One big focus for TVs at CES this year was a plethora of alternatives to the remote control. Options ranged from voice to smartphone App connectivity to control solutions, but perhaps the most intriguing for its simplicity and ease of operation is the use of hand gestures to replace the IR remote control. As mentioned in yesterday’s DD by Pete Putman, Samsung was there with a CES Press Day announcement supporting hand gesture technology on several of its high-end, Smart TV models. The company said they will begin shipping high-end TVs (8000 & 6000 series), which include an on-board camera mounted top center of the set, that not only captures images for Skype video phone calls, but also translates gestures into commands that can replace the standard functions of the remote.

To make its point, Samsung had a demo showing the technology in operation at CES and we had a chance to try out the technology first-hand (pun intended). The Samsung device goes beyond a Kinect-like gesture control, by adding voice and even face recognition to the intelligence of the ever smarter Smart TV. For the Samsung gesture demo room, the company set up two large glass enclosed areas.

Our first impression was that the technology worked rather well, with voice and face recognition quite impressive for a first gen demo. To turn the system on, one simply speaks "Hello TV" to prevent any unintended gestures making TV set changes. Voice commands like channel up/down and volume up/down worked fairly well, but did require a strong and fairly loud voice. Others in the room were able to use these voice commands also.

Face recognition was even more robust, but does require the user to be in front of the TV. When a second user moved to this recognition zone, the profile set up for that specific user was recognized (based on face), and displayed top-level content preferences.

What we did notice is the gesture recognition UI needs some. Specifically the screen UI text and icons were rather small, requiring balloons that highlighted tightly packed line items perhaps in an effort to improve visibility and accuracy. As the user waved the hand to control the cursor on-screen, the balloons would appear then disappear, like doing a mouse roll-over on a hypertext link.

This part of the demo even took the trained user a couple of tries to select the specific on-screen function, even after giving demonstrations all day long. Overall the gesture on-screen navigation experience felt a bit forced, as if Samsung engineers migrating a more highly accurate pointing device over to the gesture UI, rather than developing the system from the ground up (note, this is pure speculation on my part.)

Contrast this experience with the Prime Sense demo going on in the South Hall of the CES show where the company confirmed that LG was a licensee and showing its version of a Kinect-like accessory running gesture in their booth. The Prime Sense UI employed a rather innovative highlighting system for gesture control (along with much larger on-screen targets) that made the experience almost game-like and fun. The UI used bright white marker-like highlights on screen, to indicate what was selected. It was rather compelling. The LG system uses a multi-camera approach that is based on creating a 3D image that may prove to be more robust, responsive but perhaps more expensive.

Samsung may have developed the 2D camera based gesture technology itself, or perhaps licensed it from Herzila, Israel based XTR3D (short for Extreme Reality) that sells a single camera solution optimized for a host of devices including TVs, mobile, laptop and gaming. On their web site the company said its technology includes real-time software that uses "...full body 3D motion capture technology," from a single standard webcam. The motion capture engine "extracts the 3D position" of the user in front of the camera, using every frame, then creates a live 3D model of the user in real time, which is analyzed with gestures extracted, using "appropriate tolerances according to skeleton positioning and/or trajectories," the group said.

Specific to the TV solution, XTR for TV requires a web cam and software, offering OEMs a minimal footprint and memory consumption, with seamless integration to augment the existing remote control, working up to 5 meters away. It also helps that the solution is OS agnostic adapting to any platform, according to the company.

We think gesture control, along with voice and face recognition is the "wave" of the future of TV, plus many other devices. Besides being intuitive and convenient, it also has the potential to solve the lost remote problem-and which remote to use. Like so many other areas in TV innovation, what was shown at CES this year was not totally new. We’ve been looking at gesture and voice based TV prototypes since 2008 from Hitachi and Toshiba at CEATEC Japan, and perhaps even before that. But the big difference this time, LG and Samsung TVs are set to move out of the lab and ship to consumers this year. We have no doubt that the Samsung experience will improve to parity LG. So now we can finally say, "Goodbye, remote" and "Hello, TV."

Steve Sechrist is a senior analyst and editor for Insight Media. Reach him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Sanus is now shipping high-speed HDMI cables that feature a special 180° pivoting connector, making it possible for HDMI connection in tight spaces, such as behind mounted TVs and inside crowded media cabinets. The Sanus Pivoting HDMI Cables are offered in three lengths: 3.3 ft (model ELM4203), 6.6 ft (model ELM4206) and 9.5 ft (model ELM4210).

