CES Takes High-Tech to Next Level

From the home theater to deep space, annual show has it all

By CEN Staff

As the annual Consumer Electronics Show introduces thousands of new products to vast throngs of gadget dealers and techno-journalists, your team of crack observers from Consumer Electronics Net narrow it down for you with the best of the best. There?s a lot of tech out there, and here are a few examples showing the latest in flat panel display technology, home theater accessories and even a few ways to determine our place in the universe. Come along with us and we?ll take you from here to eternity.

LG Flat Panels and 3D
With perhaps the most impressive display area in the entire Consumer Electronics Show, LG impressed show-goers on almost every front. First of all, the booth entrance consisted of row of 20-foot-tall stacks of telescoping LCD flat panels that expanded and retracted on a regular basis, showing video clips with them that took clever advantage of this vertical configuration. It was astonishing (see graphic below).

Then, there was the obligatory gigantic plasma display, this time at 102 inches, and yeah, it's great to have all that size if you don't mind waiting for the hour it takes for a plasma screen that big to warm up. These huge screens are impressive, though, and even though they're only technology demonstrations and not shipping products, they foreshadow what will probably be commonplace a few years from now. Elsewhere in the booth was a remarkable technology demonstration of a 3D display, which will be ready to ship by early next year, according to an LG representative. Showing 800x600 resolution, the device displayed 3D computer graphics and games with remarkable depth and clarity without requiring 3D glasses. LG also showed an excellent 50-inch wireless plasma display which looked beautiful and gave no hint that there were no strings attached. Add LG's flat panel prowess to its new cell phone offerings reported earlier on these pages, and the result is one of the liveliest and most innovative consumer electronics companies in the market today.

LaCie Hard Disks
Now here's a great company that has always delivered high-performance storage products, and now it's adding units with even more spectacular design to the mix. My favorite was the LaCie Rugged Hard Drive (see graphic below), an orange pillow-looking device that could have been designed by Philippe Starck. Available in either USB 2.0 or a triple interface, the drives hold 80, 100, or 120GB.

Another standout in LaCie?s glamorous line of hard disks is the comically-named Little Big Disk, boasting of smaller dimensions yet bigger performance. It?s available in 160, 200, 240GB sizes, and can be plugged in via FireWire 800, FireWire 400 or USB 2.0. Better yet, it doesn't even require one of those wall warts to bring AC power to it -- it uses FireWire to draw its current. It's just right for carrying around with your notebook. 

Looking Sharp
Sharp was again showing its 65-inch LCD displays this year, and a company official said the retail price on these monsters is $22,000. Ouch. But you get a lot of video for your money, and these displays were nothing short of stunning.

Sharp? That's an understatement with this 57-inch Sharp Aquos LCD TV, a $16K monitor set for March availability. It looks so good because of its five-wavelength backlighting instead of the usual four. It was the best display we saw at the show.

But the real jaw dropper was in a darkened back room, where Sharp showed us a monitor which it claimed had the highest dynamic range in history: a dumbfounding one million-to-one contrast ratio. It was the widest contrast ratio we've ever seen short of real life, where darkened video scenes shot in a swamp at night showed the moon in the background just as clearly as the dimly-lit sawgrass in the foreground. Even though it was a demonstration that smelled of smoke-and-mirrors, it was still remarkable. Elsewhere in the Sharp area was another product never seen before, and that was a flat panel that's capable of dual viewing. When you're standing to one side of the monitor, you see one channel of video, and then on the other side you see another. Walk from one side to the other and you see it suddenly change from one channel to the other. This technology is now available for small displays and is perfect for use in cars, where a DVD can be viewed from the passenger seat, while the driver sees navigation information on the same screen at the same time. Great idea.

Roll-Up Display
Here was a first look at digital ink, where the Philips booth hosted a demonstration of a rollup display. Called the Readius Rollable Display, the idea involves a larger display wrapping around a smaller device, and the whole thing is very small and easy to carry around with you. An amazing fact about this display is that it doesn't require power unless it's updating the image -- the rest of the time you can power it down and still see the page.

This 5-inch panel was rolled around a device that was about the size of a Tootsie Roll. Its black-and-white image looked surprisingly clear, and gave us a general idea of what it's going to be like when displays will be rolled up like a newspaper. This digital ink is going to be the way of the future, where they will sport higher resolution in full, living color. We can't wait.