The following is a guest post by Sri Peruvemba
Here are a few impressions from CES this year, written for my friend Ron Mertens, while my feet are mostly recovered and catching up from being gone for a week.
CES was good for me. A few years ago, the show gave me a 25th-anniversary badge, which was both flattering and a reminder that I’ve been doing this for a long time. Despite a reported ~5% increase in attendance, the show actually felt less crowded than last year, probably because it keeps spreading out. Between the LVCC, Venetian, Wynn, and a growing collection of satellite locations, people are more distributed, even if the total headcount goes up.
AI, of course, was everywhere. Roughly a thousand companies had “AI” in bold letters on their booth signage or product descriptions, in every product category from TV to toilets. I’ve seen this movie before. It happened with dotcom, wearables, autonomous vehicles, robots, drones—you name it. In about two years, 95% of these companies will quietly remove “AI” from their marketing because it won’t be novel anymore. To be clear, there are genuine AI-centric companies—I work with some of them—but they’re probably in that remaining 5%. Even our own display industry leaned into AI this year, with several AI-centric demos tied to displays and end devices. Most of those will fade away, not the AI content, that I believe is here to stay but the nomenclature, the hype, the FOMO, they will disappear year after next.
What I’d really like to see is robots and AI doing the things I don’t like to do—making travel arrangements from air to hotel to restaurant and uber reservations, filing expenses, dealing with scheduling chaos, etc. Instead, many early implementations seem focused on taking away the things I do like to do, such as creative work, thinking through strategy, or having conversations with humans. That’s not a great trade, at least not yet. But I can see us getting there – some of us humans, particularly in customer service jobs are making it too easy for the robots.
On the display front, transparent OLED panels dressed up as aquariums were also popular; transparency has improved significantly and they looked decent, though price still keeps them out of the mainstream. Tiled MicroLED displays were everywhere—Samsung, LG, TCL, BOE, AUO—all showing impressive walls and TVs. Aledia is shipping nanowire based MicroLED samples, that’s progress. There was also the usual terminology gymnastics: some companies calling miniLED “micro,” others calling LCD TVs “RGB LED” or “MiniLED TVs.” This has been going on for some time. For whatever reason, as an industry we seem ashamed of LCD, which is ironic given it still represents roughly 70% of the display market. I love all display technologies, even STN LCD, so this bothers me—but I admit that’s my problem.
The Garmin MicroLED watch got attention, deservedly so. Eureka Park, which has long been one of my favorite parts of CES, felt a bit diminished this year. On the other hand, Samsung made a bold move by leaving Central Hall and setting up at the Wynn. Their entire booth was one of the best at the show—cohesive, polished, and confident. I also visited Sharp’s private booth, where they showed some very cool demos, including flexible displays.
Several companies showed ePaper picture frames, and they looked good, both color and monochrome. Reflective displays are well suited for that application. Over the years, reflective demos, mostly R-LCD were usually hidden away in some corner—you had to hunt for them. This year felt different. TCL put NxtPaper front and center, and it looked good to me. The color wasn’t fully optimized in the demo, and in some cases they could probably benefit from something like Azumo’s front light, but overall, it was encouraging.
There were a few AR devices on the exhibit floor and even more shown in private meetings. Waveguides, microdisplays—OLEDoS, MicroLED, LCoS—it was all there. This is one area where AI actually makes sense, as demonstrated by Meta. When AI adds context and utility to AR, it stops being a gimmick and starts being useful. My friends Radu and Karl at Display Skeptics covered this space quite succinctly.
Foldable phones particularly the tri-fold devices that open up into tablet-like form factors were on demo. I like this concept, it like getting a tablet for ‘free’. Most, if not all, still had a visible crease where the display bends—even on day one of the show. That said, my friends at Ares Materials showed a private demo with almost no crease.
Looking Glass showed off its newly created HLD demos, I am biased, but I thought they were vastly better than any other spatial, 3D, or light-field display on the show floor. Amazon had a nice booth with my favorite Kindles in the front and a clear emphasis on sustainability. Most display companies generally showed LCD (called anything but), OLED (relegated to second-row seating), and gave front-row seats to MicroLED. What are they trying to tell us?
Robots were everywhere too. As a tech geek, I always find them interesting, but most of the demos didn’t serve any real purpose. They’re still promises of something useful in the future rather than solutions to problems today.
On day one, I hit 10,000 steps by lunchtime. The hotels are massive, the exhibits are spread across multiple properties, and many meetings were 30 minutes apart by cab—plus another 800 steps from the curb to the meeting room. I also noticed a lot of coughing. In some crowded spots it felt like a petri dish for global flu germs, yet hardly anyone including me, wore a mask. Apparently, that chapter is fully closed.
On the positive side, I had good meetings and took concrete steps to advance my cause. I learnt about products and technologies, satisfying the tech curiosity. I was polite to the booth staff that tried to teach me about displays. I met industry friends, did a lot of “walk and talk” meetings, caught up with mentees, and helped a couple of unemployed friends connect with companies that were hiring. I also had informal, no-slides, no-agenda conversations with colleagues from boards I serve on—just shooting the breeze, which is often where the best insights show up.
One observation that stuck with me: in the past, when I was directly or indirectly responsible for a tradeshow booth, I worked hard—meeting people, explaining demos, engaging nonstop, never rested. We had one purpose, sell – the technology, the product, the brand. This year I noticed several booths, some in pavilions sponsored by their respective governments, had hundreds of booths where the staff looked disengaged. Lounging on chairs, eyes glued to their phones, eating (you might be working the lunch shift, I get it, but please, please, don’t eat at your booth; I came to see the latest TV not the latest tofu; I came hungry for information, and you reminded me that I had skipped lunch). You traveled thousands of miles and spent thousands of dollars just to avoid selling? There’s a big difference between startup founders and teams on a mission versus those who are there because they were told to be.
Fortunately, almost everyone I work with or met this week was in the first category—working from dawn to dusk, focused on advancing their vision. Those are the people who make you push through that extra thousand feet when the pedometer says 18,000 steps and your feet are absolutely done.
All in all, CES reminded me why I keep coming back. The brands change, the tech cycles repeat, but the real value is still in the people, the conversations, and the forward motion—even if it takes a few extra steps to get there.