The cables are compatible with 3DTVs (up to HDMI 1.4 specs) and components, and include an integrated Ethernet channel for high-speed Internet connectivity to compatible devices, eliminating the need for a separate Ethernet cable. They support 10-bit, 12-bit and 16-bit color depths and handle video resolution 1080p and beyond. A flexible material allows the cables to be easily routed during installation.

The cables are available for an MSRP of $19.99 (ELM4203), $24.99 (ELM4206), and $34.99 (ELM4210) and can be found here:  http://www.sanus.com/us/en/products/elements/hdmi-cables/ELM4203

News that VIZIO plans to enter the PC market caught quite a few CES attendees off-guard, and it was a common topic of conversation at the show this week. The company announced plans to market all-in-one (AIO) and notebook PCs.

There seem to be good reasons for VIZIO to enter the PC market from a supply-chain perspective. Many of VIZIO’s panel suppliers and assemblers make both LCD TVs and PCs. With VIZIO being a leading brand in the North American LCD TV market, it certainly has purchasing power for LCD panels, a key component of both AIO and notebook PCs.

This announcement also makes sense from a distribution standpoint in that VIZIO is quite strong in U.S. retail. While the brand fell from its number one spot in the North America LCD TV market in 2011, it still has a higher market share than Sony, Toshiba, LGE, Sharp and Panasonic.

Finally, while it may seem strange, the PC market has higher margins than the TV market; therefore, the strategy seems to make sense for a TV-centric company to continue to diversity its portfolio. With AIO PCs growing 39 percent Y/Y from 2010 to 2011, there is likely room for additional players. At the same time, notebook PCs are forecast to see at least an 11 percent Y/Y growth rate in 2012, thanks to new form factors like ultrabooks.

There are some reasons, however, to question the strategy. VIZIO is not the first company of its kind to try to make the cross-over from TVs to PCs (and vice versa). Back in the early 2000s, Dell, HP and other PC companies tried to parlay their flat-panel purchasing power from monitors and notebooks into TVs, without success. Maybe a better comparison would be ViewSonic, also a strong LCD purchaser, which tried to parlay its success in monitors—at the time a bigger market than LCD TVs—into both TVs and PCs; however, neither of them panned out. There are also differences; for example, ViewSonic was not a strong consumer brand.

But ViewSonic was quite strong in small-to-medium (SMB) and other B2B markets, and had strong channel partner relationships and brand awareness. However, this presence and the supply-chain synergies were not enough to allow ViewSonic to compete in the PC market. One of the key challenges was meeting the support demands of end customers. VIZIO might indicate that it has gained experience in supporting demanding consumer needs, for example with smart TVs, but the combination of hardware, operating system, and software application support that PC users require will likely be much more difficult.

Digging deeper into the growth potential for the PC space also does not bode well for US-centric VIZIO. In 2011, AIO shipments in North America dropped 8 percent; the growth came instead from China (up 178 percent Y/Y) and Latin America (up 107 percent). Likewise, notebook PC shipments (not including tablet or mini-note PCs) were up only 3 percent Y/Y in North America. Of course the area of most significant growth will be tablet PCs, with a projected growth rate of 58 percent in North America in 2012, but VIZIOs 8″ tablet  has yet to catch the attention of consumers the way Apple’s iPad or Amazon’s Kindle Fire have.

This article was reprinted with permission from DisplaySearch and originally appeared here.

As my colleague Steve Sechrist reported in a recent Display Daily, both LG Electronics and Samsung introduced their own 55-inch AMOLED TV sets at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) being held in Las Vegas this week. Both companies exhibited multiple units of their AMOLED TVs on the show floor to extremely appreciative audiences.

With both companies promising to sell such sets before the end of the year, is it too early to ask what might follow AMOLED as the even newer, even fresher large-screen TV technology?

What might appear to be the answer to that question was tucked away in the technology corner of Sony’s large exhibit space at CES: two FHD 55-inch CrystalLED TV sets. Although Sony had issued a press release a couple of days before, it was easily misunderstood, and the actual screen took display people by surprise. So what is CrystalLED? It is an emissive screen in which each pixel is made up of an RGB trio of inorganic LEDs. The screens looked great. In fact, they looked generally like AMOLED screens, which isn’t very surprising.

Sony representatives new very little about the screens they were showing, beyond what we’ve just said. They had no knowledge of how the screens are fabricated or what the cost issues might be. They were, however, emphatic in saying that CrystalLED is a technology demonstration and that there are no plans for it to be a product.

Now we know why. An extremely reliable source in the Asian display industry has informed Display Daily that the CrystalLED screen is composed of roughly 6.2 million LED chips (one for each sub-pixel) wire bonded to the appropriate pads. The result is a beautiful display, but it’s hard to imagine Sony building it in volume at anything approaching an acceptable cost.

