Picks from CES 2006

By Cyrris

The Consumer Electronics Show doesn’t always have a bunch of awe-inspiring products on display every year. What it does usually have though, is a good lot of interesting gadgets and concepts. Like with E3, every year I scan countless review sites, looking at what was around, and what was interesting. There is of course always the useless junk to sift through before finding the good bits. Intel’s Viiv and Windows Vista were two such things this year, with nothing really new or interesting being shown off. Having Tom Hanks and Justin Timberlake promoting those respective products really just seemed unnecessary.

There was also plenty of junk on the two quarelling high definition disk formats. I can’t think of anything in current technology circles that I find more irritating than this, and I generally steer clear of any detailed reading on the topic. Anyhow, here’s a run down of some of the presentations which took my fancy.

The EPOS digital pen was a pretty cool product. It’s much like your typical stylus except, of course, with a USB flash drive. You can scribble something on any surface, and the pen will remember what you wrote (somewhat in the same vein as an optical mouse remembering it’s positions to indicate movement), allowing you to upload it to your computer and play with your drawings as you like. I suppose it could also be used to save your signature. Or others, for that matter.

There were a bunch of enormous LCD and plasma displays on show, and I couldn’t care less about any of these. Something else is about to eclipse them - Surface-Conduction Electron-Emitter Displays. SED televisions are something which I have been interested in for a while now, ever since first reading about them in a New Scientist magazine a year or two ago. Anandtech has a good explanation (with diagrams!) in the link provided on how the technology works - SED essentially takes the low power usage and thin displacement of an LCD, and couples that with the excellent contrast ratio and response times of a CRT. Best of both worlds? Pretty much. The technology still has some way to go - but it looks like SEDs should put LCDs and Plasmas out of business quite easily once they get a foothold.

One thing I thought was interesting but actually kinda stupid was Dell’s quad-SLI system. Take a good look at the pictures - those are four GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB cards sitting on one motherboard, though only using 2 PCIe slots. That’s 2GB of video RAM. To try and keep up, the Pentium processor is also overclocked to 4.2 GHz. The system uses 850W of power (more than the provided PSU could supply) and will be on sale for the price of a small car. I personally don’t like this multi-card direction, because I never want to see games being developed which can only be run at full quality with more than one graphics card. More powerful single card solutions are where I think it should all stay, though I dare say this Dell will be quite future proof, and able to power the latest games quite easily for a few years. That is, of course, if it doesn’t burn out. But 4 cards… that’s just silly.

Electronic paper is also gradually finding it’s way into practical applications for everyday people now. Lexar’s USB memory stick with a usage indicator makes excellent use of the technology. Depending on just how high the premium is over a normal 1gig flash drive down here in Oz, I am very much thinking of getting one of these myself. Along the same lines was the Philips Rollable Display - a greyscale display device which looks awfully similar to paper. It may be some time before it’s ready for more liberal use, but I think we’re almost there. I don’t think we’ll ever replace normal paper, but this is potentially a good complement.

Moving over to the “cool if not useless” department, how about a PSU the size of your thumb. And it’s not some 5W piece of novelty junk either - this tiny things gives a healthy 120W of power. I’m not sure about the voltage, but the unit can provide enough juice for some mobile CPUs that are out today. That’ll save some space in the laptop.

Overall there’s been some really interesting stuff, and of all the things at CES I don’t think I’ve even covered 1% of what was on show. I would have to say that SED technology has me most impressed. I have a plasma at home, and it’s shortcomings are quite obvious in both picture quality and product lifespan. It’s nice to see that the next cream of the crop TVs should do away with all of those issues, and those of which LCDs suffer from as well (namely the poor contrast). Hopefully people will be able to enjoy them without confusion over what kind of high-def disk they will be using.

Trackbacks:

• Welcome to Epos