It's déjà vu all over again: just like last year, the most impressive innovations we saw at CES -- imaging or otherwise -- came from Kodak.
[Other top draws at the show include Sanyo's low-cost hi-res camcorder, and a see-in-the-dark sensor from Korea. Details are all in this week's Briefing.]
More than 150,000 attendees from 110 countries walked 1.67 million square feet of exhibit space to see the wares of more than 2,500 companies at the 2006 CES. The Consumer Electronics Association predicts that industry sales will climb from $125.9 billion last year to $135.4 billion this year.
All told, the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada was once again a huge exposition, filled this year with even more huge screens -- LCD, plasma, rear-projection, and, shown for the first time at a major public venue, the likely winner in the TV toss-up: SED, the CRT-like display technology jointly developed by Toshiba and Canon.
The opening night keynote from Microsoft chairman Bill Gates really debuted -- nothing. Mostly, he just gave a very long demonstration of Vista, the next version of Windows that is now promised for the end of 2006. [Vista's photo browser will have photo editing built in, and video clips will work in photo slideshows. Not much else caught our eye. Even Justin Timberlake looked bored during his walk-on.]
Robin Williams was quite funny at Google's announcement of its video website -- but despite the "Google helmet" he initially wore as a joke, we don't quite see how the speech by Google's co-founder rated a keynote position at a consumer electronics showcase...
