CES settles for subdued

Monday, January 12th, 2009

Take down the bunting, dismantle the booths and unchain the journalists, because the Consumer Electronics Show is over for another year.

For anybody unaware of CES, it’s an annual conference held in Las Vegas in which the industry gathers en masse to pat itself on the back in a series of self-congratulatory keynotes, and show off its new product lines for the forthcoming year. Given the glitz and sheer, sweaty effort that goes into creating CES, it almost seems counter intuitive to suggest that it was a muted affair, but beneath the bragging everybody was nervous. Crowds were a staggering 31,000 lower than last year. Shuttle buses sat empty, and lines of taxis sat waiting for people who would never come. Though the big boys’ stalls still got plenty of interest, drifting even slightly away from the centre hall meant things got very lonely, very quickly.

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2009 will be the year of DisplayLink

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

We’ve talked about DisplayLink quite a bit recently at PC Pro, whether as a boxout in a recent TFTs Labs or in product reviews like the Village Tronic ViBook. Late 2008 saw a few tentative moves by major manufacturers like Samsung, LG and InFocus to incorporate DisplayLink natively into monitors and projectors, but 2009 looks set to be the year when the technology really explodes into life.

Early reports from CES in Las Vegas have most of the major monitor brands launching DisplayLink versions of products, and mainly on previously successful, high-quality monitor lines. Several companies are also launching adapters that will convert any exisiting monitor to DisplayLink, which takes care of backwards compatibility.

DisplayLink – sending the video signal via USB rather than standard graphics outputs, for those who haven’t been keeping up – won’t revolutionise your use of your main monitor, let’s be honest. But I’m pretty certain it’ll grow in popularity among those with multi-monitor setups, those who regularly hook up TFTs to a laptop with limited outputs, and those who simply don’t want or need graphics cards cluttering up their compact PCs.

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