Not every new product shown at this week's Consumer Electronics Show is as spectacular as the
new 150-inch Panasonic plasma TV (or the hole you would need in the side of
your house to get it inside).  While I
doubt that any of us will contemplate purchasing such a set, plenty of other new
products announced at CES look to improve home theaters--and easily fit through the front door
to boot. I couldn’t help but point out two of my top picks from this year’s
showcase, which winds up today in Las Vegas.

One of my favorite new products is the Video Transfer by
Pinnacle. If you’ve ever wanted to backup your home videos onto a digital
format, you might have struggled with the conversion process—install a special
card to your computer, install software to process and decode the video, add a
larger hard drive to handle the data, etc. This one-inch-thick box, about the
size of a card deck, simplifies the process to a ridiculous degree: hook your
analog audio/video input into one end, then hook any USB storage device to the
other. The device processes the video, compresses it into the convenient MPEG-4
format, then spits it out via USB onto your computer, flash drive, or even iPod
and PSP. And, yes, that means you can avoid using your computer entirely to pull this off if you so choose. Though the device certainly makes sense with old VHS home movies, you
can use any standard-def video source, as long as it isn’t copy protected, and
transfer its content as well--should be interesting to see how this works with DVR
units. The Video Transfer is expected to be available on January 15th
with an MSRP of 9.

My other favorite was actually a reintroduction of something
cool from CES 2006: Mitsubishi’s Laser TV. Most rear-projection HDTVs (DLP,
LCOS, etc.) use light bulbs, which have issues like relatively short lives,
power consumption, start-up delays, and rare on-screen flashes of color. Mitsubishi’s
laser technology addresses all four of these flaws directly, which could help
rear-projection HDTVs gain traction in the coming year. I'm hopeful that the first laser-equipped
TVs will reach stores by this November, but don’t expect to find them on sale on Black Friday; they
will carry a premium over bulb sets. --Adam

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