Tuesday, January 05, 2016

CES News

The annual news explosion that is the Consumer Entertainment Show has started.

First off, Engadget usually covers just about everything. Here are some specific notes, though, about things that you might find interesting:

First, Oculus Rift pre-orders begin January 6 at 10 AM CST. That's Wednesday, unless you're in Australia, in which case I have no idea what day it is, really. Tuesday. Thursday. March 7.

Oddly, no price has been announced yet, but if you backed Oculus in the original Kickstarter, you get the finished unit for free.

That's remarkable, and I think it strongly points to this: the price is going to be higher than people expect, and there was internal concern that there might not be enough early adopters to act as evangelists for the product.

It's a master stroke, then, to give away the product to the people who are most likely to act as evangelists--the ones who backed the vision in the first place.

I'm ordering, of course. at 10:00:01 CST tomorrow.

LG had their big press conference this morning, and they announced multiple new OLED lines in 55", 65" and 77" sizes. All of the new screens are 4K and support HDR (there's one existing 1080P screen that will still be available). They also now have some screens with 10-bit processing (not sure which ones yet).

I can remember, just a few years ago, when LG was considered a joke. They always made huge promises about products, many of which never shipped. But OLED is a premium technology in terms of image quality, substantially better than LCD, and LG is the company that has pushed forward and is driving the market.

Oh, and here's one more change. When LG does ship OLED product after announcing it at CES, it always meant second half of the year, at a minimum. Now they're saying some of these screens will ship in the first quarter. Nice.

One other development that I think is quite interesting: NVIDIA is serious about getting into the self-driving car market. Their Drive PX2 product is very impressive and is being adopted by Volvo.

I think this is very savvy move by Nvidia (screw the caps). This is going to be a huge market, and the spin-off tech is going to be a huge market, too.

Here's something else I'm noticing about CES: I don't find as many things interesting as I used to. Man, sometimes I hate getting old.


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