Long day ahead
I tried to do all the South Hall this day. There are the most interesting and numerous stands.
Panasonic keynote
Beside the bu*****t marketing, there were a few good innovations that gave the tone to the whole CES:
- Bigger screens
- HD 1080p and more everywhere
- Wireless technologies inside the components
- Easier to use for everyone, software is important
- Huge future market for more products
Best things
Computers
Dell and HP are fighting in a couple of different ways. One of them is the gaming systems. Dell Alienware and HP Blackbird/Voodoo where difficult to avoid at the entry of the southern hall up-stage.
This was pretty interesting since neither nVidia nor ATI came to the CES. A few innovations were present and tested, but this was mainly already seen things. This was the first time I had seen a triple SLI in action.
Those machines are way too expensive and consume too much power, but I can understand those as a vitrine technologique.
Sound
The sound was honored by all the stands.
Creative was one of the most visible, with a pretty big stand, and focusing on high-market, gamer market and quality stereo headphones.
iRiver, my beloved Cowon and most of the big players were here.
A lot of the stands that weren’t focused on sound had some loud volume too to attract tourists :D.
Home Cinema
The CES is the paradize of TVs.
Almost every stand had hundred of huge HD TV, using Plasma or LCD (Samsung and sharp being the master of LCD, Panasonic of Plasma), but all displaying 1080p or 4k streams, using 120hz (or even 240hz for TI). A lot of stands had motion algorithm for image and compression compensation.
So high quality, LCD getting better and better, content quality, compensation and HD everywhere.
New codecs for home cinema: DTS Master Audio, H264 High profile, Dolby TrueHD are the clear winners. I haven’t seen a lot of VC-1 nor all the intermediate dts and dolby codecs.
I have tried a few 3D displays which seems to be interesting and working. I am not sure they will be in my living-room tomorrow…
Multimedia
I have spend some time on the DivX, RealNetwork, Gracenote, MusicIP stands. They seem to make the most money on CE integration and services for manufacturer and on music platform for consumer than anything else.
I didn’t thought that before.
Streaming
Every storage manufacturer has a media server, every wifi, sound or codec company have their home media center to stream everything to the TV. And some are using VLC.
Storage
Flash everywhere, SSD, Hybrid disks, and miniSD cards of 32GB were on the top of the CES.
Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD. Unfortunately, Blu-Ray has clearly won the CES2008 battle. Consumers will loose. :'(
2008 might be the year of the SSD ?