This morning, HCC and sister magazine What Satellite & Digital TV stopped by Toshiba's Tokyo headquarters to see the long-awaited Cell Regza TV.

The 55in TV will go on sale in Japan this month, and is powered by the same Cell superchip found inside the Playstation 3, tasked with a range of picture improvements and multi-channel recording. It's paired with a brand new Toshiba-exclusive LED panel, and between them they knocked our socks off. Toshiba's TV group manager Yuichi Sekiguchi talked of stepping into the realm of high-end plasma, and it's not hyperbole. The levels of detail, brightness, contrast and colour are breathtaking for an LCD TV.

The Cell chip also helps to manage a staggering 15 tuners - it continually records all eight of Japan's digital terrestrial TV channels to a 3TB hard disc so there's always 26 hours of TV to choose from, and you can use the rest to record from satellite, analogue and digital terrestrial, and broadband streaming and on-demand. And it does home networked media as an afterthought.

It will sell for 100,000 Yen - roughly 10,000 GBP - so the UK version might not be quite so high end when it arrives (did we mention to fantastic soundbar speaker?), but it's bound to be amazing. At the very least, we've asked for the ultimate set-top box home media server - imagine picking your favourite Freeview or Freesat channels to be always at your fingertips?

Via Home Cinema Choice