Hi guys. Here is the start of my CES report. This was fraught with technical difficulties as far as “reporting.” The first day I got there the battery in my camera died after a few shots. It said it was 100% full before I left :-(. Usually it gets me through a show like this without remotely needing charge so I did not bring the charger with me. Had to buy a $25 one at Fry’s. But cost me $40 for the taxi ride and half hour wait in line at the hotel to get there for a total of $64. Could have almost bought a new camera for that! 
The bigger problem was the wireless at my hotel. It was super flakey. Argued with their support line and they kept promising to fix it but nothing happened for the duration of my trip. So here I am, at the airport, starting to upload my files and linking them here.
Anyway, back to the show. This thread is about the main hall which is usually video intensive given that all the major companies hang out there. As you may know, Bill Gates/Microsoft for the first time pulled out of CES. That seemed to have a big impact on the show. Bill Gates keynotes were a huge draw, with lines around the block. I doubt anyone lined up for the crew they had here instead this time. Added to this was the Japanese companies seriously scaling back. Panasonic booth was a fraction of its usual size. Ditto for Sony. Sharp seemed to not be that much smaller but also lacked buzz. LG and Samsung tried to fill the gap with massive booths with lots of traffic. Not enough to fill the vacuum though. Clearly space was auctioned at low prices as there were tons of Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean companies where there would normally be major companies you would recognize by name. Here is a shot showing how the Chinese company TCL had taken two thirds of what used to be Panasonic’s last year booth:
I usually take two days to do the main/South halls but due to above, I got bored two thirds into the first day!
The major theme for this show as expected was higher resolution/larger/OLED displays. I won’t rehash all the press releases which all the other rags have done. But let me clue you into an exclusive: there were a ton of smoke and mirrors. Almost without exception, every display had serious manufacturing flaws. Dead pixels abound, some so serious that it looked like pieces were literally missing from the display! In one case, I saw the dreaded vertical panel joint meaning to get the larger size, they had pieced smaller units together and the seam was showing. All of these problems need to get resolved to get real products for manufacturing. So I suspect the timelines for some of these displays is quite long, and/or pricing very high as they manually sort through them to find working units/ones that can be repaired.
Here is an example of this kind of flaw:
See the black spot in the top right quadrant? That is a dead pixel and a giant one at that. Remarkable how obvious it was, and how oblivious people are to them as I have not seen anyone report it.
Moving on Nvidia announced a new Android based game console. It looks as ugly as its name, “Project Shield:”
I guess there was be a huge shortage of competent marketing people to have come up with that name. And every industrial design company must have been closed on the day they decided on creating this cheap looking device. I say good luck to them, competing with their traditional device customers….
In the south hall I ran into this product that is a headphone that works through bone conduction:
It made it very comfortable to wear. Sadly, it had no lows or highs. If you stuck your fingers in your ear, then you got huge amount of ugly bass. The thing had won a bunch of awards so it was probably me, being grumpy after seeing the above Nvidia product. The company name is Aftershockz in case you are interested (and I was in using while exercising).
This company had an integrated system where they would measure how you were biking and then synchronize it to streaming video from their site. Seemed well done for someone like me who has never looked at products like this:
Multiple people could race the same route and you could see your position relative to theirs and such.
DTS was showing a simplified headphone surround virtualizer, ala Smyth Research. It was called “Headphone X.” They did a demo in a theater first with 11.1 speaker configuration. Then they repeated the same with just an ordinary pair of headphones. The first demo was startlingly good: they did the usual speaker identification track where each speaker announces its location and type (“Left Height”). I was getting ready for something really good. But it was not to come. They played a movie and the dialog was very strange as it did not seem to at all come from the center front. Same thing happened with the next movie clip. The virtualization was heavy on rear, but almost nonexistent in the front. I think they shot too high and missed. Another natural problem was lack of bass of course. Without a sub the special effects were extremely lackluster. Strange that they would pick material that focused so much on that. This was a prototype so hopefully they dial out the issues in it.
Here is the shot of the speaker ID track:
And the headphone:
As expected all the CE companies had 4K displays which they now call Ultra HD. A better name if you ask me as “4K” was wrong anyway. TV resolutions use vertical resolution. 1080p has 1920 horizontal pixels. A 4X more pixel display would have been 2016p and not “4k.” Here is Toshiba’s take on Ultra HD:
Realizing that there is no “4K” content, the marketing departments in these companies were busy inventing new names for what is simply upscaling. You can see Toshiba’s name above. Here is their brochure on that:
They also showed this interesting, super wide screen laptop:
While I was there, I spotted Steve’s dream car:
Canon was there and the only thing that was interesting to me was this cut away of super telephoto lens:
The bigger problem was the wireless at my hotel. It was super flakey. Argued with their support line and they kept promising to fix it but nothing happened for the duration of my trip. So here I am, at the airport, starting to upload my files and linking them here.
