CES 2006 Main Show Floor

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CES 2006 Main Show Floor - Part II

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Kurtis Kronk
Brian

Jan. 19, 2006

Specifications

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Dell

A while back I decided to snatch up a Dell 2005FPW 20.1" Wide (16:9) LCD with a native resolution of 1680x1050, mainly because I got a really nice price thanks to our Hot Deals section. There was a huge coupon for like 30% off, putting the monitor at about $380 shipped, and I couldn't stand my CRT any longer. So, here I am, about six months later, wishing I had $2,000 to drop on an LCD. Why, you ask?

Well, if you haven't heard about it already, Dell launched a new 30" LCD with a native resolution of 2560x1600 (that's significantly more than my 22" CRT which goes up to 2048x1536), 11ms response time, and a 700:1 contrast ratio. Some might say, so what, Apple has had the 30" Cinema Display for a while. Well, the specs on the Dell are a little better, with the Apple having a 400:1 contrast ratio and a slower response time of 16ms. Seeing this LCD in action was just amazing, and you'd better believe that you'll need a very high-end system with two high-end video cards running in SLI or Crossfire to be able to play games at the native resolution.

Alternatively, you could get Dell's fiery-hot new XPS system with QUAD-SLI! Yes, four video cards. This thing required so much power that the video cards were actually powered by a second power supply which was under the table. Dell's ultra-high-end XPS system is going to very expensive and will be sold in extremely limited quantities. Another perk of the QUAD-SLI system is each case is hand-painted.

Samsung Camera

Samsung Camera is a division separate from Samsung, so they weren't actually at the Samsung booth. Instead, they had a press room! for important people like myself. Many months ago, I posted a press release about a new digital camera called the Pro815 which they were touting as a huge innovation in the digital photography world. It has the longest optical zoom (7.2mm~108mm, 35mm equivalent of 28~420mm) and the largest LCD at a whopping 3.5". I was really excited to get to hold a Pro815, but I have to say my first impressions left me a bit disappointed. The first thing I noticed was that the LCD was huge, but it was really low resolution. When I asked the rep what resolution the LCD was, he didn't know, so I can't give any hard figures on that yet. I also couldn't help but feel like I was holding a Kodak, that's just what it felt like. Not that Kodak's are necessarily bad! they just don't have that quality feel to them. I'd still like to take the Pro815 for a whirl though and see how it fares in a full-on review.

I was also shown a digital camera on the opposite end of the spectrum, a tiny little guy named the Digimax i6. This one had a little more of a quality feel to it, and it is not just a camera, it actually doubles as a portable media player. The i6 is a 6MP camera with a 3x optical zoom lens with an ultra-thin body at only .7" thick, it has 64MB of onboard memory and accepts SD/MMC cards, it's a point-n-shoot obviously, has electronic image stabilization, plays videos (MPEG, AVI, QuickTime, WMV, ASK) and music (MP3, WAV) that you transfer from your computer, records movies at 640x480 (30fps) in MPEG-4, is PictBridge-enabled, uses a lithium-ion battery, and it ships next month for only $299. That's a lot of stuff in a tiny package. Impressive.

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Page 6 of 7

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Page 1: Introduction / Antec
Page 2: Cooler Master
Page 3: SilverStone Technology
Page 4: Microsoft
Page 5: COWON / SanDisk
Page 6: Dell / Samsung Camera
Page 7: LG / BenQ / Monorail / Conclusion

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