CES - Jason "Fujitsu" Schneider - Day 1

One day down, three more to go. The first day of CES was a great one, and we definitely covered alot of ground during the day. Today I spent the entire day at the Sands and Venician, and we visited a ton of great booths, and saw a ton of great products. We were able to check out and get a quick demo of alot of newly released products, and hopefully we will be able to get some of these products onto our bench and give them a more thorough test.

 I'll post a brief description of some of the products we saw today, as well as some links. These are some of the main meetings we had today, we also had some quick stops at alot of other booths, and we will hopefully add some more of those at a later time.

Accordance Systems

Accordance Systems provides affordable RAID solutions for both business and home users . We had the privilege on Monday of getting to see Accordance’s products first hand. They provide 3.5” PATA HDD, as well as SATA HDD internal RAID solutions, and also 2.5” HDD internal RAID solutions, as well as External USB and Firewire.  This is a company that you may not have seen or heard of, but they offer some great RAID storage solutions, we look forward to hopefully being able to take a look at some of their products in the future, as they provide a great alternative to your traditional RAID setups.

ARAID 1000L

ARAID M100

The ARAID 1000L mounts into two 5.25” bays , and is completely self-contained and does not require any onboard and add-on RAID controllers, its all in one box. It also contains a LCD panel on the front that provides drive status, temperatures and system status.  Both trays are fully lockable, and also have built-in fans to ensure both drives remain cool at all times. A similar version using SATA HDD's is also available (ARAID 2000 Dual Mode )

The ARAID M100 uses two laptop HDD’s (2.5”) and turns them into a RAID array, giving you a RAID array in approximately the same size as a CD-ROM (The M100 fits into a single 5.25” Bay).  Like the 1000L, the M100 it also contains a LCD to provide drive and system status as well as HDD temperatures.

ARAID T1000L (USB Connected)

Microdisplay

We were able to attend Microdisplay's first ever press conference, and were able to be there for the unveiling of their newest (and first) 1080p high definition rear-projection big screen. I was very impressed with the quality of the picture, it definitely is going to be a product to watch in the future.  

Microdisplay is a brand new player in the high-def projection TV market . They are partnering with AKIA and Memorex to release 56” and larger 1080p rear projection televisions in the summer of 2007.  

Microdisplay 56" 1080p Rear Projection TV

Microdisplay hopes to revolutionize the big-screen market, and plans to bring down the current market price for rear projection televisions. The estimated retail value of their 56” inch televisions will be approximately $1500 USD at release, making it more affordable than any other 1080p projection TV’s on the market today, they also plan to lower that price even more in the future.

The native resolution of the display (1080p) is 1920x1080 , and all their televisions use only a single proprietary LCOS chip that uses their “Liquid Fidelity” technology (Rear projection TV’s on the market today normally use 3 chips). Microdisplay also has plans to release models up to and over 60” and also reduce the width from 16” (that was displayed at the press conference) to under 10” in the future.  

Liquid Fidelity LCOS Chip

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