Home

News

Reviews

Forum

Articles

Columns

Podcast

Programming

Reports

Studies

Resources

HDTVs & Equipment

Today's Show:
That's right, time has come again for us to make our annual trek to Las Vegas to see all that the world of Consumer Electronics has to offer. Some years we see some really great stuff. Other years we get home really tired with not much to show for it except a bunch of free giveaway junk. So here's our list of things we expect to see, or are at least really hoping for. If we see all of them, it'll be a home run.

What we expect, or at least hope, to see at CES 2009

Large format OLED screens - Sony is currently selling an 11-inch OLED TV for the low, low price of $2500. We expect to see much larger screens, say 32-inch or larger, and hear news of their expected arrival sometime in 2009. We know the cost will be extremely high.

Ultra Thin Televisions - In years past we've seen companies competing to have the largest LCD on the floor, or the largest plasma. This year companies will be competing to show the thinnest LCD or plasma on the floor. Enormous screen sizes don't impress as much as they used to. This year it will be a competition to see who is the skinniest.

3D LCD that works - The best home 3D experience we've seen has been the DLP based version. It requires glasses, but works very well. Most of the LCD versions have been slightly off-putting. They either don't work, only work if you stand in just the right spot, or make you really dizzy and sick. We don't care if you need to use glasses. But since DLP is on its way out, or at least it seems that way, we need a viable, home 3D solution.

Built-in wireless HDMI - We'd like to see some wireless HDMI chips built right into the Projectors, TVs, Receivers, Blu-ray/DVD players and Set Top Boxes. Enough of the proprietary solutions and the external third party add-on boxes. We want true, wireless HDMI out of the box.

Netbooks, Lots and Lots of Netbooks - This market is heating up, but there isn't a lot of differentiation right now. Most of the available models are indistinguishable from one another. CES will reveal a ton of new Netbook models, some which are drastically different in design from what's currently available. They may merge design elements from the ultra-compact PC, or the tablet PC or even the PDA or cell phone.

Wireless HDMI based whole house audio and video - There will be systems that allow you to beam audio or video from you central hub to any room in the house. The room could be purely an audio zone for listening to music, or it could be a video zone for playing back something recorded on the DVR. This will replace the big expensive matrix switchers and all the cabling with a simple box that can receive from multiple sources and transmit to multiple receivers.

3D Gaming - There are a few companies dabbling with 3G gaming on the XBox 360 and the PS3 using the 3D DLP chips from Texas Instruments. This will be big in 2009. Many more games will become available that do the same thing. It would be ultra-cool if it was done on the Wii, but odds are it wouldn't be. 3D on the the other consoles could give the Wii a little run for it's money in the interactivity department.

Flexible TV displays - This will be one of the "early prototype" demonstrations around CES. We'll see a TV that can actually be bent, rolled up, build into a shirt sleeve, etc. Of course no word will be given on when they could actually come to market, and the prototypes will be really rough, but we'll get to see it nonetheless.

© 1998 - 2009 HDTV Magazine, Ltd.
Home  |   Advertise  |  Contact Us  |  About HDTV Magazine  |  Help  |   RSS Feeds
v3.0