CES is four days of controlled - and sometimes uncontrolled - chaos for the consumer electronics industry and the analysts that cover it. (Events for the analysts and press start on Tuesday afternoon, so that makes it five and a half days for us.) So where could I possible find an island of calm at CES?

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor
of HDTV Retailer

As the dust settles, it seems that we are in period of relative calm as far as large-screen display technology in commercial TV sets is concerned. Fueled by lower costs and massive advertising, manufacturing and sales have ramped at a furious pace, but most of the plasma and LCD panels in the TVs sold in December 2005 were not wildly different from those sold the preceding January. The relative technical stability combined with a rapidly expanding market have allowed second- and third-tier makers like BenQ, Syntax, Maxent, Vizio, HiSense, ViewSonic, and Westinghouse to establish their own value propositions and channel relationships. Syntax and Westinghouse found themselves among the top five brands of LCD-TVs at one time or another during the last year, and Maxent’s 26-inch LCD-TV was one of the five top-selling models in mid-year. Vizio and HiSense had models that were among TigerDirect’s best sellers.

This technological calm won’t last. New technologies for dramatically reducing motion blur and improving contrast and color gamut in LCDs will begin finding their ways into commercial TV sets this year, cost reducing technologies such as single-sided driving and film filters will appear in larger numbers of plasma panels, and the first generation of rear-projection TVs illuminated by LEDs instead of bulbs could make RPTV an even stronger competitor for direct-view flat-panel TVs. And all of this is superimposed on the well-reported roll-out of 1080p in more LCD-TV and PDP-TV models.

By the time of CES 2007, there won’t be any islands of calm at all.