CES 2008 – the Consumer Electronics Show 2008 has long replaced Demo, COMDEX (sigh ….RIP)and other IT shows. CES is the place to be just after Christmas to see what will be the popular electronic gadgets for Christmas 2008. The market does need the lead time even in the frenetic electronics gadget market place.
If its Tuesday, this is the Casio??? booth …. Now photofinishers may only be laterally interested in mobile phones and handheld PDAs or gaming software and control devices or car technology and GPS-Global Positioning Services … more or less these can be either bypassed or quickly viewed. Also photofinishers will find that the digital camera and video camcorders plus inkjet and laser printers revealed here leave a bit to be desired as the later PMA and Photokina shows will have much more and salient content later in the year.
But even with this filtering that leaves a lot of ground to cover at the huge Las Vegas Exhibition Centre. And the fact is that CES aficionado, David Pogue of the New York times found “C.E.S. 2008 offered few big announcements that got everybody buzzing. “ And this remote observer will have to agree so these are five items that caught this Photofinsher’s attention:
1)The resurgence of Plasma HDTV’s especially in the high end market of 50 inch and larger monitors. Now several factors are driving this. First, digital TVs will become the standard in 2009 – and the public is being alerted to this because some analog TVs will not perform. But also the availability of TV, video and HD-High Definition home video cameras has also spurred interest in better monitors. Finally TV and computer monitor screens are converging and the electronics to support both modes of operation are attractive in many situations. The result is that CES 2008 showed plasma TV’s which have the largest size, better brightness, better color gamut, and faster image change (reducing ghosting effects to zero). Thus at CES plasma TVs dominated the larger HDTV sizes with Panasonic showing a 150″ diagonal model (cost $150K) but 103 thru to 50 inch models in LCD and plasma were available at reduced thickness, weight and prices. In edition OLED technology which provides even better brightness and color fidelity started to emerge from Sony and Samsung in the 11″ to 32″ inch range but the prices were very steep. In short, TV and PC monitors will converge and emerge at a large enough size to match digital SLR and HD camcorder requirements at several price points.
2)There were some nifty peeks at very good cmacorder technology at CES2008. Here is one of the more interesting:
Sony-HDR-SR12 is interesting because it supports a 120GB hard disk drive for storing 1920×1080 video and 10MPixel still image. It is due out in 3rd quarter 2008 in estimated $1100-1200 price range.
However, of equal interest is the lines that this and all of the camcoders are crossing. First, 1920 x 1080 definition betters the best of most HDTV broadcasts. Admittedly the quality of the AVHDC format still cannot match the quality of DV tape recording over a full lighting range – with serious noise, blocking and colour gamut problems in low lux lighting situations. But also there are software compatibility, rendering time, and other glitches in post processing. However, the transition to camcorders for digital image taking for both still and video uses is now upon us. So instead of plunking down $250-500 for a tiny digital still image camera, consider paying $300 more for avideo camera that has 10-12x zoom, image stabilization, and can do those videos you are taking with a still camera with much greater panache.
Finally, Canon can see the writing on the wall and has also come out with its own SD card enabled camcorders:
In general, for those who do either Web video or Web still images (and are savvy enough to move video images available in most video software – this new range of camcorders will be very attractive. My two concerns are a)the manual controls for many operations like aperture, focus, iris control etc are all over the place on these camcorders – so there is a significant learning curve that does not transfer well among camcorder nor between digital SLR and camcorder. The second problem is that the vendors still seem bent on doing image/photofinishing tasks in camera which really should be done on Mac or PC.
3)The only Digital SLR announcement of consequence at CES 2008 was the Sony A200 priced very competitively at $700 given its iimage stabilization, 10Mpixel, and huge back LCD screen obviously derived from the A100 and A700 models. However the dearth of SLR announcements seem to support the notion that PMA and Photokina rae the places to be.
Well consider the fact that picture frames, PCs, and Kiosks support Wifi and therefore Eye-Fi can dump photos to a folder on a PC or upload them to social networks or photo-sharing sites such as Flickr, Photobucket or Facebook. And Eye-Fi manages the handshake, password and upload transactions. This party has done enough strenuous uploading such that this looks like an interesting proposition.
5)Asus has announced two PC laptops well worth considering. The eePC is two pounds, runs lInux and coupled with GIMP is a great offloading and instant image editing machine. Asus M70 laptop is at the other extreme and supports 1TB=1000GB hard drives in a laptop – very fast and able to be configured as RAID drives. Very very interesting.