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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piroroadkill - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
No, it's basically not worth it on phones.I have an 800x480 4.3" display, and it looks more than fine to me. I also used an iPhone 4 and 4S with their 960x640 3.5" display. I'd take the 800x480 at 4.3" any day. It doesn't look any better to me at this tiny size, and I'd rather have the larger screen.
Finraziel - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
I'm using the Samsung Galaxy Note now (is it released stateside? No idea...) which has a 5.3" screen with 1280x800 display and I never want to go back. This resolution means I can view just about any website without zooming in in landscape and it's big and sharp enough for me to read ebooks in PDF form on (such as programming books). So for me, yes, the increase in resolution is definately worth it :)R3MF - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
" while I’m not sure if all 4K displays will use the same resolution, this particular panel was running at 4096x2160, so it’s even wider than the current 16:9 aspect ratio panels (and closer to cinema resolutions)"I can't help feeling they would have done better to just make 4K a straight 2:1 aspect ratio, and kept the resolution at 4096x2048!
MamiyaOtaru - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
gah I have been dreaming of a QXGA LCD for my desktop for ages! I'm stuck at 1600*1200 and hating this new widescreen stuffiSayuSay - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
Technology is always about patience. If we're just patient enough to wait for them to be mature and more common, you can jump in with a much reasonable $$$.Hard lesson learned when I bought launch day PS3 back in 2006. It was friggin $650, I couldn't afford to buy one actually, but I "had to". It was very very expensive to me.
And just within 13months after that I got the YLOD for the first time in my life! My super expensive launch day PS3 was unrepairable, not under warranty anymore and I was just frustrated.
I paid Sony $650 just for being lousy beta tester! Now we could buy a $300 PS3 with no YLOD, more energy efficient, better cooling system and chips.
I said no more!! No more wasting my hard earned money to buy a expensive beta phase technology.
And I would wait 4K display to be matured enough, have adequate and affordable contents, price range and availability.
Even now, how many 1080p content was actually available? Does it already widespread like standard DVD? I know many people who owns a LED HDTV but not care enough to notice that they still watch sub 720p content.
bhima - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
Most poignant point I've read all day: "What really irks me is that all of this comes in a 10.1” IPS package, exactly what I’ve been asking for in laptops for the past several years." AMEN brother. I bought a Sager because it actually offers a good 95% color gamut screen. As a designer, I really have a small window of choice because these manufacturers don't offer a decent monitor yet every tablet seems to push out great displays.The 4K TV thing is great, but in terms of gaming there will be a huge technology gap once the 4K monitors are priced reasonably. I just don't think our GPUs will be able to push those kinds of pixels in the next 3 years except for maybe the $500 beast cards or SLI/Crossfire.
bhima - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
Needs an EDIT button:The Lenovo Yoga is ALMOST perfect. If it just had a wacom digitizer in it, it would be worth a lot of money to me and other graphic designers. Hell, it could force even Mac-heads to consider converting to Microsoft.
chizow - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
Idk, at the rate GPUs progress, next-gen single GPUs tend to perform similarly to last-gen's top-end SLI configs. Its not quite 100%, probably closer to 50% increase over 2 years but its very possible we'll see a single GPU push 4K/2K without much trouble while maintaining high framerates (~60FPS).4K/2K is roughly 4x the resolution of 1080p, very close to 2x2 supersampling over the same screen area. We already have mid to high-end configurations pushing 3x1080p with surround configurations from both vendors with relative ease, and even 3D with those same resolutions which is an effective 6x1080p.
4K/2K wouldn't be too much additional burden, I think even a high-end single card would be able to push that resolution without too much trouble, and today's high-end card is tomorrow's mid-range card.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
I'd just look at our triple-head desktop benchmarks if you want to know roughly how well current GPU setups can handle 4K displays for gaming. Basically, something like HD 7970 CF or GTX 580 SLI will certainly handle it, though you'll want the 2GB/3GB models. Now it's just waiting for the price to come down--on the GPUs as well as the displays.cheinonen - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
4K support for studios varies a bit based on which studio it is. Sony, for example, has their Colorworks processing facility on their lot and all of their work is done at 4K at a minimum, with some work done at 8K resolution. As 4K displays start to come into play you will likely see a transition to 8K workflows at studios that allow them to sample CGI and other effects down to 4K for release. If you search at Sony's website you can find a list of 4K theater releases and theaters that support them. The majority of digital cinema is still presented at HD format, though Blu-ray releases likely use a slightly different master since the colorspace and gamma target for cinema releases is much different than the Rec 709 target for Blu-ray.100 GB for 4K is really pushing the limits of the medium, and not likely to be what would be used. Most Blu-ray titles clock in around the 30-40 GB range for the film, so given 4x the resolution you are looking at 120-160 GB for a film of similar quality. Another current issue with 4K at the home is I believe that HDMI 1.4a is limited to 24p at 4K resolution, so while films can work fine, no TV or Video content will be able to be upscaled outside of the display or projector. I imagine before 4K really catches on we will have another update to HDMI, and a new media format, as downloads are obviously not fast enough for 4K streaming or downloads yet.