Our latest eyewitness report from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas comes from Michael Fischer, who runs the venerable Nielsen’s electronics stores (in the business for 85 years!) in Spencer, Iowa, and is past chairman of the North American Retail Dealers Association. Michael is a CES veteran who says that innovation, innovation and innovation are his primary focus in scoping out all the goodies at the annual trade show.

“The trick is know which ones will actually show up in the marketplace and which ones will remain a dream,” he said. “You look for products that make things better and easier for consumers.”

With that in mind, here, in his e-mailed words, are some emerging technologies that impressed him: 

Walk into the light
Emerging on the scene are LED (light emitting diodes) light sources instead of CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent lighting) tubes inside of LCD TV’s. One supplier, Samsung, has already introduced the technology into the marketplace with its 81 series product. What makes LED better? While I hate using contrast ratio for determining picture quality (it’s an almost useless number), there is clearly a better image with the products I saw with the technology. Blacker blacks, better detail, colors that pop – it’s obvious that LED technology is a big step forward.

Both Toshiba and Sharp, among others, showed prototypes. While I don’t believe anyone should buy a TV based on a contrast ratio, the Toshiba and Sharp prototypes have incredibly rich and deep blacks and color graduation that a conventional CCFL tube cannot reproduce. Just so you understand what an LED light source is, it is very similar to a room light controlled by a rheostat control that can make the light brighter or dimmer . Because the LED can do this so much better than the current light source, colors are richer, deeper and there is incredible color range. While manufacturers are incredibly tight lipped about when product will be available, my guess is that one of these manufacturers, if not both, will introduce the product in the fall if for no other reason than to keep Samsung from getting too far out in front. 1080P, 120 hz and LED light sources tell me we haven’t seen anything yet in terms of the picture quality LCD and LED can reproduce.

Thin is in
There’s a lot of reaction to Sony and Samsung bringing organic E.L. display (OLED) product to the marketplace. Sony has planned to bring it out in the spring in a small screen size (under 12 inches and reported to be $2500). The advantage of organic displays is that they will be very thin – roughly half-inch thickness. The technology is currently used in cell phone and car audio CD player displays. What we don’t know a lot about is how these displays will work for the average viewer. For instance, how will it handle fast moving and changing scenes (like in sports). And brightness levels. The prototypes looked good – but there’s a difference sometimes between what the demonstration video and real-life signal sources look like.

OLED wasn’t the only thin technology. Sharp showed a prototype LCD panel that was 1080P, with a LED lightsource — and was approximately 1.3 inches thick (actually 29 millimeters, but it’s been a while since I had to convert millimeters to inches). The 52-inch display was simply stunning. One Sharp official told me that this was intended to be 2010 product. Time will tell. Samsung had similar prototype product  No matter how narrow organic EL display is, it isn’t going to be that much narrower than 1.3 inches –- and LCD is a proven technology. The $64 question is how much more are you going to pay for a TV that has less than 1 inch difference in “thickness”.

Not to be outdone, Pioneer Electronics, which builds high-end plasma product, jumped on the “thin is in” bandwagon as well. Pioneer showed a 50-inch plasma display that was less than 7/8-inch thick and weighed less than 40 pounds, according to a sales representative. That’s significantly less than a current plasma or LCD TV in the 50-inch category. That means wall mounting, which is sometimes an issue with plasmas because of weight, wouldn’t be if and when this product comes to market. Projected release date is in the 2009-2010 time frame.

Look, Ma, no wires[br]One last innovation caught my eye. Samsung will come out with 50- and 58-inch plasma displays with the ability to receive a high-def signal from a remote transmitter in the same room this year. This means mounting a plasma TV over the fireplace just got easier because running connection wires (with the exception of the power cord) just got eliminated.

How much of this cool technology will show up eventually? The short answer is: Most of it. Just keep this in mind: By the time it does show up, the manufacturers will have come up with something else you’ll just have to have.

Good stuff. Thanks, Michael.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 8:05 am and is filed under CES. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.