CES 2005 - More Tech Notes From the Floor

CES Predictions in '05: Graphics

Graphics were a big part of this show, for both the announced and "unannounced" hardware floating around the show. In particular, Prolink's 6600 non-GT SLI and the nForce4 Ultra-to-SLI hacks were the talk over late night dinners and closed room conversations, so we are really excited to see how some of these out-of-band technologies are accepted both by the consumers and NVIDIA - who have the power to pull the plug at any minute.

If I had to pin a single non-Microsoft related word to label this CES it would be "DLP". As Anand's coverage showed, digital light projection was everywhere on the show - you couldn't walk 5 feet without seeing a DLP TV or a poster to go see the DLP booths. Epson's 3-LCD display put on some very convincing demos representing the "rainbow" effect on DLP displays and how their 3-LCD technology combats that. But the fact is that none of the displays outside their booth used 3-LCD - and that was no accident. Whether 3-LCD or DLP are the better technologies, we did come away from the show with a few significant inferences. Primarily, LCOS seems very dead as Philips just announced their withdrawal from the technology as well. Plasma, of course, is also a dying ship that should have died a long time ago, but is now also on its way out. With the introduction of 7" deep, 1080p DLP TVs, we have to argue if LCD is really worth pursuing also. LCD TV has a long way to go to catch up with DLP TV, particularly in the cost race.

Fortunately, it looks like this is one of those years where we will really benefit as consumers, since there are so many competing technologies attempting to lower their price points on many different technologies. If we compare this to CES 5 or 6 years ago where we only had a few companies deciding the marketing direction for the entire industry, we can see that there have been some clear changes in how consumer electronics are marketed, designed and manufactured.

Now for a few weeks of rest - just in time for Spring IDF and Cebit!