Last night, some of the Insight Media team covering CES gathered for a dinner to relax and discuss some of the most interesting products, technologies and emerging trends we’ve seen at the halfway point at the conference. In attendance were Matthew Brennesholtz, David Wares, Ken Werner, Steve Sechrist, Paul Beatty, Robert Brown, Mike Kalmanash, Art Berman and myself. That’s a pretty impressive team of display and industry experts. We still have two more days of meetings, so our impressions are not complete, but here are some of the top items we discussed over dinner.

Chris Chinnock
Senior Analyst and Editor
for Insight Media

First of all, we were wowed by a number of display systems that were on the show floor. This included the 150" PDP TV from Panasonic, the new LCD TV from Dolby with local dimming from newly-acquired Brightside Technologies, 14" and 31" OLED TVs from Samsung and a 32" LCD TV from Bang & Olufsen with an "orchestra pit" sound system and geometry that just impressed the heck out of Ken Werner. Also drawing lots of attention was the new 3D PDP introduced by Samsung, the pico projector by 3M and a new dual-view mode display system demonstrated by Texas Instruments.

Earlier this week in Display Daily, Ken Werner already touched on the "kick in the stomach" that Warner Brothers dealt Toshiba by siding with the Blu-ray camp. But, Steve Sechrist noted the introduction of a 32GB SD card that may now make Blu-ray obsolete.

We have also seen a lot of very cool technology in the many suites that are off the show floor. Microvision, for example, gave us a demo that finally showed a path to create a nearly speckle free image from a scanned laser beam system. Robert Brown, whose background includes 35 years in speckle-reduction work, was impressed as this major concern now has a solution.

Mitsubishi also unveiled their Laser TV with much fanfare, and the set is indeed very impressive. But in a private media demo, they also showed 3D content on the DLP-based Laser TV that was among the best I have even seen. Can a Laser + 3D TV revive the RPTV category? Mitsubishi certainly did what it had to do to make this happen.

In LCDs, Matt Brennesholtz and Robert Brown were particularly impressed with the work that Jabil, GLT and Luminus have done on the edge-lit backlight unit. This design consists of a series of horizontal waveguides with LED light injected for the left and right sides in alternating "blades." Achieving very high uniformity in brightness and colorimetry over the 46" display is very difficult, but this team has done it.

We also spotted some key trends. Everyone noticed that wireless transmission of HD content is quickly becoming a mainstream technology this year. There were also a number of demonstrations of thin LCD designs and even PDP designs. One- to two-inch thick LCDs, complete with the backlight unit, will be here within the year. We also noticed a proliferation of OLED displays.

Pico projector interest is at a fever pitch. Even 3D gained some mainstream visibility at this CES, driven by the availability of more 3D TVs and the prospect that much more 3D content may start to flow to consumers within the year.

We also noticed much more mainstream activity in gesture control of TVs and displays with multiple demonstrations of various capabilities. And, there was also clear evidence of the growth of application-specific user interfaces. What does this mean? A good example pointed out by Steve Sechrist was the Motorola E-8 mobile phone that has a display where the icons are reconfigured based on the mode of use of the phone.

And on a final note, Art Berman noted that he was stopped in his tracks when he saw a CRT TV on display at CES. As far as CES is concerned, I suspect it is now safe to say: RIP CRT.