Andreas Gustafsson's Blog

Sunday, March 12, 2006

CeBIT 2006

My employer was kind enough to invite everyone at the company on a trip to CeBIT.
We started out from Sweden thursday morning and drove down to Hamburg where we stayed overnight. Friday morning it was snowing a lot, and it took us quite a while longer than planned to get to Hannover. Luckily the -1C and snowing that we started out with in Hamburg had turned to +14C when we got to Hannover!

For those of you who don't know this - CeBIT is HUGE, there's no way to cover the entire fair in only one day, but we did our best to atleast see the most interesting stuff.

The first thing we checked out was Toshiba, were I had expected to see SED technology in action, but it was nowhere to be seen. They did show a lot of HD-DVD demos, and while the detail level was great (which even made you see a lot of the imperfections from the filming process, grain etc.) there seemed to be some choppiness with scrolling/panorama shots. I don't know what could case this, perhaps the material was 30 fps upconverted from 24, which sometimes can show such artefacts.

Apart from SED which was missing, there were a LOT of other highdef displays. Plasma, LCD, LCOS etc. After seeing what feels like thousands of screen, the overall impression was that plasma displays delivered the best picture overall. Most impressive of all were the large 100+ inch 1920x1080p screens that many were showing. Gargantuan size and simply awesome picture, even when viewed from close range.


Panasonics 103" monster plasma



Me next to Samsung's 102" plasma



LG's 102" plasma flanked by Christian and Anders

Since one of my hobbies is developing games for cellphones, I also made an effort to see what was new in this area. I saw a couple of phones aimed at gaming (better control layout, 3d acceleration etc.), but they seemed to be for the asia market only so far.

Highres screens (320x240 etc.) also seems to be more common now (which from a developer standpoint means yet another set of art has to be created probably), but atleast Sony-Ericsson still seemed to have quite a few new models with the good old 176x220 screens. I also have to mention the new phones from VK mobile, a company that I never even had heard about before, but they had some very nice looking superthin phones with OLED screens. While they didn't have camera, everything else seemed to indicate a capable phone, but with a weight just a tad above 50 grams!


Samsung game phone



LG game phone (SV360) with 1 Mpoly/sec 3D acceleration




Closeup of the LG phone


Other than that, we saw about fivehundred billion MP3 players and iPod accessories, and a LOT of companies ripping of other companies design and ideas.

Someone is trying to bring the Commodore brand back, selling MP3 players and mediastations I think it was, but atleast they paid homage to the machine that built the brandname!


A real classic makes an apperance at CeBIT


And ofcourse, there were other things besides technology to look at...



1 Comments:

  • I am not trying to be some cynic,*Raises his hands in some humility* but man u don't have to use flash of your camera is such bright places.
    Never ever use a flash in front of surces which may reflect the flash.

    By Blogger Tarun, at 23:19  

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