The best of CES

The 2011 International CES event, in Las Vegas, from 6 to 9 January, featured 20 000 technology product innovations, drawing 2 700 companies and over 140 000 attendees.

ITWeb highlights the innovations that had everyone talking during the show.

At the tail end of 2009, 3D really took off. The world has James Cameron's Avatar to thank for that, both when it comes to the technology for powering the visuals and capturing them.

CES 2011 had a ton of 3D TVs; many in the wider, more cinematic 21:9 screen ratio.

More notably, Sony and Panasonic had still and video cameras equipped with two lenses and capable of capturing 3D images. These cameras will, no doubt, be the next big thing as consumers start looking for more ways to use the 3D functionality in their expensive, new TVs.

Now users have to wait for 3D printers, so that 3D pictures don't have to be viewed with 3D glasses.

The Samsung series 9 ultraportable notebook is the Korean company's attempt at making a better, more stylish Macbook Air. Its new portable computer is a hair thinner and gnat lighter than the equivalent 13-inch model from Apple.

Brushed aluminium surfaces and a bright LED-backlit screen are joined by 4GB of RAM, a 128GB SSD, and one of Intel's new Core i5 processors based on the Sandy Bridge architecture.

Pricing is a bit of a sore point: Samsung says it'll sell for $1 599 in the US. That's a fair bit pricier than the Air, even with the 4GB RAM upgrade, but the Samsung still has a much better processor.

No word yet on if and when SA will see this notebook.

LG was probably tired of seeing rival Samsung get all the attention for its Galaxy S Android smartphone, so the Goldstar engineers developed the Optimus Black: “the world's thinnest and fastest smartphone in the world”, according to LG.

It sure is slim, though, at 9.2mm, and the 4-inch NOVA display has a maximum brightness of 700 nits - nearly double the average notebook or desktop display which is around 400 nits.

LG says the new display technology also uses up to half as little power as the competing AMOLED display in Samsung's Galaxy S. It is expected to land in SA later this year.

While users are already well acquainted with HDTV, and its variants, there is now 3D TV, and some offshoot technologies. But where it's really at is Internet-connected displays.

LG has been selling its “smart TVs” in SA for a while, but at CES it showed off a set-top box to give existing TVs a new lease on life.

Its ST600 Smart TV Upgrader adds DLNA, Web browsing and application capabilities to any HDMI-equipped HDTV. LG has not said exactly what the ST600 will do, but if it has some of the features from LG's smart TVs, then expect Skype, Flickr, YouTube and multimedia playback, along with weather, news and other information services.

No word, yet, on whether this will be available in SA.

Memjet is perhaps not a name everybody would immediately associate with desktop printing. The company develops and licenses its technology to OEM partners, and at CES 2011 it demonstrated the latest in inkjet technology using a Memjet reference printer.

The new tech only requires a single pass of the page to print, in colour, at speeds of up to 60 pages per minute. That officially makes it the fastest desktop printing technology on the planet, it claims.

Memjet says printers using the new technology should hit the market this year.