I have a brief moment of pausing for breath on the news side today, as I have finished the Siggraph report and IFA is still six days away, although the number of meeting requests, press releases and pre-announcements scales up. That also applies to IBC, which is a couple of weeks later, but which has a much more focused PR corps.
IFA should see some interesting developments. LG is said to be planning an LED TV – frankly, it would be surprising if it wasn’t, and Samsung may get a bit more firm on its plans for the consumer version of ‘The Wall’. I suspect that a lot of companies will be showing something LED-based, like LG, just to prove that they can make (or buy) something with that technology.
I’m expecting to see some good looking TVs, although OLED hasn’t moved on much from last year and the really interesting TV developments are usually seen at CES as few brands want to risk delaying holiday purchases by showing products that aren’t immediately available. There will be plenty of 8K hype, I expect, from Samsung and Sharp in particular, but I’m sure that others will join in! I’d love to see the 16K 100″ panel that Innolux showed in Taipei recently, but I would be surprised to see it before CES.
There should be a strong presence in gaming, with everybody, I expect, hyping up their new Nvidia RTX-enabled systems for real time ray tracing – and many of them, I expect, showing the same demos – possibly of Battlefield V, which is very impressive, visually and whose trailer seems to be everywhere! (It’s worth a quick look at this video for more on the effects that are now possible)
It’s not yet completely clear what level of boost the Turing GPU will bring to existing games that don’t exploit the new technology, although they are expected to boost the performance of 4K games a lot – which is good news for monitor makers. The combination of the new GeForce boards with the latest DisplayHDR monitors should make a big impression on visitors to the show.
One of the enabling technologies for the HDR monitors will be miniLED backlights and we hope to see some good new monitors at the event – there are usually quite a few genuinely new products.
I’m not sure how much VR there will be. It would be surprising if Acer didn’t try to exploit its investment in StarVR by hyping the new headset that we saw at Siggraph, but it is aimed at professionals. I’m really not sure that there will be much in the way of new VR headsets, but you never know, and I don’t expect anything in A/R, although, again, you never know!
Anyway, if you have something that you’d like to show us at either event, let me know.
Bob
This frame from Battlefield V highlights the realistic eye, but also the reflection of an off-screen gun flash in the soldier’s eye.
