Touchscreen tablets and the latest high-definition TV’s are two of the hottest items featured at the giant Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. Both technologies were designed and developed by businesses with Clark County ties.
Sharp Microelectronics and Sharp Laboratories in Camas and Wacom in Vancouver sent engineers and executives to the trade show, which ends Sunday, to pitch products, spot new technologies and trends and predict what gadgets will dominate in 2010. Both were encouraged by the show’s attendance and range of new products, as well as the positive response to their latest offerings.
The Consumer Electronics Association predicts slightly higher revenues for the industry this year, with more than $165 billion in U.S. shipment revenues, compared to $159 billion in 2009, which represented a 7.8 percent decline from $171.9 billion in 2008.
“The traffic seems pretty high and that’s definitely important for us,” said Doug Little, a spokesman for Wacom. “We have a lot of meetings with buyers … places like Best Buy and Staples and Fry’s. They’re looking not only at products we have now but what we’re developing.”
In addition to showing its new Bamboo line of pen and touch tablets, Wacom unveiled a prototype of its latest multitouch technology that allows input from an unlimited number of fingers on a screen. The G6 (generation six) technology is aimed at computer suppliers such as Hewlett-Packard that use Wacom’s multitouch function in their own product lines.
Such touch technology lies behind some of the most talked-about items at CES this year, electronic readers and tablet computers, essentially small laptops with touchscreen monitors instead of keyboards.
HP, which employs hundreds in Vancouver, announced at the show this week that its new laptop, the Touchsmart tm2, converts to a tablet that includes Wacom’s touch technology.
Wacom says it supplies about 90 percent of the market with the digitizing technology that turns pen or finger movements into electronic signals on a screen.
“Touch is definitely something that will continue to grow in the industry,” Little said. “People want to stay closer to technology and you can’t get any closer than actually using your fingers for the input.”
Sharp focus
Sharp Microelectronics also showed off its latest products, including the Aquos line of high-definition TVs. The company’s quad pixel technology, which makes the picture brighter by showing four pixel colors instead of the standard three, received a lot of attention, said Rono Mathieson, a vice president at Sharp Laboratories in Camas.
Sharp Labs was also on the lookout for trends, including the plethora of new electronic readers from large and small companies.
“They’re all pretty much similar to (Amazon’s) Kindle, so not real exciting,” said Mathieson. “I was hoping to see a little bit more in terms of e-book technologies.”
The limited diversity in electronic readers could present an opportunity for Sharp to bring its LCD monitor technology to the e-book market with a new, more exciting design, he said.
