I spent a couple of days at CES last week. While two days isn’t enough to see the entire show, it is more than enough time for me to spend in Las Vegas. Walking the floor is also a serious cardio workout. It’s not the distance you walk but rather the constant crowds that you try to swim through.
If I had to sum up CES this year, it would be Smart TVs and Android tablets. Everyone seemed to have an Android tablet and they were all running ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich). You would have been hard pressed to find a booth that didn’t have a tablet they were marketing. There were so many, it got to be boring looking at them.
Smart TVs were also all the rage. They were last year too, but they were still pretty new. Every TV was connected. I couldn’t find a TV that wasn’t and several vendors even told me they were going to stop making TVs that were not internet connected. Of all the vendors I looked at, Samsung had the coolest TV. It was high definition and was OLED. It was so thin, it was hard to convey in a picture since all you saw was a line down the center of the photo. To best illustrate just how thin this TV is, I shot a short video.
[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXkT44ilzU4″ title=”Samsung%20OLED%20HD%20Television” autohide=”1″ fs=”1″]
There were also several 4k televisions and even an 8k. I think the latter was simply for bragging rights. To put this into perspective, when you go to the movies and watch a digital projection, you are typically seeing a 2k image. Don’t rush out and try to upgrade your TV just yet. No one is broadcasting in 2k resolution let alone 4k. Sony did announce at the show a Blu-ray player (model BDP-S790) that will upscan your Blu-ray disc to 4k resolution, but I heard nothing on price and only “2nd quarter” for when you could buy one.
Everyone had their 3D TVs as well as several glasses free 3D demos. Most people just kept on walking past the 3D. Content creators and manufacturers keep pushing the technology but the public just 1) doesn’t want to fork out the extra money and 2) doesn’t want to wear glasses just to watch television. I looked at the glasses free televisions but they just didn’t look as 3D as those that require glasses. 3D is a novelty that people will indulge in from time to time when they go to the theater.