai's regional management headquarters to accompany the exhibition.
In a brief chat with newsmen, Tomohiro confirmed that they had touch competition from the good unofficially brought into the country, but said those did not dishearten Sony to compete.
He also agreed the price-wise the Chinese products were causing difficulty to all the manufacturers, but they were still holding their ground.
The products on display, a Sony official said, were either locally-assembled or had been imported from Malaysia and Japan.