There were two companies that had unique products in the area of wearable video recorders. VIEVU has a small wearable video camera that can clip or be pinned to clothing. The unit touts MPEG4 compression to achieve 'over 4 hours' of 640x480 pixel video. The representative mentioned that the strorage is built-in and cannot be expanded. They didn't mention how much memory it has on-board. The unit is very light and has very good picture quality and also has a infra-red mode for night recording.

The unit is aimed at people doing interviews or even parents that want to record the action of their kids sports without having to be constantly holding the video camera. The video can be downloaded to a computer via a USB connection.

The unit starts recording when the lens cover is slid down and stops recording when the cover is slid back up to cover the lens. The unit has a rubberized exterior, is water proof and weighs around 5 oz. The dimensions are 2.75" x 1.75" x 0.65".

There are two models, the PVR-LE and PVR-Pro. The PVR-LE is the consumer version and the PVR-Pro is the professional version that supports encryption for use in law enforcement and legal representation of the data.

Overall, the unit seemed sturdy and had decent video quality. At some point I would like to do a hands-on review.

Company URL: http://www.vievu.com/

Twenty20 Cameras has a new product called VholdR. This product was on display and was a winner of a CES 2008 Innovation award. The VholdR is similar to VIEVU's product in that it is a MPEG4 video recorder. The similarity ends there. This product is aimed mostly at sports enthusiasts that want to film their adventures. The camera mounts onto a helmet via a quick release adapter. The barrel shaped unit has a microSD card slot and sports a USB connection to pull videos off to a computer.

The microSD card slot doesn't support SDHC cards, but hopefully the company will provide an updated unit that will. The unit is powered by a removable lithium polymer battery and the company states a 2 hour battery life.

The VholdR is a very lightweight unit that is 4.8 oz. Recording can be easily started and stopped via a sliding on-off switch.

The helmet attachment appeared sturdy and easily accessible for turning on and off recording. It is more streamlined than the PVR-LE, but then again both are aimed at different markets, but the PVR-LE can be used like the VholdR by using a helmet strap (per the company representative). It would be a little more obtrusive since it has to mount to the front of the helmet and may not be as secure.

Company URL: http://www.vholdr.com/

MyVu Corp announced their new line of wearable displays. The Crystal 701 is a lightweight VGA display that unlike many other wearable displays, the product is small, light (2.6 oz) and doesn't look overly nerdy. The unit has connectors that support the video iPod, Zune and composite video from computers, portable DVD players and certain cell-phones.

The display for the Crystal 701 is 640x480 pixel, 24 bit color. The USB rechargable Li-Polymer battery is stated to last up to 4 hours. The video quality is quite good and comes a long way from the previously cumbersome lower resolution wearable displays.

Company URL: http://www.myvu.com/HomePage.html

Sony OLED TV

There were a couple of companies displaying new OLED displays. These displays have an edge over LCD in that they OLED display is self illuminating and therefore doesn't require a backlight. The display is also much lower power consumption than Plasma and lower power requirements than LCD due to the absence of a backlight. The contrast ratio for OLED is amazing. These displays are very thin in comparison to the current LCD displays.

Sony displayed their 11" OLED set and their 27" prototype with 1 million:1 contrast ratio which was dwarfed by Samsung's new 31" OLED TV. Samsung is working on a 40" OLED set that hopefully we'll se at the 2009 CES. Pictures of the 31" Samsung weren't allowed in the Samsung CES OLED viewing room.

There were some extremely thin LCD TVs and thin plasma displays. The thin displays ranged in thickness from 3 mm to 39 mm depending on the size of the display.

TV manufacturers once again this year tried to best each other in the massive TV category. The players this year was Sharp and Panasonic.

Panasonic showed off their 150" plasma display that touts 4x the resolution of a 1080p television. The picture quality, even from close up, was amazing. Panasonic calls this display 'Life Screen'. Now how am I am going to get that into my living room..

Sharp was showing off their 103" and 108" LCD televisions. The sets were amazingly thin for their size. The picture quality was amazing, but I think the 150" Plasma sported a more vivid picture.

Toshiba showed off a embedded image processing chip that can scale a 480i image (640x480 interlaced) to 1080p (1280x1024 progressive) resolution. The detail that the processing extracted was nothing short of a miracle. The processor can be used to up convert current standard definition programs to HD quality for transmission to the customer or can be embedded into consumer devices. Click the image on the right for a full resolution image (warning - large file size).

One manufacturer that will remain to be unnamed in this article showed off a simulated 240 Hz versus a 120 Hz LCD TV. The representation showed the 120 Hz LCD video to be jerky, but the 240 Hz one to be smooth. The 120 Hz is faster than the human eye can perceive, so I don't see the immediate advantage of 240 Hz.