Toshiba's flagship product at the Consumer Electronics Show last week was a television that used the powerful and exotic Cell processor (the computer chip used in the PlayStation 3 gaming console and powerful research computers) to achieve a number of unusual and impressive effects. Chances are you weren't able to take time out of your busy week to sneak into the Las Vegas Convention Center to see this thing for yourself, but don't worry —we've got you covered! Read on for our impressions.

Pictured directly below is an early prototype of a Cell-based computer that sits separately from the TV, but that communicates with it wirelessly. Using the Cell processor, the TV can do image enhancement effects on the fly that can normally only be done on a professional video workstation computer. With this system, it'll happen in your living room.

At 2160p, the TV is actually higher-resolution than the current 1080p standard. It uses the Cell to upscale the 1080p image to the TV's native resolution, just like an upscaling DVD player uses (much less) processing power to scale 480p DVDs to the 720p, 1080i, or 1080p resolution of your HDTV. Toshiba told us this technology can also be used to upscale everything from standard definition DVDs to web videos.

There's an arguably more fantastic benefit to this setup, too. There are enough pixels on the TV (which was 55 inches, by the way) to render four separate 1080p images at full resolution. To do that smoothly would require a a lot of processing power, though — more than any TV currently on the market has. But with the Cell, it's possible. We're not sure why you'd need to, but if you wanted to, you could watch four Blu-ray movies at once on the same screen at perfect quality. As many as 48 lower resolution images can be displayed at once, too.

The Cell-powered upscaling effect did have a noticable effect on image quality to our eyes, but it wasn't enough to floor us. We were more impressed with the splitscreen functionality. Toshiba hopes to release a retail package including a TV and the Cell computer this Fall, and plans to equip the TV with LED backlighting technology as well. If you see it, you'll be really impressed, but there's no way this comes cheap, so unless you just got a bonus for tens of thousands of dollars or won the lottery or a lucrative lawsuit, don't get your hopes up too much!