talkingDigital

CES 2010 has come to an end. We had a lot of fun and discovered a few diamonds in the rough.

3DTV was as good as can be expected, but still requires glasses. Some versions of 3D irritated our eyes while others required heavy active polarization glasses. Only the Sensio 3DTV technology impressed us by using simple glasses and had no visible flicker or offset images. Of course, we spent the least amount of time with it and it was the first 3DTV we tried so it is possible that it wasn’t really that much better. We left CES hoping that any video released in 3D format will also come with a 2D version. 3D is odd. It can improve an action film, but nobody needs to see Devil Wears Prada in 3D.

Sensio’s website

There were two digital cameras that highly impressed us. The Casio EX-FH100 high-speed camera with 10x zoom and the Kodak Play Sport HD waterproof pocket camcorder.

We were also impressed with the new Blue Microphone Mikey and Yeti products. The Mikey is the latest generation of Blue’s popular iPhone/iPod Touch microphone. It recorded beautiful sound and worked simply by plugging it in. The Yeti was Blue’s new USB microphone. The Yeti was very large and heavy, but it offered the ability to switch between condensers and adjust gain via two simple knobs. It also sounded great and was very heavy. It would make an excellent beginner or spare mid for podcasting.

Yeti by Blue Microphones

Blue Mikey iPod Touch/iPHone microphone

We will be going through our bags of press releases for quite a while. Keep an eye on talkingDigital for a lot more CES information over the coming weeks.

photo credit: wili_hybrid

We head off to Las Vegas a week from today – attending our first press event later that same day. We look forward to all of the great new tech.

Here are a few things that we hope we don’t see at CES:

Digital Picture frames – They were great five years ago, they were getting old two years ago. If they show up this year, we are going to ask very pointed questions to the exhibitor as to why they wasted the money for booth space.

Bluetooth headsets – Unless it’s the size of a grain of sand, it’s not worth showing us. We don’t care about what kind of noise reduction it has or how stylish it is. We will only talk to you about it if you give us a free one.

Netbooks – We love netbooks but they are all 50 different brands of the same device. 10.1″ screen, the latest Intel Atom (or whatever the netbook processor will be), 1-2GB RAM, 160-320GB hard drive, 4-8hrs battery… If you surprise us with one that has a projector built in, that might be cool, but probably not.

Any iPhone app – Save it for CeBIT or Macworld (if there is still such a thing), we love the iPhone, but don’t want to listen to a 15 minute pitch for a product we need to speed at least a week with before we decide how we feel about it.

Cell phones that will never be released in the US – The Koreans always dazzle us with their booths full of fancy phones, but all they do is waste our precious time that we need to spend looking for gadgets and gear that our listeners and readers have no hope of ever getting their hands on.

The world’s largest flat panel TV – Even if it’s 500 inches, there is no way of communicating how massive a massive TV is via photos. We are no longer impressed by bigger, faster or prettier.

A new $300 ebook reader – Before we can get excited about ebook readers they will have to fall well below $100 and  view PDFs, doc and every other ebook format natively. We might consider paying $150 if it offers Kindle-like EVDO downloads for free.

Essentially, we want to see something new. It is time for something that will revolutionize the way we all live. This will take something affordable that fulfills a need that everyone has.

Podcast: Play in new window

So, we got our Windows 7 House Party kit. Here’s what it looks like. We added some commentary and subtitles, so make sure that you close any YouTube ads that may come up by clicking on the little X on the lower right side..