Just went down to Las Vegas for one day (Friday) at the Show. What a zoo. If you just want to wander around, it would take hours to see just one hall, and the CES was comprised of the Hilton, North Hall, Grand Lobby (where Sony was), the Central Hall, and four South Halls. Plus, there was spillover into some hotels.
Big LCD and plasma screens everywhere. Samsung showed a 57" LCD display and a 102" plasma. Lots of cameras, printers, a 500GB Hitachi hard drive (good for over 30 hours of DV!), and lots of Blu-ray vs. HD DVD marketing. Oh, one of the halls was dedicated to just auto audio systems--you know, cars with huge subwoofers that you can hear a mile away. Over lunch, one person told he took photos of one car that had so many amps driving the subwoofers in the rear that the engine compartment was full of alternators--16 of them. Call me a traditionalist, but that's a bit excessive, in my view.
Sony had a nice setup and Vegas was being demoed by Keith Kolbo from VASST (I think I spelled his name right). He was showing HDV editing both in the raw form and with Cineform encoding. I sat through the Sony Theater show which ran about 10 minutes. Why do they boost the low bass 20db in those shows? Sounds dumb. Wait, maybe they borrowed the car with the 16 alternators.
Bad traffic everywhere, and a parking spot near the convention center cost me $20. Las Vegas as a city is just amazing. So tacky yet expanding at a prodigious rate. When climbing out from the runway this afternoon we flew west before reaching the cloud base. Huge swaths of desert, many miles from the city center, were being cleared for future housing developments. Real estate prices are climbing sharply, too, now that the construction is beginning to reach the foothills.
Big LCD and plasma screens everywhere. Samsung showed a 57" LCD display and a 102" plasma. Lots of cameras, printers, a 500GB Hitachi hard drive (good for over 30 hours of DV!), and lots of Blu-ray vs. HD DVD marketing. Oh, one of the halls was dedicated to just auto audio systems--you know, cars with huge subwoofers that you can hear a mile away. Over lunch, one person told he took photos of one car that had so many amps driving the subwoofers in the rear that the engine compartment was full of alternators--16 of them. Call me a traditionalist, but that's a bit excessive, in my view.
Sony had a nice setup and Vegas was being demoed by Keith Kolbo from VASST (I think I spelled his name right). He was showing HDV editing both in the raw form and with Cineform encoding. I sat through the Sony Theater show which ran about 10 minutes. Why do they boost the low bass 20db in those shows? Sounds dumb. Wait, maybe they borrowed the car with the 16 alternators.
Bad traffic everywhere, and a parking spot near the convention center cost me $20. Las Vegas as a city is just amazing. So tacky yet expanding at a prodigious rate. When climbing out from the runway this afternoon we flew west before reaching the cloud base. Huge swaths of desert, many miles from the city center, were being cleared for future housing developments. Real estate prices are climbing sharply, too, now that the construction is beginning to reach the foothills.