Unlike my colleagues at Insight Media, I spent only two full days at CES - but they were long and productive days, with over 35 booth meetings and multiple suite visits from early in the AM until the wee hours.

I’ll have full coverage and analysis of the show on my Web site (www.hdtvexpert.com) next week. For now, here are a few products and trends that I found significant while wearing out my shoes going from meeting to meeting.

Déjà vu All Over Again: InFocus (www.infocus.com) has once again resurrected and reinvented itself. The company’s recent history rivals that of the best soap operas. Investor revolts, power grabs, collapsed ventures, failed products and acquisitions - you name it; it’s happened in Wilsonville over the past five years.

Two members of the "InFocus Alumni Association" have actually returned to set a new course. David Woolf, who I first met when he started at InFocus a decade ago, is senior director of worldwide marketing, while Ken Hunkins, long at Pixelworks, reprises his role as product marketing manager.

The company appears to have re-focused on its core market of portable and small installation business and education projectors. InFocus’ current projector lineup plus several new models for 2008 (all currently under NDA) show the company is listening to end-users. Despite the battering InFocus has taken in market share, their brand still has worldwide recognition. Can they regain their once-lofty position?

Who Needs Blue Laser? VUDU (www.vudu.com) showed a new set-top media terminal at Digital Experience. This box, which sells for $399, provides access to movies and TV shows through VUDU’s server on a pay-as-you-go basis. A 3 MB/s broadband connection is required for real time viewing as the downloaded program streams to your TV.

What’s significant about VUDU is that it supports HD recording and playback, unlike other download services. It can also play back those HD files as 1080p/24 programs, just like Blu-ray and HD DVD. Rental fees range from 99¢ to $3.99, while purchased movies will cost anywhere from $4.99 and $19.99. No word from VUDU on how much capacity you’ll get in the set-top box, but the files reside locally and not on a remote server, which is the system Amazon’s Unbox uses. The model I saw did have USB slots for expansion storage.

How Low Can You Go? Pioneer (www.pioneerelectronics.com) raised a lot of eyebrows with their "best in class" KURO plasma displays last June. But their demo at CES showed a newer version of the PDP matrix that has a black level equivalent to the completely darkened room we sat in. I’m not pulling your leg - it really was an inky black, with images appearing to float in mid-air.

To drive the point home, a current-model KURO plasma was placed next to it to show the same content, and that panel’s blacks looked like a very low gray. I did notice the images were slightly dimmer on the super-black model, though. All I could think of, after seeing this demo and Pioneer’s 9mm thick plasma "concept", was that the final nail has been driven into the SED’s coffin.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! JVC’s (www.jvc.com) press breakfast on Tuesday featured an HDTV that responds to sounds and hand motions for navigation. During the demo, a JVC engineer turned the set on by clapping his hands, then selected a menu and navigated through channels with rapid finger motion and pointing. It’s just the thing for those who keep dropping their TV remotes behind the cushions.

Yet Another Display Interface: DisplayLink (www.displaylink.com) showed how you can connect a PC monitor to your desktop or laptop using nothing more than a standard USB cable and driver software. The demo showed 1024×768 resolution on single, cloned, and extended desktop monitors, and a wide range of pixel counts and refresh rates are supported. (Wonder if the DisplayPort guys saw this demo?)

Get With The Widescreen Program: Mitsubishi (www.mitsubishi-presentations.com) -the projector guys, not the laser TV guys - had a $15K 1920×1080 installation projector on display. The FL-7000U is a 3LCD design rated at 5000 lumens and uses Epson 1.1 inch inorganic panels. The pro AV channel has been slow to adopt widescreen imaging for conference rooms, let alone 1080p products. Maybe this product will do the trick?

New Tricks For An Old Dog: Vizio’s (www.vizio.com) new plasma lineup for 2008 includes a $1600 50-inch 1080p plasma TV (VP504F). Surprisingly, there’s also a 32-inch product in the lineup, the VP322. This 1024×720 PDP TV is priced at $689 and comes with 3 HDMI 1.3 inputs.

Most analysts (myself included) had long conceded this screen size to LCD technology, but the suggested retail price is attractive and competitive with 37-inch 768p LCD products. Vizio undoubtedly noticed LG’s strong sales in China of a 32-inch plasma TV and figured the same magic might just work over here.

Once More Into The Breach: How ironic that Texas Instruments had its largest CES DLP showcase booth ever, yet the once-long list of DLP rear-projection TV manufacturers has essentially dwindled to two - Samsung and Mitsubishi. And Samsung has a "plan B" in their massive plasma and LCD fabs, should they decide to give up on microdisplay technology.

On the other hand, Mitsubishi has placed its chips on DLP imaging and the much-ballyhooed introduction of its 65-inch laser DLP RPTV came off without a hitch on Monday night, although there’s still no official word on availability and pricing. Picture quality was decent with nary a trace of speckle, although I can’t say the image was overly bright. In fact, it resembled some of the better LED RPTV demos I’ve seen in the past two years.

Reply to the author