There were a couple of "dream come true" moments at the NAB show in April ... but you have to realize how much is related to the dreamer.

For Mark Schubin, our technical editor, it was probably the Sarnoff Test Pattern, with its moving zone plate, lip-sync monitor, chroma subsampler, frame-drop field and loss-of-edge indicator. (You can read about the Test Pattern in his Research & Developments column here.)

For our Vidy Awards judges, the dream products included Field Emission Technologies' nano-Spindt Field Emission Display, Laird Telemedia's LairdShareHD workgroup media server and storage solution, and Panasonic's AJ-HPX3700, a 2/3-inch P2 HD camera designed on the imaging technology of the company's VariCam line. (You can read all about the winning technologies here.)

And NAB was a dream if you're interested in 3D production and post (advances from Quantel, Iconix, HP, REAL D, Silicon Imaging, PACE, Philips and many others), content protection (KDDI R&D Labs' system for detecting copyrighted material), solid-state recording (new cameras and camera systems from Sony, Panasonic and JVC, as pictured on the cover), or 4K production (products including the S.two iDock 4, Codex Digital Portable Recorder, RED Digital Cinema RED RAY and Vision Research CineMag, as well as cameras such as the RED Epic 5K camera, Sony F35 and Vision Research Phantom 65).

Our full NAB coverage is online, but we tried to focus less on dreams and more on reality.

NAB 2008 Wrap Up: Editing and Post, by Oliver Peters

NAB 2008 Wrap Up: Cameras and Lenses, by Carl Mrozek