By John DeFore

Every year in January, legions of electronics manufacturers put aside their spreadsheets of holiday sales and look forward to the year (and sometimes decade) ahead, tromping out to Las Vegas for a hype-fest of Vegasian proportions.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which was taking place Jan. 7-10, has at times been the coming-out party for earth-shattering new technology — the VCR, compact disc and DVD were announced here — but innovations of that magnitude don’t come around every year.

More often, attendees come to promote incremental adjustments to existing products, or to add bells and whistles in hopes of standing out from the pack. (The mobile phone sector is a good example of this, with perhaps the most talked about new model, Motorola’s ROKR E8, being largely a touch-screen response to Apple’s hit iPhone.)

Which is not to say that those incremental adjustments aren’t presented with maximum hoopla, as the TV section (where the most showy models aren’t yet for sale) proved. TV makers tried to outdo each other with ever-thinner and ever-huger flatscreens — Pioneer’s KURO TV was an astonishing 9mm thick (putting announcements of 1.7- and 1.5-inchers to shame), while Panasonic had fun trotting people out to watch life-sized images on a gargantuan 150-inch screen. (At that size, of course, a video projector is a whole lot cheaper.) Rather than compete on size, LG.Philips introduced an LCD screen that augmented its medium-huge 52-inch size with touchscreen capability. Samsung had a concept TV in which an 82-inch LCD produced images that weren’t merely high-def, but actually had four times the resolution of today’s high-def standard (that’s 3,280 x 2,160 pixels), never mind that nobody produces content with that level of detail. (Naturally, Japanese companies are rumored to be experimenting with “ultra-high-def” programming.)

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