The photos have been edited…the press kits downloaded…the flash drives emptied…time for another post-CES writeup!

There were lots of mixed signals at CES this year. On one hand, attendance was way up from 2009’s debacle, and that’s a good thing for the CE industry. On the other hand, many booths were smaller, and the South Hall wasn’t even filled to capacity. There were quite a few ‘rest stops’ to be found in the Central and South halls…booths that were paid for, but never used. And that led to a few ‘dead ends’ as I searched for several ‘missing in action’ exhibitors.

In my Display Daily for January 18, I mentioned some of the more prominent MIAs, notably Sanyo, Pioneer, and Hitachi. A Pioneer representative emailed me after the show that…“our home entertainment group decided not to exhibit at CES this year in order to reduce costs and make the most efficient use of their resources for the remainder of the year.  As you noted, our mobile group did exhibit in the North hall…the home division is on track with restructuring efforts announced earlier in 2009, and they’re planning a normal rollout of key product categories in Spring, Summer and Fall 2010.”

How nice to CES to provide this “park” next to the Panasonic booth!

I’m still not sure what happened to Sanyo and Hitachi. The former company is a powerhouse across a wide range of CE products, including digital still and video cameras. And Hitachi was doing some nice cutting-edge work with super-thin LCD TVs, along with combo BD camcorders and motion-recognition TVs.

Instead, their booth spaces were taken over by Chinese CE manufacturers such as Haier and Hisense. You may not have head of these brands before, but you will soon – Haier is already being distributed by small, regional appliance retailers, and Hisense plans a major push into the US market for 2010 with a full line of super-thin LED LCD TVs. They’ve even got a glassless 3D TV solution.

So what were the gems from this year’s show? Here are a dozen products and/or demos I saw that made the trip to Las Vegas well worth the aggravation. (And if you’ve flown to Las Vegas lately on US Airways, you know what I mean by aggravation!)

Samsung’s prototype OLED ID card works with RFID sensors.

Samsung OLED ID card: This technology demonstration took place at the Digital Experience tabletop show. The card has a tiny (about an inch square) OLED embedded in it, next to a conventional photograph. When placed near an RFID sensor, the OLED screen comes to life, showing an animated 360-degree view of the person. It rotates twice, and then zooms in to a tight headshot (below the hairline to the chin). Remove the RFID reader, and the screen goes blank. It’s powered by a super-thin lithium ion battery.

It looks like they’re mating…

Luftco wireless USB file transfer: Got a file on one flash drive you need to copy to another? Piece of cake! Simply use two of Luftco’s wireless (Bluetooth) USB flash memory sticks. Place them side; turn both on, and after they sync up, the file is automatically copied to the empty drive. Look ma, no laptop!

That’s actually a 3D globe, loaded with content and menu windows.

Toshiba Cell 3D TV demo: I’ve seen this before at CES in a less-refined presentation. This year, Toshiba really dressed it up, and added active shutter 3D content on top of everything. The Cell processor is powerful enough to process up to 8 streams of HD programming while simultaneously handling the complex x,y,z vectors of hand gestures. Will we see this on a commercial TV model by end of this year? I believe we will.

You want wide? Vizio’s got w-i-d-e.

Vizio 21:9 (2.35:1) LCD TV: Most of you readers have probably heard about Philips’ CinemaScope LCD TV. Prototypes were shown last spring, but this is the first I’ve heard of a manufacturer bringing it to the marketplace. It’s a niche product to be sure, but the size (56 inches) and resolution (2560×1080 pixels) will no doubt attract plenty of early adopters. No firm pricing has been announced just yet.

I thought we were supposed to be watching HDTV on these things, not YouTube!

IDT StreamClean video processor: Now that we’re all running out and buying big screen plasma and LCD TVs, what are we watching on them? YouTube, Hulu, and a host of other low-rez, crappy video signals. Those look bad enough on a desktop monitor, but on a 55-inch 1080p LCD TV? Fortunately, IDT (among others) is working on a host of ASICs to clean up compression and scaling artifacts. While they don’t exactly turn chicken turds into chicken salad, they work better than I expected.

A projector with an antenna connector? You betcha!

Desonic HomeBoy LED LCoS projector: Wow – it didn’t take long for LED projectors to go mainstream. Desonic is another one of the Chinese manufacturers that swamped CES this year. Their booth in the South Hall featured a few clever projector designs, but this is the first one I’ve ever seen with a built-in ATSC tuner. Not sure how functional that is, but Desonic gets extra credit for thinking out of the box. The HomeBoy is rated at 100 lumens and has a native resolution of 800×600 pixels.

How much smaller can they make these things? (And not, it’s NOT 3D…)

Aiptek PenCam Trio HD: This is a super-slim 1280×720 HD pen camera that can also shoot 5 MP photos. It comes with 4 GB of flash memory (records 100 minutes of H.264 video) and is equipped with a mini HDMI port for connection to a larger TV. The viewing screen is tiny – only 1.1 inches – but it’s an AM OLED screen! Cool all around, and it comes in five different colors.

More eye candy from the LG Displays suite.

LG Display suite: It doesn’t matter what LGD shows every year, ALL of it is cool. Located at the Bellagio this year, I was once again greeted by old friend Bruce Berkoff and Stacey Voorhees, and they proceeded to show me several 3D demos, a wall of 15-inch OLEDs, and a new 72-inch LCD glass cut from LGD that also showed up in the LG booth and Vizio’s suite at the Wynn as finished TV products.

A 3D camcorder for only twenty-one grand? Such a deal!

Panasonic 3D plasma demos and consumer 3D camcorder: The folks from Osaka are jumping into 3D in a big way, and their active-shutter demos of Olympics footage were top-notch. In fact, almost half the booth space was devoted to 3D – wireless, DirecTV, and a prototype $21,000 camcorder that is being ‘built to order.’ Look for it at the 2010 HPA Technology Retreat in a few weeks.

An LED, a laser, and a color wheel – voila! A “green” projector!

Casio Green Slim projector: Casio’s answer to eliminating mercury-filled projection lamps almost reads like a Rube Goldberg design (note to younger readers – Google his name, it’s well worth the read!). Their latest projector design uses a red LED, a blue laser, and a spinning color wheel with green phosphors on it to derive a full RGB palette. The red LED illuminates a DMD directly, while some of the energy from the blue laser splits off and ‘tickles’ the green phosphor. Both WXGA and XGA resolutions are available, and amazingly, they start at $800!

You’ve got to see it in 3LCD LED color. (Sorry, Epson!)

Samsung F10M LED 3LCD projector: This XGA-resolution desktop projector uses three discrete light-emitting diodes instead of a short-arc lamp, and brightness is specified at 1,000 lumens. Up until now, all of the LED projectors I’ve seen at this brightness level have used DLP technology. Guess what? 3LCD imaging works just as well with LEDs. Look for other 3LCD manufacturers to follow suit in 2010.

(Later this week: My final CES post-show wrap-up.)