A busy week is now nearing its close, as the crowds on the floor finally start to thin out. I’ll be going back shortly for a final presentation by NHK of its Super HD (I think that’s how they spell it), a technology which is said to project at 8K pixels. Not sure where that sort of res is valuable in today’s competitive marketplace, but perhaps NHK is just acting proactively, presenting the R&D that will be productized by its clients, the Japanese electronics manufacturers. A similar pattern came with the development of HDTV, which debuted at NAB and SMPTE shows decades before deployment.

Most recently, I stopped by the booth of the ever inventive folks at 1 Beyond, based in the Boston area. President Terry Cullen presented with pride the company’s latest unique products that should be delivering soon, including the HD Octoflex (an eight-processor workstation running under Windows XP) and IntelliRaid FC-XPR (16 SATA2 drives with dual 4-gigabit fibre channel connections).

I’ve found again and again at this show that some of the smallest, least heralded companies surprised me with breakthrough gear at affordable prices. (More on this in some follow up blogs and in our June NAB wrap-up issues.) Just to take the IntelliRaid as an example: the company implemented a new type of controller chip, and moved to dual PCI Express busses (most everyone still uses PCI-X as the connection to the motherboard) along with super secure Raid 6.

The result is a 16.2TB system that delivers more than 500MBps according to Cullen, while pricing around $15K, including warranties of five years on the drives. That’s amazing throughput at a great price that lured some of the top production houses around to check things out.

It’s been that kind of NAB.