CES Products Electrify Vegas and Gadget Hounds
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), held Jan. 8-11, 2004, in Las Vegas was huge, glitzy and overwhelming, as it should be. Whereas many of the products were more-of-the-same-slightly-better, some gadgets and trends stood out.
One clear trend is that DVR (digital video recorders) sets for home entertainment centers will soon be a standard item, allowing consumers to record TV programs on DVDs instead of today’s ubiquitous VCR tapes. DVDs have the advantage that they take up less space and allow quick skipping to specific programs; the hard drives included in many of these sets offer both nonlinear recording and easy integration with TiVo-type personal video recorder (PVR) features. Typical of the new genre is the Toshiba RD-SX32, which has an 80GB hard drive and a high-speed DVD recorder. What makes the difference this year is price – entries such as Gateway’s Ar-230 DVD+RW recorder at $299 are bringing DVRs into the mainstream. Note that both DVD-R/W and DVD+R/W formats are still around, so you may want to buy a +/- dual format unit to be on the safe side.
Gateway was not the only computer maker that decided to enter the home entertainment market. Dell is now offering a full range of entertainment products, including TVs and DVD players. And Epson is making printers with wide-screen TV monitors attached. HP is also born again as a CE (consumer electronics) maker, with 30 and 42-inch plasma flat panel TVs, an entertainment hub that serves as a distribution point for home audio/video media, and a deal with Apple to produce an HP-branded digital music player based on Apple’s iPod.
Another trend is that LCD monitors are getting larger and cheaper, making them an attractive option for people with limited space – such as a university dorm room – to use as both a computer monitor and television set; many new LCD monitors have both TV tuners and computer inputs built into them. LCD televisions were once relatively small, but there were dozens of sets in the 30- and 40-inch range at the show, topped by a 55-inch model from Zenith/LG, showing how popular this monitor format has become for television viewing.
The other technology that could be seen everywhere was DLP, the Texas Instruments form of the micromirror chip, which was offered in a wide range of both front and rear-projection televisions. Toshiba, which had offered its own rival LCOS-based technology last year, caved in on that technology because of production difficulties, and now also offers a full range of DLP products, including HD sets based on TI’s new HD+ DLP chip, which replaced last year’s Mustang as the champion in the 1260x720 range for HD 720p/1080i (and 16x9 native resolution) displays.
Digital cameras are selling better than ever, with a large number of 3-megapixel models in the $200-$400 range. Advances include better zoom ranges (4-12x instead of the traditional 3x) and more pixels, with several 6-megapixel models such as Canon’s hot-selling digital Rebel showing what will soon be considered the minimum acceptable resolution the market will tolerate. The biggest improvement is in response time, both for startup and for picture-to-picture times – several previous digital cameras (including some Sony models) had several seconds of delay between taking one picture and being ready for the next.
Digital camcorder sales are also brisk. What’s new is a lineup of very compact cameras the size of a deck of cards, such as the Panasonic SV-AV100 and the Sanyo/Fisher FVD-C1. These cameras achieve their tiny sizes by using removable Flash memory cards instead of DV tape for video storage (the Sanyo is also a 3.2 megapixel still camera). Although still limited in how long they can shoot (a 512MB card may allow only 15 minutes recording time, for instance), these cameras will clearly come to the forefront with the availability of higher-capacity Flash memory cards.
One clear trend is that DVR (digital video recorders) sets for home entertainment centers will soon be a standard item, allowing consumers to record TV programs on DVDs instead of today’s ubiquitous VCR tapes. DVDs have the advantage that they take up less space and allow quick skipping to specific programs; the hard drives included in many of these sets offer both nonlinear recording and easy integration with TiVo-type personal video recorder (PVR) features. Typical of the new genre is the Toshiba RD-SX32, which has an 80GB hard drive and a high-speed DVD recorder. What makes the difference this year is price – entries such as Gateway’s Ar-230 DVD+RW recorder at $299 are bringing DVRs into the mainstream. Note that both DVD-R/W and DVD+R/W formats are still around, so you may want to buy a +/- dual format unit to be on the safe side.
Gateway was not the only computer maker that decided to enter the home entertainment market. Dell is now offering a full range of entertainment products, including TVs and DVD players. And Epson is making printers with wide-screen TV monitors attached. HP is also born again as a CE (consumer electronics) maker, with 30 and 42-inch plasma flat panel TVs, an entertainment hub that serves as a distribution point for home audio/video media, and a deal with Apple to produce an HP-branded digital music player based on Apple’s iPod.
Another trend is that LCD monitors are getting larger and cheaper, making them an attractive option for people with limited space – such as a university dorm room – to use as both a computer monitor and television set; many new LCD monitors have both TV tuners and computer inputs built into them. LCD televisions were once relatively small, but there were dozens of sets in the 30- and 40-inch range at the show, topped by a 55-inch model from Zenith/LG, showing how popular this monitor format has become for television viewing.
The other technology that could be seen everywhere was DLP, the Texas Instruments form of the micromirror chip, which was offered in a wide range of both front and rear-projection televisions. Toshiba, which had offered its own rival LCOS-based technology last year, caved in on that technology because of production difficulties, and now also offers a full range of DLP products, including HD sets based on TI’s new HD+ DLP chip, which replaced last year’s Mustang as the champion in the 1260x720 range for HD 720p/1080i (and 16x9 native resolution) displays.
Digital cameras are selling better than ever, with a large number of 3-megapixel models in the $200-$400 range. Advances include better zoom ranges (4-12x instead of the traditional 3x) and more pixels, with several 6-megapixel models such as Canon’s hot-selling digital Rebel showing what will soon be considered the minimum acceptable resolution the market will tolerate. The biggest improvement is in response time, both for startup and for picture-to-picture times – several previous digital cameras (including some Sony models) had several seconds of delay between taking one picture and being ready for the next.
Digital camcorder sales are also brisk. What’s new is a lineup of very compact cameras the size of a deck of cards, such as the Panasonic SV-AV100 and the Sanyo/Fisher FVD-C1. These cameras achieve their tiny sizes by using removable Flash memory cards instead of DV tape for video storage (the Sanyo is also a 3.2 megapixel still camera). Although still limited in how long they can shoot (a 512MB card may allow only 15 minutes recording time, for instance), these cameras will clearly come to the forefront with the availability of higher-capacity Flash memory cards.
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