2012 CES highlights

[ixfd64]

I got back from the 2012 CES in Las Vegas two days ago. This year's show had a heavy focus on entertainment, and I've decided to post about my finds:

1. I tried to get more details about Intel's upcoming chips at their booth but was told that they don't give out such information at the CES.
2. I couldn't find much about AMD's CPUs either, only their video cards. I guess the competition is really strong.
3. One company had a 48" all-in-one PC. Want
4. It was kind of fun to watch people play League of Legends at the Supermicro booth. For those curious, Supermicro's main products are high-end motherboards, workstations and servers. Their flagship product is an 8-socket beast; I'm sure it could run Crysis with no problems. But since this was the Consumer Electronics Show, they didn't demo any of their servers.
5. A booth babe was showing off a tablet that had the Windows 8 Developer Preview. However, it lacked many of the features present in the main version.
6. Haier demonstrated a remote-control system that tries to detect the user's brain waves. I couldn't get it to work because my head was too small, though. I can't wait until game companies start taking advantage of this technology.
7. The 3D TV displays were really cool.
8. Razer had a gaming laptop with a touchpad that doubled as an LCD screen. I thought it was pretty neat.
9. Powerbag is exactly what its name suggests. It's a bag that charges your smartphones and tablets on the go. Sounds like a great gift for geeks.
10. Angry Birds was everywhere.
11. There were very little swag this year, most likely due to the poor state of the economy. It was pretty fun talking to the booth babes, though. :P
12. On a more personal level, I won $100 in a random drawing, courtesy of TechnologyTell.

Speaking of trade shows, I'd love to go to E3 or PAX someday. I'm actually more interested in PAX because E3 is closed to the public, but I wouldn't mind a ticket to the latter. Now to make some friends in high places. :P

That having been said, you can read my full trip report here.

[Jeff]

I really liked the Panasonic VT50 plasma TV *drool*

Insane black level and rich colors. Smooth motion (not as smooth as an LCD, but smoother than 24 FPS). And as usual 1080 lines of moving picture resolution (600 Hz sub field drive).

I've got the Panasonic G25 from 2010, but I don't plan on upgrading until 2015-2016 when OLEDs become cheap.

[Inanimate Carbon Rod]

Congrats on attending! I wish I could have gone.

Anandtech did an article about the best of CES 2012.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5437/the-best-of-ces-2012

A 4k projector (and 4k content) would be the push I need to upgrade my home theater.

[X-Vector]

Those projectors are still rather pricy: http://techland.time.com/2011/09/08/...-so-long-1080p + http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/08/j...-quite-4k-pix/

Of course, if you really want to go all out, there have been (semi-)pro 4K systems available for a number of years, but then you're looking at an investment of $100K and up.