I have been lucky enough to have avoided the worst of the UK weather and escape to this year’s CES show. Although this is a consumer event many of the products do resonate with the commercial world therefore I thought it worthwhile giving you a few of the highlights.
3D was by far the most talked about and visible area with most major brands featuring products. The majority based round glasses but companies such as Samsung showing a ‘glasses free’ solution suited mainly for advertising. It seems that 3D will be a standard option on TV and Blu Ray in the medium term and be available on high end models this year.
The next most obvious area was the step change in the focus on content provision across TV. Many brands were talking about internet delivered applications including home video conferencing via Skype on your home TV set. We see VC growing steadily in the commercial market, if consumers get used to being able to do video calls easily (and cheaply) at home they will demand this option at work. As for the rest of the applications the push is to make your TV a truly connected enabling access to applications like your I-Phone and even to stream from products like I-Player.
LED was seen in two main areas. There was a whole load of really nice PICO projectors, still not very bright but getting better and finding a market place. A real step change came from Casio with an LED/Laser 3000 ANSI Hybrid which seems to have jumped ahead of the market where the next best LED I saw was 1000 ANSI. I am sure we will hear a lot more about LED at ISE! This area seems to be accelerating more quickly than I believed.
The second LED focus is with TV with some fantastic units from Samsung, Sharp, LG and others. These sets only appeared last year however already they deliver stunning image quality combined with real benefits. These are now being introduced into the commercial market where ultra thin format, negligible heat emission and very low power consumption are all hugely desirable features.
I have to mention a really cool product from Black Berry which enables you to present via Blue Tooth from your Black Berry to a projector or monitor. It works really well and if you combine with a Pico Projector you have a really compact portable presentation solution without the need for a Notebook.
So these are a few of the many highlights, if CES is anything to go by ISE will have some real step change products which are market changing – can’t wait.
