Amir's CES 2015 Report and Picture Thread

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The 2015 CES show turned out to be quite fascinating. I almost did not go as I am tired of just seeing walls of flat panels with no price or availability and not much else. But after getting asked to meet with some old friends/colleagues, I decided to go and I am super happy I went.

This year the show lived up to its name: Consumer Electronics Show. Electronics being a general category and not just TVs. There is a massive new transformation going on with new category devices. On top of that is the so called "IoT" or Internet of Things (see http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showthread.php?15585-IOTs-the-next-tech-buzzword-you-should-know). There were tons of new companies fueled by the golden pot of getting rich from Google buying you for insane amount of money as they did for Nest, and Facebook for Oculus. Just 2-3 years ago no one would even talk to you if asked them money for a hardware start-up. Now it is the hottest thing.

IoTs are helped by massive price reduction of components due to their use in smartphones and tablets. Sensors of all kinds are now tiny, power efficient and cheap. Not yet thought out is how to bring order to them all but the movement is afoot in a big way.

Other nascent categories are also on the rise. 3-D printers are getting more serious and Drones are getting seriously cool.

Another new and major category is automobile tech. Major auto makers from BMW to Audio and Ford where there showing their latest innovations. Self-driving cars getting more real every day. Audio had a car self-drive itself from San Francisco to Las Vegas. And lots of electronics bleeding into the dash.

Microsoft, Apple and Google still absent from the show. Intel has stuck in there although I can’t help but feel sorry for the small role they play in this new universe.

Of note, tablets are yesterday’s news. The category has lost its luster although it remains a staple of the industry of course.

As to the TV guys, they are lost in the woods. They seem to have no idea what to do. One year they bring out this technology and the next they kill it, only to bring it back the next. They seem to not know what sells above commodity TVs. Good example is the Sony “Quantum Dot” technology which is a layer between the TV’s LED backlight and the LCD panel. It sharply increases the gamut or the range of colors the TV can display. Other companies are now copying them and including their version of it in their set.

For another example, Samsung has pulled way back on OLED and focused back on LCDs. Fortunately LG is hanging in there with OLED, producing the best images at the show. It is jaw-dropping to see blacks that are truly black and contrast out of this world. All the other sets and their features seem gimmicky to me in comparison. This year we should be able to see flat OLED displays from LG.

Back to Samsung, they have unfortunately bet the farm on Curved display. It is now part of their “design language” and the booth droid have been told it is Curved or nothing. They have absolutely gone insane on this.

I was sold though on one application of curved displays: computer monitors. It seemed so natural for ultra-wide computer monitors to be curved. This also allowed for breathtaking displays when 2 or 3 were combined together. Games would be in heaven. I especially liked the LG. While I did not see it, Dell also is the first to bring an ultra-high resolution curved 34 inch curved monitor to market. Retail is just $1,200 and I hear one can find coupons that bring it well under $1000. I need to get one!

Windows computers are getting better. I did not focus on them but the Dell XPS 13 is getting a lot of buzz with its power efficiency (15 hour of battery life?) and thin bezel display. Powered by a new Intel processor, Broadwell, they are more efficient and higher performance than before. Dell beat Apple to the gate with this new processor. Likely Apple will replace the Macbook Air with the same processor soon.

There were also cool appliances. OK, appliances and cool don’t go together . But it is cool to see a closet which refreshes your cloths while they hang there (LG). Or washers that can wash two things at once.

Overall, I say you better start saving your money as there is a lot more electronics in your future home than there is today.

Here are some images I took. I took my DSLR camera this year and it was a lot easier to capture images with it. All the pictures are using my full-frame Canon 5D with my 24-105 F4 IS zoom lens, shot in all cases wide open at F4. ISO is 800 or 1600.

 

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As I mentioned, cars were a big deal. Here is Nvidia showing off Full graphics dash display in Audi:

And this muscle electric car going for a cool $530,000!

 

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I did not have time to take pictures of all the droids out there. But here is a quick sampling:

Here is a robot arm that is scanning a 3-d object. Pretty cool and necessary as it is far more precise than a human doing the same:

 

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I forget who had this absolutely cool display of old typewriters but they were truly works of art:

This one is just stunning:

 

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You know I am always thinking of what gift to get Steve for his birthday. As you can imagine, the man has everything and then some. Yet I managed to find two things that he will love. This is one of them:

Here is an app for his iPad that walks him through baking. He will be able to eat well forever!

 

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You may have read my post on company Seek Thermal and their little USB device that plugs into the tablet or phone and turns it into an Infrared camera. Well, the #1 company in that market could not sit still and is bringing out its version of that later this year. Sadly the resolution is still much lower but hopefully the fidelity is better. I have the Seek Thermal camera and will post a review of that soon.

What caught my eye though was a cute little touchscreen Flir IR unit that looks like a pocket digital camera:

It was light, rugged and very nice to use. Unfortunately it also retails for $700.

 

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Here is what happens when facebook throws more money at your feet than the GDP of some nations:

Virtual Reality is well, getting more real finally. I really wanted to go and try it but you couldn't pay me enough to stick that thing on my face after a few thousand other people had done the same!

 

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Here are some images from the LG booth.

Every flat company was claimed "first this and first that." I lost tack. Here is LG's "first:"

 

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4K/UHD video services tricking in. The GoPro was the best. The rest were a yawn with soft pictures and compression artifacts (although better than last year):

Ouch!

 

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Here are the gorgeous LG curved computer monitors:

You could look like you are making money from the stock market even if you are not!

This is gamer heaven or what?

Freesync is the technology that finally catches up with the fact that LCD displays are persistent and don't lose their image between updates. So there is no reason to run them like the old CRTs. This new interface makes high frame rate games look better (no tearing):

 

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Some of those cool appliances I was talking about:

 

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LG watch:

The OLED display was very nice and scrolling/touch responsiveness excellent. Almost made me want to get one. Not!!!

 

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Bob Marley's estate is now into headphones:

Pretty cool looking and in the style of the man to be sure.

 

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Tivo going nuts with storage in the DVR:

 

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Dish Network, the US DBS provider made huge headlines in offering a limited set of channels purely over the Internet. It was thought up to now that the cable companies would never let that happen. Well, it has. If you like sports and cooking, you can sign up and get a handful of live channels. There is no DVR capability but they do have some on-demand content:

Sorry about the shaky image but this is Dish's 4K player. It ran fairly warm but the box is tiny so you can hide it behind your flat panel if you wanted. Requires the main "hopper" DVR as the master:

 

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Intel was jumping into the bandwagon of using 3-d cameras to detect the position of your fingers. Here is a guy playing an imaginary piano:

It had some latency/delay but it was workable. Why anyone would go to Intel for such things though is beyond me.

 

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Speaking of Intel, they were showing a couple of IoTs with health sensors in them. One was a cool set of In-ear monitors that also measured your heartbeat. Cool thing was that that it did not require a better or power otherwise!

 

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Someone who is into cars has to tell us what this car was as I don't remember.

 

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Panasonic, Sony and Canon still pushing for 4K camcorders:

Neat electric bike Panasonic was showing:

And this start-up using Lithium battery packs:

Panasonic is Tesla's partner in batteries so no wonder that they had the new SUV on display. Neat but also very "plasticy"

 

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Neat factory that is being built by Tesla and Panasonic to produce more batteries:

Panasonic's supposedly 4K Blu-ray player:

It looked deader than a road kill. Clearly just an empty box doing nothing. The Panasonic demo guy later said it was supposed to come out in September but "don't hold your breath." I certainly am not.