A practical inorganic LED panel does have attractions. It could solve the blue aging problem and consequent color shift that bedevils OLED displays. Inorganic blue LEDs are famously long-lived. (They are the emissive engines in all of the white LEDs used in the backlight of cell phones, notebook PCs, and LED-lit LCD-TVs.) They could also be more efficient, if miniature LEDs share the luminous efficiency of their large brothers used in solid state lighting.

So, are their ways of making an inorganic LED display that could be competitive in cost with AMOLED? Maybe. At least one other panel-maker has been looking at the problem and considering how inorganic LEDs could be placed on a glass substrate in economical ways. Wire bonding is not part of that solution.

Ken Werner is a senior analyst and editor for Insight Media. Reach him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Fresh out of the gate here at CES minus one, aka, "Press Day," the hot rivalry between Samsung and LG just turned white-hot at the blockbuster introductions of not one, but two, 55-inch OLED TVs (using two different technologies) from the two Korean CE giants.

First came LG’s 55-inch OLED (uses white OLED, plus a color filter of RGBW) which had the media at a frenzied pitch by the time the press conference ended. LG’s John Taylor and company had the stage mobbed by a press eager to get an up-close look at the new set, despite the best efforts of company-hired security to protect the new device from a swarm of onlookers.

Then six hours later, Samsung, never to be upstaged by hometown rival LG, announced its new 55-inch OLED set (also scheduled to ship in 2012), based on its red, green and blue OLED sub-pixels and, perhaps, PenTile technology (sans any color filter). Samsung evidently learned from LG’s mistake of leaving the set on stage for the press as they moved the OLED set off stage before the end of the show.

OLED technology has been in the offing for the past four years, after the long-promised technology arguably made its TV debut at the 2008 CES with the Sony XEL-1. That 11-inch OLED TV was more of a proof-of-concept device, offering an eye-popping display that served to whet the Consumer Electronics industry’s appetite for the "uber" thin, self-emitting OLED technology.

Today, that earlier promise was delivered and then some -- at least as far as any trade-show press conference can -- and not by Sony, but by two Korean rivals who seem, more than ever, determined to leave Sony in the consumer TV technology race dust with large OLEDS that will ship this year.

LG offered a stunning pedestal style 55-inch diagonal package with electronics built into the base of its stand. Specifications for the new display include a new model number (55EM9600) and a very light for its size (16.5 lbs.) ultra thin (4mm) product. To get the stunning images, Tim Alessi, LG’s director of home electronics new product development confirmed that the set uses a White OLED approach with a four primary (RGBW) color filter. They also employ what LG calls "Color Refiner" technology that works together to generate "natural and accurate colors that are sharp and consistent." According to LG, this technology uses a special algorithm to improve viewing angle and refine hues and tones, making the viewing experience more consistent than in past models.

For its part, Samsung said far less about their OLED, offering no model number as yet, but did indicate in an earlier report in Korea-based ET News that the panel was made on their 5.5-Gen SMS line (small mask scanning), having reached yields and life time efficiencies that justify going to market, perhaps in time for the 2012 Olympics.

Four years ago at CES, Sony launched its 11-inch "TV" along with an odd native resolution of 960×540 to much fanfare, but, by February 2010, the company stopped production amid concerns over limited lifetime of the display technology (17K hours to half brightness) that uses sub-pixel architecture, micro cavity and compensation circuits developed by Sony. A report on Sony’s OLED lifetime released at the time stated, "The RGB architecture is very sensitive to the image and has a 5,000 hour lifetime for white and a 17,000 hour lifetime for the typical video image, well below the published specifications of Sony. Moreover the panel suffers from differential aging: After 1,000 hours the blue luminance degraded by 12 percent, the red by 7 percent and the green by 8 percent," according to the DisplaySearch findings. For its part, Sony continued to maintain the published spec of 30K hours life for the XEL-1 OLED TV. The set eventually reached a selling price of $2,500 and was the world’s thinnest TV at just 3 mm.

But Sony was successful in creating demand for the new OLED technology and the time is ripe for OLEDs to once again appear, this time in full-HD and real TV sizes of 55-inch. It will also be interesting to see who choose the better OLED approach in these "early days" of large display for the technology — the lower cost and perhaps less risky LG color filter approach, or Samsung’s RGB OLED cells that depend on getting the science right to match lifetime color uniformity and brightness over the long haul. Let’s hope the lessons of Sony weren’t lost on Samsung and they can deliver on what some are calling the "messiah of TVs."

Steve Sechrist senior analyst and editor at Insight Media. Reach him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it