The Best of CES 2012
by Jarred Walton on January 17, 2012 6:15 PM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
- Lenovo
- Asus
- CES
- Transformer Prime
- CES 2012
- Yoga 13
- 4K
Lenovo’s Yoga 13: Ultrabook, IPS, Windows 8, and Convertible
Last on my list of impressive showings at CES is the Lenovo Yoga 13. This is another ultrabook, and if you weren’t at the show, let me just say that Intel is pushing ultrabooks in a major way. We’ve reviewed several shipping ultrabooks, and I can guarantee there will be many more to come. Every laptop manufacturer had one (or more) on display, and Intel’s booth used probably half of their public floor space to show off ultrabooks and related technologies. So far, none of the ultrabooks we’ve reviewed have really nailed every area, but when the Yoga 13 starts shipping that might finally change.
The short summary is that the Yoga 13 sports a 1600x900 IPS touchscreen panel, and it’s beautiful to behold. How Lenovo manages to cram touchscreen and IPS, plus a folding laptop/tablet hybrid into a 17mm thick chassis is something of a mystery. Okay, perhaps it’s not that mysterious—I expect the device will carry a pretty steep price tag, but hopefully it will be worth buying. The design felt solid in the hand, the soft-touch coating on the palm rest is great, and with an Ivy Bridge CPU and SSD performance should be there as well. The only major complaint I have is that the IdeaPad Yoga 13 won’t start shipping until the Windows 8 release, and I want to test one now (or at least when Ivy Bridge officially launches).
Best of Show Summary
I didn’t intentionally set out to find a top three of CES that all shared a common theme, but it’s there nonetheless. For anyone who uses a computer or tablet, or who watches TV and movies, the one thing you always have to see is the display. Put in a great display and you can rise above the crowd; cut corners and you enter the race to the bottom that has brought about the cheap construction and poor quality that run rampant at Best Buy, Office Depot, etc.
Long term, the higher quality displays in tablets and HDTVs are eventually going to force laptops to adopt better, higher resolution displays. What's sad is that I have a 1920x1200 laptop from five years ago, and that display probably cost the manufacturer $350 (possibly less). Today's $350 displays are almost universally worse, other than having brighter LED backlighting. Meanwhile, the $1000 2.8GHz Core 2 Extreme (dual-core) CPU in the laptop is now slower than even a basic $130 Core i3-2310M in most tasks, and this formerly $4000 laptop is also slower than today's laptops that cost just $750. The price-performance ratio has shifted an order of magnitude in five years, but laptop displays continue to stagnate.
I hope we’re nearing the inflection point where consumers will start asking for better laptop displays. When all the tablets at Best Buy are WUXGA, QXGA, or even QHD/QWXGA, advertising a laptop as having a 720p panel ought to present problems for Joe Sixpack. I also hope that Windows 8 will revamp the handling of high DPI displays; Windows 7 does a bit better than Vista, and both are a big step up from XP, but I still routinely encounter applications that don’t scale with DPI settings. When such applications are written with the assumption that everything runs at 96 DPI—and worse, when they have a fixed window size—the result is text that overruns the viewable area and buttons that are unclickable. I’d guess Metro apps will all scale nicely with DPI settings, but we’ll have to see how many apps (and users) eschew Metro on desktops and laptops and stick with the familiar desktop interface.
Wrap Up
That takes care of my top three, but as I noted in the introduction I didn’t even see a fraction of the show floor. (I could also do a bottom three of CES, but that’s too easy: the taxi lines and crowds take slots one and two for me, and the pay-$12-per-day-for-lousy-Internet gets the third. But I digress.) Even with ten editors from AnandTech running around, I’m sure we missed covering a lot of cool technology and gadgets, so I’m curious to know: what do you see and/or read about at CES 2012 that impressed you most? What would you like to see us cover sooner rather than later? Let us know in the comments!
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imaheadcase - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
Because marketing a TV for thousands of dollars now is not going to appeal to the small market of gamers who care :DBut i'm with you, if the price was right, I would be willing to be a first adopter if i could get a hands on preview of it. Meaning see how it does hooked up to a computer with a few games.
