Every trade show has its must-see exhibits. With CES, these must-see exhibits are almost determined before the show gets underway. Pre-show press releases, conferences, and early coverage pick the cream of the crop to be the top products of the event. While we got around to a lot of places in the first three days of the 2007 International CES, we saved these must-see exhibits for the final, fourth day. Since this list of exhibitors was rather small, we put off heading down to the Convention Center until later in the day, around 1 PM. This would give us about 3 hours at the show, plenty of time to cover what we hadn’t yet seen. The theme of the day was to be displays and HD media formats. First stop: Central Hall.

One of the big stories coming out of the show was something called the Super Multi Blue Player from LG Electronics. The Super Multi Blue Player is a new reader from LG that can play both Blu-ray and HD-DVD drives. It is a fantastic piece of engineering because the device not only incorporates two different lasers, one red and one blue, but each laser operates at a different wavelength in order to read media from different depths on the disk. The concept seems obvious, and perhaps it was, but LG was the first to do it, and for that they won multiple awards with their player. The player is expected to retail somewhere in the neighborhood of $1100, which is not outrageous considering the individual costs of Blu-ray and HD-DVD players.


Beyond optical media players, LG also had their LCD product lineup on display, including the FLATRON L1982U, a 19” monitor with a 3000:1 contrast ratio and 1ms response time which looks like it will be a killer choice for gamers. On the far side of their booth LG was running a little Blues Brothers concert/game show type of thing in which they would shout out trivia questions and whoever answered them first would receive a free t-shirt. Thomas clearly answered two of the questions well before anyone else but did not receive a t-shirt. Needless to say we will not be reviewing any products from LG in the near future. Just kidding, we hope to have some LG on the plate real soon.