The thing that makes these little OLED TVs stand out from their larger prototypical OLED counterparts is that you can, in fact, buy one. Like most OLED TVs, some of the numbers are staggering, most notably the 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio. The viewing angle of 178 degrees isn’t bad, either… The native resolution, however, is a bit disappointing at only 960×540. The panel is only 3mm thick, which although impressive, is completely moot since it’s permanently attached to a large ugly base with a large ugly stand. The cost? $2500. The target consumer? According to the Sony rep, these TVs are for people who “want to watch TV on their boat.” Thanks, Sony.
If you work in a crowded office and find yourself battling for time in the meeting room, the RoomWizard will serve as a neutral electronic third-party. It’s a touch-screen display designed to be mounted outside a conference room that provides an easy way to either book the space for a meeting, or peruse the upcoming schedule.
If you want to just drop in, a set of LEDs on the side switch between red and green indicating the room’s availability which should prevent you from looking like an idiot when you barge in on a meeting in progress. The RoomWizard can also be accessed from your work PC since it runs an internal webserver, and can even be synced with Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook servers. Over time it will even keep track of room occupancy and reservation patterns so you can see exactly how the shared spaces are being used.
Official pricing for the RoomWizard seems hard to come by, but apparently the units cost over $2,000 each, which should bolster the sales of white boards and markers.
When it comes to displays, bigger isn’t always better. Sometimes it is, but not when we’re talking about mobile devices. Hitachi is showcasing some of their very small, yet very bright high resolution (and, in some cases, touchscreen) displays, which we’ll start seeing in cellphones, portable media players, and even perhaps UMPCs in the near future:
2.4 inch QVGA (240×320) LCD; brightness 500 cd/m2, contrast 1000:1, less than 1mm thick
2.98 inch VGA (640×320) LCD; brightness 500 cd/m2, contrast 500:1
5 inch WXGA (1366×768) LCD; brightness 350 cd/m2, contrast 500:1
About an hour ago, I got a chance to play around with Microsoft Surface in a more or less personal demo, thanks to a miraculous feat of fast talking by Brian Westbrook (who’s covering CES for KATU, KOMO, and KXL) who got me in the door with him. Watch the demo video below, and then I’ll tell you what it’s like to play around with Surface, which I got to do for a few precious minutes afterward.
Surface is one of the most intuitive interfaces I’ve ever experienced. It works just like you think it’s supposed to, you don’t even have to concentrate. We played with Paint, using our fingers and hands as brushes, which was (for lack of a better expression) way, way fun. Surface is not touch sensitive; underneath the tabletop are five cameras, a projector, and a Vista computer. The cameras watch for user interaction on the surface, and then control the projection on the underside of the table. Surface identifies objects by looking for a tag, which is a specific combination of white dots on a black background (it’s like a bar code). No RFID involved. As the Microsoft guy says in the demo, it’ll first show up in retail locations here in Las Vegas in the spring, but in 3-5 years you should be able to buy your own… Likely for something over the current $10,000 commercial partner price (but I hope I’m wrong about that). Either way, it’s money well spent, if you ask me.
Why do we come to CES? One reason: hot chicks are there specifically to be nice to us. Why is that? Because we’re all totally cool, right? Right. I wish. No, they’re trying to get us interested in their products, and damn if it doesn’t work like a charm.
This is the D-Link DSM-210 wireless photo frame. It has a 10″ 16:9 “10-Megapixel” (they’re lying about that) screen and is supposed to pull RSS feeds of photos or news over your wireless home network. It’s also supposed to be easy to set up… But I’ve heard all that before, and I’ll believe it when it comes out this spring for around $250.
Once again, there just has to be a winner in these hopelessly competitive CES TV spec wars. And when it comes to thin, it can only be the Pioneer Kuro plasma concept:
Looks good, right? 50″ at only 41 pounds, and just oozing contrast. Now check this out:
That’s a plasma TV in there… Not just in the thick (18mm) center; the screen extends through the thin (9mm) bezel. And it was actually too crowded for me to catch it perfectly edge on. You could practically julienne a carrot with the edge of this. Not that you’d want to do that, I’m just sayin’…
Not satisfied with having the biggest display at CES, Panasonic is hard at work shrinking the thickness of its plasmas… Now you see them:
Now you don’t.
Or, you wouldn’t, if it weren’t for the cords and mounts. No specs available besides the thickness (less than 1 inch). Expect these to be on the market sometime in 2010. Sigh.
I love to draw, and while my art probably won’t ever be featured in a great comic book, or anything else that actually gets published, I like to think that some day I’ll make it big. One of my favorite tools when drawing was my Wacom tablet. I saw was because it stopped working after the USB cable was accidentally ripped out when I moved recently. I pushed the cable back in, but no amount of tape seemed to make it work again. I think that next time I buy one I’m going to go all-out, and I think I’ve found the perfect one.
Sure, I’m not going to afford one of these any time soon, but I can dream. This massive 21.3-inch Cintiq tablet is essentially a monitor with a tablet thrown on top. Don’t confuse this with a Tablet PC, as it’s far more sensitive, and doesn’t include the PC part. It comes with a fancy stand that rotates 180 degrees to each side, and tilt from 10-60 degrees. You’ll also have a set of programmable buttons along the side for quick access to various tools. All this for the low low price of $2,499. That’s a lot of money, but judging from the reactions it’s gotten at CES, it would be well worth it.
There had to be a winner in the giant TV contest this year, and there most certainly was (nobody else even came close):
This monster plasma TV from Panasonic is 150 inches diagonal. That’s twelve and a half feet. Totally snubbing HD, its resolution is 2160 x 4096 (that’s 4x the resolution of HDTV). It requires 220 volts to operate (that’s twice what comes out of your sockets), and weighs I don’t even want to know how much. The picture below shows just how big it is; the pathetic little TV on the left is Panasonic’s 103″ model:
Want one? Rumor has it that you’ll be looking at something in the low six figs.
It’s certainly no secret that major electronics manufacturers are engaged in a running contest of “mine’s bigger!” when it comes to TVs. So, here are a few of the big and bigger TVs on display at CES:
I’m pretty sure that this custom Samsung plasma TV is 102 inches; nobody at the Samsung booth knew how big it was (seriously), so we had to get creative with some sheets of paper and mental trigonometry.
Panasonic 103″ plasma.
Sharp 108″ LCD.
Now, I don’t know a ton about HD TVs, but from just walking around and looking at them, I tended to favor smaller and crisper HD displays as opposed to the giant ones. I think the reason is that standard HDTV has a resolution of 2,073,600 pixels, and when you make a bigger HD TV, all you’re doing is increasing the size of each pixel. The huge HD TVs are certainly impressive, and look great from a distance, but personally, I’d take one of the smaller ones and just sit a little bit closer.
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