So during my blogging hiatus, the recent Consumer Electronics Show has come and gone. Admittedly, I was hoping for a lot more than what was shown. I feel like CES is far less cutting edge than in the past. It is not like the Detroit Auto Show where you come away socks knocked off by some concept car and some vastly different model line up.

I’ll sum up my grief succinctly.

Sony only introduced one other (pricey) 4K/UltraHD projector in addition to their 25 grand flagship model. No other manufacturers entered a true 4K/UltraHD model in to the market.

Sony and Panasonic’s joint OLED venture folded leaving only Samsung and LG in the OLED game at this point.

Every OLED display is still curved. In the great words of Mr. Horse… “I don’t like it, I don’t like it at all.” For me, it still looks gimmicky, with no real benefit outside of picture distortion depending on where you sit.

No official announcement on any real new UltraHD physical content such as “4K Blu-ray” or any other next generation disc.

Okay, so admittedly a few minor products did catch my attention. The first being DTS Headphone X. Think of it is as full surround sound with all of its speakers around you stuffed in to a pair of headphones. Now some naysayers may claim that is a direct attack on “the home theater experience” and just moves consumers to watching things on mobile devices. Fair enough. I’m on the road a lot, I have no choice in the matter some days, so I think that’s cool.

Remember the now defunct Palm smartphones with WebOS? Well my wife had one, and actually loved the thing. It was a cool phone operating system, it was alarmingly simple and in my opinion it never reached its true potential. Palm was acquired by HP and they bungled the whole thing up to the tune of a billion dollar loss. Well, WebOS is back, and it is the new graphical user interface being used in some LG televisions. Very cool, some tweaks and from what I see I think it’s perfectly suited for that kind of function. I have a Sony Blu-Ray player that I use to stream media and it’s user interface is lame, so this is very welcome news.

Lastly, cable cutters rejoice! Channelmaster came out with a new over-the-air DVR. It has a really slick looking interface. It currently can stream movies via the internet using VUDU. However, Channelmaster claims to be adding more services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon prime at later dates. I guess it can also pair up with a Slingbox to stream your recorded shows to a mobile device while away from home! The downside is that it only can record two hours of programming on the box. As a result you need an external hard drive. That adds to the cost a bit but as someone with Channelmasters previous over the air DVR, I find this to be a plus. I run out of space constantly, and I find myself constantly choosing which programs I want to save and delete. A cheap 3TB external hard drive from some Amazon Gold Box deal and you could be recording 24/7 for days. So this could be a lemon you can make lemonade with so to speak. Check it out below.

http://www.channelmaster.com/Products_s/329.htm#DVR+

I do apologize for my hiatus. Work had me in training in January, and since then we have been working on a home purchase. Hopefully, this will lead to some “theater build” blog posts in the coming months. I’m really excited for that. Stay tuned.