My CES Revelation

As a television station employee, I’ve made the annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas for the National Association of Broadcasters convention each April for the last nine years. It’s a spectacle that is enormous, rarely boring and always huge. It seemed inconceivable to me that any other assembly could be anywhere near that size.

This year, I decided to break the pattern and attend the International Consumer Electronics Show instead.

It is also held in Las Vegas, in the same facilities as NAB, and in several others to boot. It’s bigger. MUCH bigger. Maybe 50 percent bigger. And while not every booth has something to do with video, the primary focus of CES is from the sales angle, and also from the perspective of the user, the customer, the viewer. It’s a very different view, indeed.

It’s been a long time coming, but it can finally be announced: At the grand old age of 86, the cathode-ray picture tube is officially dead. Yes, flat-screen plasma and LCD displays have been making astounding inroads in the last 7 years or so, but even as recently as NAB 2007 I saw at least a few tube-based displays on the floor.

At CES 2008 I saw exactly zero.

At the same time, manufacturers are moving toward remedying some of the flat-screen sets flaws, mostly in "judder," that extremely unpleasant visual jittering you see so much of (on LCDs in particular) when the camera pans horizontally (right-to-left or left-to-right.) The manufacturers are fixing this flaw by doubling the frame rate of the displays, from 60 frames per second to 120. In fact, at the Texas Instruments DLP projection booth, they had the frame rate cranked all the way up to 240 fps! This technique is startlingly effective at reducing motion artifacts. And while the displays themselves are largely to blame for this phenomenon, sometimes we do it to ourselves. Hitachi is going the extra yard to remove the 3:2 pulldown artifacting inherent in 24-frame-per-second video by resampling, actually "tweening" frames to remove that 24p "film look" you waited all those years to use.

Another victim at CES 2008 was 720p, at least in displays. The buzzword this year is 1080p, as in 1080 scan lines progressively displayed, with no more interlacing. You couldn’t swing an audio guy without hitting signs declaring "1080p- TRUE HD!" And that applied to cameras as well. While you can still buy a few standard definition DV camcorders, the push among the manufacturers is to 1080p, single-chip CMOS cameras. And it is also time to write the obituary for recording tape, at least in consumer cameras. No fewer than five manufacturers were featuring 1080p palmcorders- in once instance, I could have held three of these cameras in one hand- and none recorded to tape. Using the extremely efficient AVCHD codec, these cameras record to some combination of an internal micro-hard drive, flash memory, or in the case of Hitachi, a mini-Blu-ray optical disc.

CES 2008 might be the event that announces the resurgence of over-the-air broadcasting as a viable delivery mechanism. Sure, cable and satellite penetration is over 80 percent, but with the right antenna and a digital tuner, viewers can receive multiple channels of pristine, beautiful digital content right out of the air- with no monthly fee. The tools are finally here to make this happen. Virtually every new set includes an ATSC (digital over-the-air) tuner, and for viewers that don’t want to buy a new TV very soon, there are finally ATSC tuner boxes available, just in time for the government DTV tuner $40 coupon program to begin. Echostar announced its TR-40 digital tuner, which will sell for what everyone said was impossible- less than the $40 value of the government coupon.

Finally, it would be wrong to ignore the major dichotomy of product segments at CES 2008: Home theaters versus mobile video. On the one hand, you see 150-inch plasma displays, luxury seating, motion systems, huge surround sound rigs and more. Meanwhile, every cell phone at the show can display video from an astonishing number of sources. At the Motorola booth, the company showed a phone, the Moto Z10, that not only shoots stills and video, but lets you edit the videos right on the phone and upload them when you are done. Two different audiences, to be sure, but can we afford to ignore either one? And if not, how do we configure our productions so they can look at least acceptable on both?

The Moto z10 captures video at 30 frames per second, can edit footage, and add a soundtrack, commentary and visual effects, all from the handset.

The new 17" monitor from Panasonic offers motion handling and latency advantages previously only found in CRT monitors.

Oh yeah, I saw one more display we should all be thinking about: an LCD set that perches on top of a gas pump. These started popping up at InfoComm and other display trade shows last year, but they were out in force at CES. Yet another audience and viewing venue to cater to.