Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas

No I was not subjected to a tradeshow my first week back from vacation but there were several of my coworkers that were. Today a number of them showed up back at the office and gave me a quick rundown of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Last year the show was fairly boring. This year reports are that it was even more boring. I'm not sure if that is a bad thing or if it is good in that I get to hold onto more of my money this year.

The big buzz from the major consumer electronics companies is 4K television. The picture is the equivalent resolution of having 4 HD televisions. That means that when you get close to the screen, you see incredible detail. Unfortunately we are still lacking content for them and so I wouldn't rush right out and buy a 4K television. You also don't see much of difference between HD and 4K when you sit at reasonable distances from the screen.

Another product category making noise this year is wearable devices. There were a number of vendors that had various bracelets that measured calories burned throughout your day. Some of the better ones interact with your smartphone while others can interface with your computer. This seems to be a category that will need a bit of maturity before we see some real leaders.

I was able to watch several press conferences of the CES event and feel that the most innovative technology was in the digital camera space. Sony has their a7 or Alpha 7 camera that does away with the mirror found in most digital SLR cameras. This makes the camera lighter and also allows you to take faster pictures. This is not really necessary for portrait shots, but is critical for capturing the right action ones. CES also showed a number of features from full-featured cameras making their way into our smartphones. There are a number of manufacturers that include cameras with better than 10 megapixels in their phones. We are also starting to see image processing features such as background blur or defocus.

One of the bad things about a show like CES is that a lot of what is shown looks good in a showroom but won't see much use in real life. The hard part is sifting through all of the features and gadgets and trying to predict what will get used. We'll see if any of the things I think are cool gain mainstream adoption.