Posted 01/12/2010 - 3:13pm by Julia M
PMG President Tommy Hadges has just returned from his annual visit to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas & here’s Part 1 of his overview:
CES 2010 was, as usual, both crowded (120,000 attendees, compared to 113,000 last year) & loaded with many fascinating gadgets from the areas of electronics, mobile, computing & gaming. One of the major themes at this year’s conversion was 3-D. In fact, by far, the most pervasive pieces of equipment were 3-D glasses, both the simpler “passive” glasses (used for projectors capable of displaying 2 separate images for left & right) with polarized lenses & the battery-powered “active” glasses (used for TV & computer displays, which alternately show left & right images) with shutters that allow each eye to only see one image at a time.
For those that haven’t experienced the power of 3-D recently, the old-style paper 3-D glasses that were used many years ago in theaters and occasionally for 3-D TV specials. The newer active 3-D technology is a substantial improvement. These active glasses were required to view everything from realistic 3-D gaming (like Nvidia’s display, based on the 3-D mega-hit theatrical “Avatar”) to the many 3-D flat-panel displays with 1080p & 240Hz images capable of showing 3-D (which will be available in the next few months from a wide range of manufacturers, including Samsung, LG, Sony & Panasonic).
All the 3-D images suffered from a slight loss of contrast (due to the lenses in the glasses themselves), but the depth looked very impressive in an excerpt of a FIFA soccer game & extremely compelling in 3-D footage of an NCAA football game (USC versus Ohio State). On the other hand, I wasn’t that impressed by the 3-D demo of “Wheel of Fortune” & not sure at all whether the public will actually want to wear 3-D glasses whenever they watch TV, with non-glasses 3-D still a decade away. Still, there’s going to a be a lot of 3-D content available soon, with new channels coming later this year & next year from ESPN (with events including this year’s World Cup soccer tournament & next year’s BCS championship football game), DirecTV (actually 3 1080p channels, with one offering a mix of movies, TV shows & live events, one offering on-demand pay-per-view events & one free 3-D demo channel) & a full-time channel mixing new programming with old 3-D shows & movies, coming from Discovery, Sony & Imax.
Most manufacturers also showed prototypes of 3-D Blu-Ray DVD players, which will be released soon, along with 3-D movies from virtually every studio that has already committed to the format. By far the best 3-D images I saw were from some 24.5-inch OLED prototype displays from Sony, since the incredible sharpness & contrast of this technology (still not commercially available in this size) resulted in crystal-clear 3-D images that were amazingly realistic. Other “oh wow” TV innovations included some incredibly thin flat-panels (like a 55-inch Ultra Slim LCD displays from LG that is only ¼-inch thick or a 15-inch OLED panel from LG that is only 1/10-inch thick), to some truly huge displays, like an amazing 152-inch Ultra-High Definition plasma “commercial prototype” from Panasonic, with “4K” resolution of 4096x2160 pixels, compared to today’s HDTV resolution of 1920x1080 pixels.
To read the full "Tech Trends" for the week of 1/11/10, click here.
