Hey folks Valkor here, with the final day CES update. Today
was a rather slow day as I had to make a rush, rush effort to find Sony’s
booth. They were the last of the big players that I wanted to see. And while
they didn’t have the PSP in playable form, it did make a showing among a few
other surprises. After that, not much else happened, I visited a few more
booths that I past visited, went back to my room, packed my bags, and headed
back to
Sony
This was it, the final moment of truth. I was waiting 2 days seeking out the ever elusive Sony booth, only to discover there was no booth, but a series of rooms. It’s not a bad idea, because it keeps their products separate. I skipped the automotive section in favor of the home entertainment section, where Sony showcased everything from their newest Wega HD TV’s, Vaio laptops, and new DVD format, Blu Ray. Blu Ray was the biggest reason I was there and I was very impressed by their display. Sony had Blu Ray prototypes up and running showing films that will grace the format including the best of the best Spider-man 2. I would have shown only Spider-man 2 as what they showed was truly amazing, equaling the power of HD-DVD. On one screen, the colors were a bit too bright, but the detail was amazing. You could see every brick in the building, embossed webbing on Spidey’s suit, and drops of sweat glistening off Doc Ock’s face. This is something that has to be seen to be believed. Ok you can see it now, but it’s a small grainy piece, but to truly experience you have to see it up close and personal.
Moving on, Sony also showed off some of its newest portable devices such as an atrac/mp3 CD-player and boom, a super minidisk player and finally a very small but very powerful Flash memory MP3 player. And when I saw small, I am talking smaller than an Ipod, but packs an equal punch. Obviously the menu system is on a tiny LCD screen, but it’s easy to scroll through the songs. If you hold it in such a manner that your thumb can turn the knob and then press the play button at the top. You can flick this knob up or down to scroll through your library of songs. But Val, how does it sound? On the speakers that Sony provided, the sound was equally impressive to that of the Creative Zen, however with it’s really tiny size, not many will want to handle such a product. I’m gonna stick with the Zen.
Sony also was running a way past cool HD-TV, using some new technology called SXRD. What is SXRD? To quote from their pamphlet:
Blah, blah, blah, what does it all mean? It means super crisp, unbelievably sharp, highest quality of video I have ever seen, and rich all around colors for your HD-TV or HD projector. It kicked my ass and then some. This is touted as the first “commercially available 4k projector”, mind you this was the technology they were gonna do the Spider-man 2 presentation on, though I think that would have been a better projector. However I was happy to simply get a taste of things to come and believe me it tasted sweet.
Lastly the PSP made a showing, but not the kind of showing I was expecting. I was expecting to get all hands on with the thing, however it was encased in a plastic case, showing a really cheesy home movie type flick. From what I was told, it was merely to show off the new 1 gig memory stick. That’s it. We won’t get to see the PSP in action until the March event or E3.
Samsung
Bet you guys thought my day was all Sony did ya? Well guess again. In a short time I covered quite a few booths, now while I visited Samsung before, I didn’t realize they had a Blu Ray prototype on board. Plus their HD TV’s were pretty amazing too. Some of them were rather gimmicky such as the 3d models. Come on are we still trying to capture 3d films? Their 3d model was ok and worked better with the gaming Demo. I can see using 3d only for gaming and only for games that use a first person perspective. I cannot see myself using this thing for casual watching. Samsung also had a 3d monitor running that didn’t require the glasses. However you needed to be standing aways a bit to get the full effect and even then your eyes have to adjust to this new look. Another kewl device was the HD converter DVD. They actually had a side by side comparison of what a standard DVD looked like compared to this new DVD player and the look was quite impressive. As you can see from the picture below, how they compare to one another. The one on the right is far richer in color and detail than the one on the left. Beautiful.
Texas Instrument was on hand in a big way showing off their plasma TV’s and projectors to a huge crowd of folk. There was even one projector showing the Colts/ Broncos game (For those that don’t know the Colts spanked the Broncos). It was a beautiful HD display and the surround sound enhanced it. Also on hand were a few choice nuggets that caught my eye. The first was the empower Osaka project, which is a DVD/ clock radio, that plays DVD, CD’s, MP3’s and also has a touch screen for controlling functions. Also from what I was told, the OP is in direct competition with Bose radios for sound quality. However if we were to go by look I’d say hands down Bose is the winner. And since this was merely a prototype, I was not able measure sound quality and I have heard Bose and Bose kicks all ass. TOV looks forward to examining this new piece in the future. One other little tasty morsel is the slingbox. This box might be the next wave of the future. Let’s say you have TIVO set up to record a show at home, but you’re away in another country. What you do is connect to a wi-fi service and signal your slingbox and it will send the program to you. So no matter where you are, so you won’t miss your show or get stuck watching programs in another language.
Lead Singer
What’s a former 80’s pop star to do when her star power runs out and well, she’s just lying around on her talent? She hawks cheesy products in hopes of maybe gaining some of that limelight back. That’s what happened to Debra (Debbie only to her friends) Gibson, as she was out at CES pushing her Lead Singer Karaoke device. The LS is simply a microphone with all the songs and lyrics contained within it through a technology called “Musikartridges”. It hooks directly to your AV jacks either in the front or the back of your TV and that’s it. No more bulky machines or fumbling with CD’s, the LS is all in one baby. Debra was showing the folks how the device works while singing and waving to the audience. And she still sounds pretty good, though the goofy waving and smiling I can do without. The LS comes in two models: The LS-2100 which contains 200 songs and the LS-3700 which contains 300 songs. My overall impression: It’s not a bad toy to play with, and I think it would be great for parties. However I would think something more wireless would have been a better idea, for mobility sake. But I can see myself buying this for a gift, and then moving far out of the country afterwards.
The makers behind some of the best cameras around, including
my f700,
The last day was pretty much cut and dry, my main objective
was to find the Sony exhibit and that was it, but of course I came across the
other booths along the way. And I walked away completely satisfied. Thank you
CES and all its exhibiters, it was an amazing show and I cannot wait for the
next show. I also wanna give a special shout out to the people at