Computer monitors have been at a standstill for quite a long time. It basically went CRT to LCD and thats pretty much it. In fact i would venture to say its went BACKWARDS for monitors..it used to be anything over 24 inches was 1900x1200. Now you see the market flooded with 22-23 inch 1900x1080 monitors. Or worse 27 inch 1900x1200.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
4K definitely works on PCs -- I don't even care if it requires two connectors. However, I expect the cost to be prohibitively high for a while. I mean, the movie theaters and digital film has already been using 4K for a while, but it's just not consumer grade stuff. But yeah, AMD showed you could definitely play games on a 4K display. All you need is the display and a GPU with the necessary ports, but I think the display part is only available special order for >$15K.chizow - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
I asked in the other thread about 4K/2K, but did AMD actually demo any actual PC games (just saw some in-house castle demo)?That was my point though, with PC gaming we don't need to wait for any content since most any game that reads resolution caps from Windows will be able to render natively at 4K/2K and output 4K/2K natively over 1 output, or with some help from the driver if 2 outputs.
But that makes sense about the price/demand aspect, since no one is going to make $15K displays affordable just for the PC gaming community. I guess our best bet of seeing these displays commoditized in the near future would be the professional graphics space, which is what largely drove the 2560x1600 format and 30" IPS market as well.
JarredWalton - Saturday, January 21, 2012 - link
I only saw their rolling demo, but that's not too surprising. I also poked around at the system from the Windows desktop and everything was as you would expect. I thought I saw a shortcut for a game, but I don't have any pictures of the Windows desktop so I can't confirm or deny. Basically, the game would have to support the dual DP outputs running a single display I think, but if a game supports Eyefinity that shouldn't be a problem.Fanfoot - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
Good questions of course.One obvious use of 4K displays would be to allow for passive 3D without sacrificing resolution. So while only half the pixels would go to one eye, you'd still have 1080p resolution (with say line doubling on top of it). Assuming anybody cares about 3D of course.
Another possibility is that displays could do upscaling. So just as we saw EDTVs at the end of the SD life-cycle there could be 4K displays upscaling 1080p content.
Then of course there's games. An updated XBox or PS4 could conceivably drive a higher resolution display. Not clear this will happen of course, but the potential for this increases as the number of years before these consoles get a refresh.
Then of course there's movies on disk. Studios want you to buy Blu-Ray movies and not stream stuff over the internet or watch it via your MSO's VOD offering. So a future 4K Blu-Ray standard could push higher resolution as one way of trying to stave off the eventual move to all digital delivery. Sony for example claims to have more than 60 theatrical releases shot in 4K, and there have been a number of high profile pushes for 4K (James Cameron for example is shooting Avatar 2 in 4K). Sony has promised to work with the Blu-Ray disk assocation to define a new 4K standard and has promised to release the next Spiderman movie in 4K.
How are they going to do that? Well... they can already do 1080p 3D, so all they need to do is something less than double that. And the next codec being developed has a goal of another halving of needed bandwidth. So... Or there's always more layers...
Bit rate for cable or satellite delivery? Well...
Fanfoot - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
Looks like the Joint Video Team is targeting 2013 for the next video codec, currently tagged High Efficiency Video Coding or HEVC. It'll get deployed whether 4K is a reality or not of course, since it'll also allow lowering the bit rate for the same quality, whether for mobile video applications or simply 1080p content streaming over the internet....Fanfoot - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
And it looks like the existing PS3 will be able to display 4K stills. So these TVs will work great for photo-realistic paintings or simply displaying your high-resolution camera images.PubFiction - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
Too me 4k displays are going to be about what used to be eyefinity. Everyone tryies to get small bezels and good monitors. 4k offers you that , it offeres you no bezel. So maybe if they are fast enough gamers will want them in place of 3 monitors.Assimilator87 - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
120Hz.
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4k
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.
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OLED
>_<
Finraziel - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
I'm actually wondering why on earth we'd need 4K displays at all? I have a full HD 42" plasma (and love it), but I barely see the difference between 1080 and 720 content. Even when downloading for free, I don't bother going for the 1080 version. Same for the bitrate, why do you need the 40 mbit rate that bluray offers when a 4 mbit file (720p 40 minute episodes are generally around 1.2 GB) looks fine?What I wish the industry would move towards a bit faster, is a higher framerate! Sitting 3 meters away I don't really see more pixels, but I do see chopping when the camera is panning around (even though I have a plasma, I'd probably go nuts if I'd have an LCD with a static backlight). It seems insane to me that with all the improvements to image quality over the last decades we're still stuck at 24 to 30 frames per second...