Search

This article reports on the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Interesting were industry updates by InfoTrends/Cap Ventures' analysts. They noted that this past year camera phone sales passed cameras, 138 million to 180 million. While we agree that this is an interesting trend, we would much rather know how many pictures were taken with each. Another theme that was to become familiar was that over 55 percent of all digital cameras purchases were made by people who have already owned at least one camera and are looking for improvements in resolution, liquid crystal display (LCD) size, and speed of operation. Driven by low prices, the industry has been surprised by the rapid adoption of 5 Megapixel (MP) or greater digital cameras, which account for more than half of all new sales. Though there are plenty of players in this space, most of the pie is split between Kodak, Sony, Canon, and Fuji, who are expected to hold these positions through the coming year. On image printing, there was discussion as to whether people will print more or less in the future. It seems to us that with the advent of higher resolution television and the integration of digital media around the house, printing may well become a thing of the

This article discusses the products presented at the 2004 National Association of Broadcasters' (NAB) annual convention. It was one of the most important for the computing industry. At NAB 2004, Sony's consumer-level camera was on display behind glass, and will be released when it's ready. Canon, Sharp and Panasonic weren't showing any HDV equipment, so no new baby brother for the XL-1S yet. Momentum, though, says HDV is the next consumer/prosumer standard. At NAB, Panasonic announced P2, a capture format using PC Card memory cards instead of tape (traditional cameras) or optical disk (Sony XDCAM). P2 cameras have five PC Card slots, and automatically switch as one gets full. Just a few days before NAB, NVIDIA had a major shindig in San Francisco to announce its next generation of consumer-level graphics cards, based on the long-fabled NV40 core, including the GeForce 6800. NAB was the site for another major NVIDIA announcement, this time for its new workstation graphics card, the Quadro FX 4000, the successor to the FX3000 and 3000G. This card's specs appear to make it the fastest volume workstation graphics card on offer, and includes Genlock standard, formerly an extra-cost feature of the 3000G. NVIDIA also announced Gelato, a production-pipeline rendering tool. Intended for the studios, it speeds up the rendering of complicated 3D scenes by sharing the work between the CPU and the Graphics Processing Unit.

This article highlights the 2005 Consumer Electronics Society exhibition held in Las Vegas, Nevada. A number of digital imaging companies took the opportunity to make product announcements at the ImageScape reception. Particularly notable was Kodak with its new EX Share One camera. Also interesting were industry updates by InfoTrends/Cap Ventures' analysts. They noted that the past year camera telephone sales passed cameras, 138 million to 180 million. Genoa Color Technologies previewed the world's first five-primary color liquid crystal display (LCD) television; while the display had manufacturing defects, its had a higher color range than the standard 17-inch LCD television next to it. Meanwhile, LaCie showed its 21.3-inch LaCie 321 TFT LCD display. The 321 has 1600 x 1200 resolution and a 500:1 contrast ratio. HomePlug Powerline Alliance has been considering powerline networking with its 14 megabits per second standard. Spanish company DS2 hopes to jumpstart powerline networking with a 200 megabit per second technology. Aura Communications was demonstrating the LibertyLink magnetic communications custom chip, which is fabricated in standard mixed-mode complementary metal oxide semiconductors.