CES 2012

edwardm

This next item is not camera oriented, exactly. It's the Nokia Lumia 900 which I guess is likely to ship in March. It is my understanding that Nokia is putting a lot into the cameras built into these phones with 8 megapixel sensors and Carl Zeiss lenses. I have an Android phone myself, but I found the Windows Phone interface very nice - its definitely worth checking these out.

edwardm

I did not take many photos of whole booths; wish I had as it would help to see the scope of CES. This is a decent shot of part of the Nikon booth. Nikon had models up on a stage, giving you something to shoot while checking out the Nikon cameras.

On my flight to Las Vegas, NV, I read through a couple of Nikon manuals, and also the Samsung NX200 manual. Samsung has everyone beat with the best camera manual I have ever seen. But Nikon manuals are also really good. The other camera manufacturers need to step up and produce better manual and the should look to Nikon and Samsung to see how they could do a much better job.

edwardm

The next item is not a camera item - but I am interested in seeing how embedded systems are being put into many kinds of appliances and devices. While having processing power enables many new features, I find the user interfaces tend to get more complex - and just doing something simple becomes difficult. For example, on old ovens, we had an analog timer that was set just by rotating the dial to the number of minutes. On digital ovens, we have to press up and down buttons and hold them down for a while until reaching the number of minutes. Clumsy!

This particular unit is an appliance made by Samsung (Samsung makes everything). I suspect the user interface on this is pretty good, in spite of my comments above. I say that because I thought Samsung did a very good job with the NX200 camera interface.

edwardm

StreamTV is, from what the person there told me, an R&D business that has a group focused entirely on 3D technology. They do not build the tablets or TVs themselves but license their technology to others. They were demonstrating glasses free 3D tablet screens and 3D television. I am a fan of 3D, so I am biased - but I thought this was some of the nicest looking glass free 3D that I saw at CES. The company has also developed a real time 2D to 3D conversion system that works very well. I understand they also have a non-real time converter that is intended for higher quality conversion of old TV shows and movies to 3D. I watched a demo reel on the glass free TV and the quality was excellent.

This is a photo of their demo 10" tablet computer screen.

edwardm

Another non-photo related item. I turned into the Samsung booth just as a hit Korean "all girl music group" showed up as part of Samsung's promotional efforts. I never did see them - the mob of people and the wall of cameras, shown in the photo, was amusing, though.

A lot of the vendors - not just big ones - hire celebrities to attract attention to their booth. This works okay for them, I guess. I heard of a robot vendor that brought in Justin Bieber, oddly enough. Good for them, but the other vendors in the area were not happy, complaining that they had few visitors for two hours, and some were talking about asking for a partial refund from CES.

edwardm

The outside of the CES multi-building complex is ringed with storage crates, cranes and semi trucks. This photo is just one tiny pile of empty crates. There is no way to convey the immense size and scope of CES.

There were over 3,100 separate vendors occupying about 1.9 million square feet of space (or 176,515 sq meters) in separate locations: Las Vegas Hilton, North Hall, Central Hall, South Hall (two floors) and more rooms and floors at The Venetian Hotel conference center.

This was my 3rd or 4th time attending CES. Previously I went for only 2 days but this time was there for 3 1/2, yet felt I saw much less than in past years. That was mostly because I spent my first two days working on business related conversations with selected vendors, and that was time consuming. (I built a prototype product that I showed to some vendors seeking their feedback - the feedback I received was positive and that was what I needed to hear to move onto the next step. Sorry, can't say what it is yet.)