CNET has bestowed its annual Best of CES Awards for the top products debuted at the Consumer Electronics Show. The winner of best in show went to Philips’ Eco TV, a flat-panel LCD display that conserves energy by adjusting the brightness in response to program content. A benefit of the HDTV, which also won CNET’s TV category, is that dimming the display for, say, a night scene not only saves energy but provides deeper blacks.

Other winners of CNET’s Best of CES Awards are:

Car tech and GPS: Azentek’s in-dash PCs, which offer traditional Windows functions along with GPS, stereo and cell-phone integration.  

Cell phones: Motorola’s Rokr E8, which seamlessly integrates music playback and has a nifty “morphing” touch-pad interface. It also won the People’s Voice Award, based on votes from CNET readers.

Computers: Lenovo’s IdeaPad and IdeaCentre laptops, which are entertainment-oriented and feature nice design touches, such as a “frameless” screen and textured finish.

Digital photography: Sony’s Alpha DSLR-A100, a 10-megapixel dSLR for $700.

Emerging technologies: Bug Labs’ Bug Base and Bug Modules, a wildly configurable geek toy that allows users to create all kinds of gadgets with open-source software.

Gaming: Nyko’s wireless Nunchuk contoller for the Nintendo Wii, which gets rid of the bothersome cord that typically connects the secondary controller to the main Wiimote. 

Home audio: Logitech’s Squeezebox Duet, a $400 network digital audio streamer that allows users to better manage their digital music collection.

Home video: EchoStar’s TR-50, a high-def DVR that allows people to record HD programs that they receive via over-the-air antennas. (I could actually use this, but CNET gives no price.)

Portable audio and video: iRiver’s W7, an MP3 player that offers GPS capabilities through an optional car mount.

How fashionable: a strikingly colored stun gun that you can accessorize with an MP3 player. The Consumer Electronics Show always produces some techno-oddities, and they

TASER C2 stun gun in its leopard-print version.

surely include the new leopard-print TASER C2 stun gun, aimed at women. But, wait — there’s more. With an MP3 player that’s built into a carrying case for the C2, the also-new TASER MPH (Music Player Holster), you can listen to music while you tote your C2 stun gun, also available in “fashion pink” and “red-hot red.” (An incorrect report from the London Telegraph that the MP3 player and TASER are combined into one device will surely start some urban legend.) TASER will sell the stylish C2 and its MP3-carrying holster for about $550 combined when they’re available in four to six weeks. TASER promotes the TASER MPH as allowing “personal protection and personal music for people on the go.” Of course, if you’re so busy listening to cranked-up music while walking down some dark street, you might never hear that attacker you’re hoping to stun.

The TASER MPH (Music Player Holster) holds the C2 stun gun and has a built-in 1-gigabyte MP3 player.

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.

Warner Home Video sure knows how to ruin a party — in this case, the annual extravaganza known as the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. When Warner announced late Friday that it was going to give its sole support in the high-def disc war to Blu-ray Disc, the main backer of rival format HD DVD, Toshiba, got left holding the bag — actually, hundreds of them. As Don Lindich, whose consumer electronics Q&A column appears in the Star Tribune and who is in Las Vegas for CES, writes on his blog:

After checking in to my hotel I went over to the convention center to get my badge holder and the free press bag Toshiba gives out every year.  Usually it is a backpack, though I have received laptop bags before.

… Every press bag has the HD DVD logo proudly emblazoned across the back.  When you combine that with hundreds, if not thousands of international press walking around Las Vegas, the end result is you see HD DVD logos EVERYWHERE.  And I mean EVERYWHERE!  There were HD DVD banners hanging all over in the airport baggage claim and Toshiba/HD DVD ads stuck to the top of taxicabs.  Ouch!  I can’t imagine how badly Toshiba must be feeling right now, after Friday’s events and Warner’s defection.  Clearly it was unexpected and this CES is not what they had planned it to be!

So not only has Toshiba been forced to cancel all of its CES press events for what is surely a dying format because of Warner’s decision, but, ironically, Toshiba’s goodwill promotional gesture to provide the press with a functional goodie serves as a constant reminder of the bad news.

The past relationship of Toshiba and Warner can’t be understated. The two were essential partners in the creation of standard DVDs. And Warner still has flagship HD DVD titles that aren’t available (yet) in Blu-ray, such as Casablanca, Forbidden Planet and the Matrix movies. Toshiba must feel like a bride left at the high-def altar. 

Check out Don’s blog for his continual CES updates, with photos, from Vegas.

