A reported 180,000 eager retailers, custom installers, press, and assorted hangers-on descended on Las Vegas last week for the annual, trade-only CES. I wasn’t one of them. With the advent of Internet coverage from multiple sources (including full videos of the most important press conferences), the growth of the show to include areas we don’t cover (home automation, drones, automobile electronics, and gadgets of all sorts, including such things as a beer brewing machine from LG and a carry-on bag that automatically trails along behind as you bounce your way through the airport), and the outrageous gouging from even the minimally decent Las Vegas hotels ($600 a night isn’t rare), being there isn’t as necessary, or fun, as it once was.
While you can actually see the TVs when attending in person, the experience isn’t much more revealing than seeing them at your local big box retailer, with the sets all programed for punch rather than accuracy and the program material carefully selected to show off the sets at their gaudiest. We hope to review many of them in the year ahead under more controlled conditions.
In addition to our key coverage of the new TVs, I also once enjoyed spending a day or more at the Venetian Hotel, where specialty audio manufacturers would set up shop to demo their latest wares. But that’s dried up to a shadow of its former self (you can read the post-mortem at our sister site, Stereophile.com), with any number of consumer audio shows dramatically exceeding it in the number of exhibitors.
This was the first CES I’ve missed in over 30 years. Will I ever go again? Possibly. But missing out for one year was curiously liberating. Nevertheless, I’ve just spend the past couple of days perusing show reporting from everywhere—the Internet (including our own limited coverage), print, and podcasts—to ferret out the latest on the new TVs so you don’t have to spend a weekend doing so. Most of my coverage here will be of the high-end models that videophiles salivate over. Those designs, of course, are featured at the show, but all manufacturers also produce the more pedestrian (but often quite competent) models that most people buy. Chinese TV maker TCL, in fact, indicated at its press conference that only one buyer on 100 spends over $2000 for a new TV. I can’t conform this, but TCL is definitely positioning its pricing to appeal to that 99%. With worldwide annual TV sales hovering around 300 million, however, 1% is still a lot of sets.
As is usual, neither price nor availability dates were provided at the show. Both are typically released after March at the earliest. I’ll cover the latest from LG, Samsung, and Sony here, and Vizio, Hisense, and TCL next time...