Anyway, back to the show. This thread is about the main hall which is usually video intensive given that all the major companies hang out there. As you may know, Bill Gates/Microsoft for the first time pulled out of CES. That seemed to have a big impact on the show. Bill Gates keynotes were a huge draw, with lines around the block. I doubt anyone lined up for the crew they had here instead this time. Added to this was the Japanese companies seriously scaling back. Panasonic booth was a fraction of its usual size. Ditto for Sony. Sharp seemed to not be that much smaller but also lacked buzz. LG and Samsung tried to fill the gap with massive booths with lots of traffic. Not enough to fill the vacuum though. Clearly space was auctioned at low prices as there were tons of Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean companies where there would normally be major companies you would recognize by name. Here is a shot showing how the Chinese company TCL had taken two thirds of what used to be Panasonic’s last year booth:
I usually take two days to do the main/South halls but due to above, I got bored two thirds into the first day!
The major theme for this show as expected was higher resolution/larger/OLED displays. I won’t rehash all the press releases which all the other rags have done. But let me clue you into an exclusive: there were a ton of smoke and mirrors. Almost without exception, every display had serious manufacturing flaws. Dead pixels abound, some so serious that it looked like pieces were literally missing from the display! In one case, I saw the dreaded vertical panel joint meaning to get the larger size, they had pieced smaller units together and the seam was showing. All of these problems need to get resolved to get real products for manufacturing. So I suspect the timelines for some of these displays is quite long, and/or pricing very high as they manually sort through them to find working units/ones that can be repaired.
Here is an example of this kind of flaw:
See the black spot in the top right quadrant? That is a dead pixel and a giant one at that. Remarkable how obvious it was, and how oblivious people are to them as I have not seen anyone report it.
Moving on Nvidia announced a new Android based game console. It looks as ugly as its name, “Project Shield:”
I guess there was be a huge shortage of competent marketing people to have come up with that name. And every industrial design company must have been closed on the day they decided on creating this cheap looking device. I say good luck to them, competing with their traditional device customers….
In the south hall I ran into this product that is a headphone that works through bone conduction:
It made it very comfortable to wear. Sadly, it had no lows or highs. If you stuck your fingers in your ear, then you got huge amount of ugly bass. The thing had won a bunch of awards so it was probably me, being grumpy after seeing the above Nvidia product.
The company name is Aftershockz in case you are interested (and I was in using while exercising).This company had an integrated system where they would measure how you were biking and then synchronize it to streaming video from their site. Seemed well done for someone like me who has never looked at products like this:
Multiple people could race the same route and you could see your position relative to theirs and such.
DTS was showing a simplified headphone surround virtualizer, ala Smyth Research. It was called “Headphone X.” They did a demo in a theater first with 11.1 speaker configuration. Then they repeated the same with just an ordinary pair of headphones. The first demo was startlingly good: they did the usual speaker identification track where each speaker announces its location and type (“Left Height”). I was getting ready for something really good. But it was not to come. They played a movie and the dialog was very strange as it did not seem to at all come from the center front. Same thing happened with the next movie clip. The virtualization was heavy on rear, but almost nonexistent in the front. I think they shot too high and missed. Another natural problem was lack of bass of course. Without a sub the special effects were extremely lackluster. Strange that they would pick material that focused so much on that. This was a prototype so hopefully they dial out the issues in it.
Here is the shot of the speaker ID track:
And the headphone:
As expected all the CE companies had 4K displays which they now call Ultra HD. A better name if you ask me as “4K” was wrong anyway. TV resolutions use vertical resolution. 1080p has 1920 horizontal pixels. A 4X more pixel display would have been 2016p and not “4k.” Here is Toshiba’s take on Ultra HD:
Realizing that there is no “4K” content, the marketing departments in these companies were busy inventing new names for what is simply upscaling. You can see Toshiba’s name above. Here is their brochure on that:
They also showed this interesting, super wide screen laptop:
While I was there, I spotted Steve’s dream car:
Canon was there and the only thing that was interesting to me was this cut away of super telephoto lens:
