The most impressive act at HP's big Berlin event today came not from the company itself but from film company Dreamworks, which showed off three-dimensional versions of scenes from its new feature Kung-Fu Panda. HP has been heavily involved in developing technology for the animation which requires phenomenal computing power.

Dreamworks is not doing a 3D version of the full film but it did some scenes in 3D to show off a techology that it plans to use in future. We had to don Polaroid specs to get the effect and it was quite startling to find oneself flinching a virtual missiles that seemed to be coming straight at you. Incidentally the 2D version looked good too, but off course that requires only half the computing resources needed for 3D.

One result of the colloboration between HP and Dreamworks has been the HP Dream Colour display that can render a billion colours. It seems that the old CRT monitors reproduced colour a lot better than LCDs, which lack consistency across the screen because the lighting is not uniform. The two companies got together to do something about it.

The colour fidelity is obtained partly by using clusters of red, green and blue LEDs across the entire black plane to provide consistent lighting.

The display will cost $3499 in the US and Andy Bowden, manager of displays at HP, says it its is as good as specialist models costing between $15,000 and $20,000 (these details have been updated since this blog was first posted)..

One interesting factoid from the event came from Phil McKinney, chief technology officer of the personal systems group. He reckoned that if all the data held by every home PC were transmitted across the internet the task would take 11 months to complete. And ghe amount of data stored is rising exponentially. McKinney's conclusion is that we can't leave everything to the Internet. "We are always going to need some local storage," he said.