I attend CES every year to see what trends are in store, what concepts have become realities and what really neat swag the vendors are giving away. Last year I reported that the show was so immense that if given a full day and a half extra I still wouldn’t have had enough time to spend 60 seconds at each exhibit. This year was no better. 

With 1.85 million net square feet of exhibit space and over 2,700 companies, I scheduled my time to try and cover as much territory as possible and hit the highlights of our areas of interest. I failed miserably. For those of you who would like to do the math, the 1.85 million square feet I mentioned is the equivalent of over 32 football fields. It’s just too big! All that being said, I did get to see some really hot tech.

Screens, Screens Everywhere a Screen

Blocking out the scenery…. If you don’t know the song reference, don’t worry (Five Man Electrical Band – 1970). The point is, everywhere you looked there was some device with a flat panel screen.

Sony introduced its first OLED (organic light emitting diode) large screen TV. Now ‘large’ is a relative term and up to now OLEDs have been relegated to small screen devices such as cell phones.

The reasons are technical and financial but Sony has been able to overcome most of the issues to produce a 27” HDTV with an incredible picture (1,000,000:1 contrast ratio).

While this model is several years from production, there is currently an 11” model, the XEL-1 , for the tech afflicted that is being released in Japan now and may be available here in the US later this year at a price that is at least imaginable for an 11” screen, $2499.

There are many potential advantages to OLED screens such as response time and power consumption as it requires no backlight, and we can look forward to seeing it in more devices as technology and manufacturing processes improve.

Philips introduced an environmentally aware flat panel, the Philips 42PFL5603D Eco TV . This is a 42-inch, 60 Hz. 1080p resolution, flat-panel LCD with some very interesting energy saving features.

The features revolve around the concept of diminishing the back lighting output whenever possible to reduce power consumption.

One simple way they have accomplished this is with the integration of a front panel sensor that measures the available room lighting. As this light varies, so does the necessary back light in the LCD screen to accommodate the viewing environment.

A Philips representative gave us a demonstration and we watched the metered power consumption dip dramatically when ambient lighting was diminished. In an energy conscious economy, this should be a mainstream winner. Due out in March, the Philips 42PFL5603D Eco TV is expected to have a $1,399 MSRP.

There were a myriad of other types of screen based devices from phones to personal media centers to curved 3 foot wide desktop monitors (see below) and we look forward to reviewing more of these during the year.

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