Well, if you know anything about CES, you should know that there are a lot of television companies present (more than I could name to be honest). And with all of the new ideas being tossed around from booth to booth, I figured I’d recap a few hot topics that piqued my interest (in case you missed a few of these earlier in the blog).
1. 3D TV: First of all, everyone knew that this was the year of more widespread 3D entertainment. After seing small teasers at last year’s CES and now a slew of 3D movies and sporting events in the last year, this CES capped the first show where 3D was one of the top priorities of all television companies. Though we’re still a little skeptical as to whether it will be received as well as recent staples to the industry such as “High Definition” or Blu-rays, there is no doubt that just about everyone is tapping into the market. From 3D games at Capcom’s and Sony’s booths to multiple 3D televisions, projectors, and setups, I am still no more convinced of a widespread home theater phenomenon nor further enlightened by the idea than I was from the small showing of 3D at CES 2009. Having to wear a pair of glasses will always feel limiting to me and buying a new television just a few years after purchasing my 46″ Samsung seems unlikely.
2. Cell TV: Last year at CES, I remember visiting Toshiba and hearing about their Cell TV (that uses the Cell Processor from the PS3 to enhance its viewing) but I really didn’t know what to think about it. I mean, there wasn’t really anything spectacular that I took out from it other than having an immense amount of power to perform image enhancing software to optimize viewing. At CES 2010, however, I started to understand why this could be a huge leap for televisions. Seeing so many different ideas hit the table every year for what might make the next best thing, I realized how having a powerful processor within the TV itself could help to make it versatile enough to withstand some technological breakthroughs without becoming obsolete. For instance, the introduction of 3D viewing is no big deal as the processor can supposedly perform real time 2D-3D conversion on the fly. Having a built in Blu-ray player and terabyte hard drive seems a little overkill to me (just let me use the Cell Processor of my actual PS3 for this) but features such as 480Hz and a promised 4000×2000 resolution screen certainly whet my appetite.
3. QuadPixels: When Steve and I first got off the monorail at the convention center, we kind of chuckled at a sign by Sharp featuring a “fourth” pixel in their new QuadPixel televisions. Every geek knows that the Red, Blue, and Green are the primary additive colors used to produce all sorts of colors of light. Thus, Sharp would have us think that them adding in a new yellow pixel might help to give better natural colors to the yellow portion of the spectrum. After visiting the booth, we were quite surprised that the televisions looked absolutely beautiful and almost ashamed to have questioned the idea in the first place. This could be due to the ever increasing improvement of contrast schemes (and the televisions were indeed highly saturated) but nonetheless, these TVs were absouletely gorgeous. Unfortunately, they were a bit pricey as well.
4. OLEDs: This is another one of the technologies that blossomed this year after having a small, conceptual showing at last year’s CES. Now, every major television company boasted one but it was interesting to see the different uses for the technology. For one, the big screens had beautiful screens but were equally fun and amazing to look at from the side due to their sub centimeter thickness). The AMOLED (active matrix organic light emitting diode) televisions were absolutely beautiful and due to their lower power consumption, were used to create extremely small (something around 6″ diagonal and a few millimeters thick), high resolution, portable screens. Heck LG even had a water proof one (though we sarcastically kidded that everybody wants to bring their TV with them when they go swimming). If they can ever drop the price of these sleek, flexible, works of art, this could certainly revolutionize all aspects of technology (televisions, computing, mobile phones, etc, etc, etc).
