Day I Impressions – ISE 2017

February 7, 2017 by Dave Haynes

ISE is now in full roar in a wet and now chilly Amsterdam. I’ve only been in 2 or 3 of the 14 or so halls at this crazy maze of a convention space, but have already seen and heard some interesting things.

LG, like last year, is kinda killing it with their OLED eye candy – with the booth so full this morning I gave up o trying to wade in. A new twist this year is a set of large LEDS on hidden pivots so the flat walls shape-shift.

Samsung has a whole building and were marketing QLEDs – which are LCD displays with LED lighting and quantum dot technology. They look beautiful but if you didn’t know better you’d think QLED was its own thing. No sign of OLED in the Samsung booth this year, but the company had a PILE of CMS partners showing their integration with System of Chip panels.

The news on the SoC front is that Sharp, backed by new masters Foxconn, are now in the SoC smart panel business – with ARM 1.8 ghz players running Android. The company had several partners – like Grassfish, CityMEO, Videro and EaseScreen. The product is not yet out formally, but is coming by late summer … ish.

That means all the major display guys now market smart panels of some description, mainly for digital signage.

I bumped into the UK firm Condeco, which is one of the genuine market leaders in meeting room sign software. I liked a mini-sign I’d not yet seen that is intended for shared workspaces/office hotels. A little bigger than a hockey puck, with a light on top and LCD in the middle, the units attach to communal desks in offices and allow users to tap their ID card and reserve the desk and display their name. The “puck” shows a red light, indicating at distance the spot is booked, while green shows the desks that are free. Clever.

There was a massive crowd looking at the CLEDIS screen in the Sony booth. The massive screens is super-fine LED with the lights so teeny they allow for a lot more black than other fine pitch LEDs. This is actually a 1.2mm but there is a film over the LEDs so it all looks seamless.

I asked, but Sony had few to no details on things like price. Think $$$$$$.

OK, back into the mob. If things work out, I will have a series of short, on the spot interviews up on the podcast tomorrow.

Overall, the event seems very busy. The numbers of exhibitors is crazy, though there are lots of audio and smart building vendors that the digital signage crowd doesn’t need to see.