Back and busy

January 4, 2007 by Dave Haynes

I am glad I decided to mentally shut down for the holidays and not think about this stuff, because it got busy pretty much as soon as I hit the door. Nothing like a nice shiny RFI in your Inbox to jump-start the year. Presumably, I’m not the only one who got busy quickly.

I am off to Las Vegas on the weekend, planning to see for the first time what all the fuss is about with the massive Consumer Electronics Show that pretty much overwhelms the city each January. I am going at the start of the week, and will therefore steer clear of the adult video trade show that apparently runs in parallel later in the week. Vegas is weird enough without rolling that freak show into the mix.

Instead, I’ll spend Monday and Tuesday hacking my way through the trade show crowds (150,000 people expected, ugh) looking at gadgets and figuring out who has free booze and food in their hospitality suites.

Thinking about ways to make digital signage rollouts easier, I’m very curious about powerline networking (around for a while but starting to mature through standardization), wireless video, and the newest types of large format displays. Unfortunately, it looks like legal fights will keep Canon and Toshiba from demo’ing their ballyhooed surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) TV’s, which are purported to have CRT picture quality without the weight and big ass-end of CRTs.

There is, however, chatter that display guys will be unveiling some low-priced large format plasmas and LCDs, with one manufacturer said to be announcing a 60 inch 720P HD plasma for less than $2K.

I’ll take a decent camera along and try to file some thoughts and snapshots from the show.