The annual Consumer Electronics Show opened to the public today in Las Vegas, and we already have some early picks from CNET senior editor Dan Ackerman on what has caught his eye so far.

Dan’s covering CES for CNET’s microsite about the trade show, but he took time to email me from the showroom floor. Warner Home Video’s decision to support Blu-ray Disc over the rival high-def disc, HD DVD, is the biggest news by far, he said. But here are some new and upcoming products that he likes, along with his comments:  

Sony’s new OLED TV (Organic Light Emitting Diode): “New 11-inch TV from Sony — it’s $2500, but only a few millimeters think. Mostly a proof of concept for future products (they had a 27-inch prototype as well).”

Alienware’s curved DLP display: “Prototype giant computer monitor that’s wide and curved. Probably out later this year.”

Sony Rolly: “Cute little music player/robot that rolls around to music.”

Music phones: “Motorola ROKR 8 and Sony Ericson Walkman phones — mixing MP3 players and phones in products that are actually becoming pretty useful.”

Phillips BTM630 Bluetooth Wireless Entertainment system: “Simple all-in-one music system that can stream music from your PC, MP3 player, etc. via Bluetooth. Pretty clever.”

Intel Penryn CPUs: “New line of laptop processors from Intel. Slightly better, not revolutionary, but all the big laptop makers will be switching to them.”

Check out my guide to CES online for more news.

Warner Home Video’s decision to go Blu-ray-only in the high-def war sent shockwaves through the industry. But its reasoning for doing so doesn’t make sense – at first.

Warner said Friday that it was abandoning its dual support of the dueling high-def disc formats, HD DVD and Blu-ray, and going solely with the latter because consumers seem to prefer Blu-ray. But is WHV sacrificing quality for quantity? Let me explian: There’s no doubt that Blu-ray Discs have been outselling HD DVDs, largely because U.S. consumers have bought more than 3 million PlayStation 3s, the biggest-selling Blu-ray player by far and more than the entire installed user base of HD DVD players. So it’s no surprise that Blu-ray Discs have been outselling HD DVDs. The catch is that most people who buy a PS3 do so to play video games; they might buy an occasional Blu-ray movie, but it’s not a fiercely loyal audience, in general. On the other hand, people who have a stand-alone HD DVD player or the Xbox 360 HD drive have bought it solely to play HD DVD movies. Given the still-small market for high-def discs, compared with standard DVDs, it would seem to make more sense for Warner to court the consumers who offer proportionally stronger support to their chosen format, the HD DVD crowd.

But there’s the rub: The high-def market is still too relatively tiny. How small? As I pointed out a few months ago in my HD DVD vs. Blu-ray primer, the bestselling HD DVD of Transformers, in its first week, barely sold more than 2 percent (190,000 copies) of what its standard DVD counterpart did (8.3 million copies). Ouch. With a market that small, it doesn’t matter which format Warner chose to support solely, just that it made the choice. Because, as my example shows, people aren’t buying into high-def and the format war is just complicating things. Backing one format at least helps clear consumer confusion, especially since there’s no quality difference between the two incompatible formats.

So where does that leave HD DVD? Well, not on solid footing. Universal and Paramount are left as its two major content providers. DreamWorks, which Paramount distributes, is still in the mix, but it doesn’t have a big enough catalog to make much of an impact. Toshiba is the main hardware producer, but it responded to Warner’s announcement by canceling some HD DVD events at the Consumer Electronics Show, which started with press conferences today, and saying it would talk with other stakeholders to decide a future course. One of those companies is the behemoth Microsoft, but I don’t think its involvement will change anything. HD DVD could go on to become the high-def/high-capacity format of choice on the computer side without having much impact on the home-video front. The HD DVD studios might try to release some catalog heavyweights as a last-gasp effort to draw interest, but even the unlikely high-def coming of Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan and Raiders of the Lost Ark would just delay the inevitable. HD DVD is on life support now.

It’s still possible that both formats could co-exist like Macs and PCs, with cheaper hybrid drives rendering the battle moot. But the fact that Paramount once released films in the Blu-ray format means it’s just a matter of time before it goes back. Universal would have no choice but to follow. Sure, Paramount has a contract that mandates its HD DVD support, but Toshiba said it had some kind of contract with Warner, too, and look how that turned out.

If you bought an HD DVD player, especially during the recent price drops, figure that you got a good deal on a decent upconverting player that will make standard DVDs look sharp on your HDTV. If high-def discs remain the niche product that they have been so far, even with Blu-ray as the only one left, an upconverting player might be all you need.