Digital Home Thoughts: CeBIT 2004 Press Event News

Next booth was Viewsonic. They were displaying two monitors. The one above is their new 17" 1280x1024 analog + digital flat panel display. I was quite amazed by the extremely vivid colors, that I hope are clear from the images above. BTW, all the pictures are taken with my EOS 10D and I have scaled them all down by a factor of 10. If you want the full res images, please email me. Their press release about the monitor - "VX715 features ClearMotivTM technology for displaying broadcast-quality video and compatibility with high-definition 720p. OptiSync™ dual input technology on the display supports both digital (DVI) and analog (VGA) signals to expand connectivity options. The VX715 has 1280x1024 native resolution, 450:1 contrast ratio and 300 nits of brightness, while the VX510 provides 250 nits of brightness, a 450:1 contrast ratio and 1024x768 native resolution."



They were also displaying their new 15" Flat Panel TV which also looked very nice. According to their press release - "At only 8.5 pounds, the lightweight N1300 extends the entertainment experience to the kitchen, bathroom, office or even boats and RVs. Featuring a traditional 4:3 aspect ratio, the N1300 delivers 450 nits of brightness with 640x480 native resolution and a 500:1 contrast ratio. Multiple video signal inputs - including component, S-video and composite video—enable compatibility with devices such as DVD players and VCRs, while a built-in TV tuner, remote control and integrated speakers further enhance the television entertainment experience." Anyways, I asked them the obvious question - "When are TV tuners going to be embedded in all their flat panel monitors" and apparently they are making a huge push in this direction some time soon. Viewsonic already has about five different monitors with embedded TV tuners.



Next up was the IBM booth. Their tiny new projector was the first thing that caught my attention. It looks like they were aiming at the Infocus LP120 when designing it. It is not as small and light as the Infocus projector but the specs are almost the same - 1100 lumens, 2.5lbs, 1024x768 resolution support. And it is very tiny.





Their new Thinkpad line also seems quite cool. You can actually see the projector next to the laptops to get an idea of the scale. On the right hand side are the two new laptops that are meant to be desktop replacements, thought at about 5.5lbs, they are perfectly portable IMHO. The two laptops on the left are the slightly older models.



This unit is their Intellistation, capable of two of the fastest Intel processors and SATA hard drives. Very sweet machine. They particularly mentioned digital media and their benchmarking focus for editing of audio and video. The new machines will apparently be shipping with the nVidia 6800 video cards. Woohoo! :)



Next booth was by OurPictures. The gentleman giving me the demo of their product is an ex-AOL employee and this will make sense right away with respect to their product.





The product that they are making at first looks exactly like a plain vanilla photo album creator. However, what makes them different from others (and here is where the AOL reference comes in) is that you can Instant Message pictures from your machine/album to your buddy/buddies. This is done via their servers and the images are transferred fairly fast from what I could tell. They use a P2P like approach and the software also has basic image manipulation abilities built in.