Jan 17 Podcast #931: Best of CES 2020
This week we take a look at the best of CES.
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Best of CES 2020
This week we take a look at the best of CES.
Best TV SAMSUNG QLED BEZEL-LESS 8K
Samsung’s 8K Q950 has a stunning design with bezels so small they disappear to your eyes as soon as the screen turns on. The black space surrounding the displays on our smartphones is almost gone, so why shouldn’t TVs get the same treatment? Samsung has pulled that off. This should be the future of TV design — but it should’ve been available in a 4K TV since buying 8K remains just as preposterous now as it was at CES 2019. —Chris Welch
Best Smart Home Thing GE Smart Switches and Dimmers
GE Lighting is introducing new smart lighting switches and dimmers to its C by GE line of connected products that do not require the use of a neutral wire. This allows the C by GE Hubless Three-Wire Smart Switch and Hubless Dimmer models to be installed in many more homes than most smart switches, including homes built before 1980. In addition, the new switches do not require a hub to connect to the internet or be used with the Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa. The smart switches will arrive in the first quarter for $39.99 and up, while the dimmers are due in the second quarter for $49.99 and up. Homekit support coming soon via C-Reach Smart bridge
Best Router Netgear Nighthawk Mesh
Wi-Fi 6 is here, built into the latest iPhones and already in the pockets of millions of people. Except, it’s been held back by one critical missing component: affordable Wi-Fi 6 routers, with the initial mesh options costing an outlandish $400 to $700. At CES 2020, Netgear changed that. The Nighthawk Mesh, available in March, includes two Wi-Fi 6 routers for $230. It’s by no means the fastest combination out there, but it brings Wi-Fi 6 to a far more typical price, supports up to 1.8 Gbps of throughput, and offers 1,500 square feet of coverage per node. This is the kind of package Wi-Fi 6 needs to actually be put to use. —Jake Kastrenakes
Best Vaporware: Samsung Ballie
The demo video for Samsung’s Ballie had all the hallmarks of a Kickstarter pitch: a contrived tale meant to sell a dream that technology doesn’t support yet. In the video (titled, incredibly, “A Waltz For Ballie”) Samsung’s “companion robot” is seen organizing a user’s life like a tiny spherical butler: opening curtains, checking yoga poses, and cleaning up after the dog. In the actual demonstrations, however, Ballie seems merely capable of rolling back and forth a bit and going “bleep bloop” in an endearing fashion. Samsung hasn’t announced a price or release date for the bot. And although it’s certainly well-designed, don’t expect to see this thing in stores anytime soon. Oh, and as proof that while history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, it does rhyme: you might have forgotten that back in 2016, LG announced its own spherical companion robot. That one rolled out of sight pretty quickly, too. —James Vincent
Best home theater product Dolby Vision IQ
Dolby Vision IQ takes a good thing (Dolby's enhanced spec for creating and displaying HDR content) and improves its application in everyday life. While some of us would prefer to watch every bit of The Mandalorian or John Wick 3 in a darkened theater room, that's not what's available. Beyond just tweaking the picture so it looks the best for the room you're in, Vision IQ is also going to make sure that different types of content, like action sports, documentaries or feature films, are presented with the settings that best match what's on-screen. It's tech that should make everyone's home theater experience better and more accurate.
Best TV product LG CX-series OLED TVs
LG's OLED sets have been among our favorite TVs for years, and they're no exception in 2020. LG has added a ton of new features like NVIDIA G-Sync support, which makes your games look smoother, and Filmmaker Mode, which disables motion smoothing and other unnecessary video tweaks. And they still have all the benefits of OLED, like an insanely high contrast ratio, inky black levels and rich colors. LG has also improved its image processing to sharpen objects and improve details in your video. They're so good that you'll wonder why so many TV companies are pursuing 8K TVs instead of catching up to the quality of OLED.
From Digital Trends:
Audio: Vizio Elevate
The Elevate features upfiring drivers that, besides being just plain cool, can adapt the sound automatically, spinning upward to fire sound at the ceiling for 3D audio, or rolling forward for more power and musicality when you’re jamming to your favorite tunes.
Aside from that, the Elevate packs plenty of key features like a backlit remote, a dedicated input for your smart speaker, HDMI eARC connection for compression-free Dolby Atmos, DTS:X sound, and perfect audio sync from supported TVs. We don’t know the pricing for this massive bar yet (fingers crossed it keeps the Vizio tradition of affordability going), but the Elevate is an impressive new soundbar that gets our gold star for the show.
Smart Home: Lockly Vision Smart Lock
Lockly includes the features that made its previous smart locks successful, like fingerprint unlocking, but adds a camera so the lock can double as a video doorbell. Instead of having to buy a smart lock and video doorbell separately, it’s combined into one cohesive device.
It’s the ultimate smart lock for any home, including AirBnB households, because you can also send out time-sensitive pin codes. The camera adds the ability to check up on who’s at the front door and monitor who is coming or going.
The Lockly Vision also doesn’t require a bridge to access remotely, can be unlocked with a key manually, and offers local storage. It covers the gamut of what you need in a premium smart lock.
Video: TCL Vidrian
I’m still impressed that TCL was the first to bring mini-LED to market, and this new version of it, which sees some 25,000 mini-LED backlights mounted directly to a glass substrate, is way beyond the competition. To put things in perspective, most TVs have standard LED backlights numbering in the hundreds.
With 25,000 miniaturized backlights on glass, the TCL not only has tremendous control over luminance, it eliminates several layers in the LCD panel sandwich. It’s more like an LCD panini, if you will. The result is an LCD-based TV that looks as close to OLED as I’ve seen yet.
Color us impressed.
From CNET:
Our favorite TV tech could soon get more affordable, thanks to Vizio. OLED TVs belt out the best picture quality available but until now they were only available from LG and Sony. Now Vizio, the third-largest TV brand in the US behind Samsung and TCL, is going to sell an OLED TV too. Vizio hasn't set a price yet but in our reviews the company's LCD TVs consistently deliver excellent image quality for the money. Forget all the impractical next-generation displays that you heard about at the show: Vizio's entry into the OLED race is the most exciting news of CES 2020 for TV shoppers.
Locks August Wi-Fi Smart Lock
August has been our favorite smart lock since it came out due to its retro-fit design that works with any standard deadbolt, as well as its open-armed policy towards working with the various voice assistants. The newest model addresses two persistent criticisms, the lack of built-in Wi-Fi (requiring an extra Wi-Fi adapter plug to make the connection necessary to control it remotely), and its large size. The newest model is 45% smaller than the original, giving it a much sleeker appearance on your door, and the built-in Wi-Fi adapter gets it online right out of the box. August says to expect a price tag around the $250 mark when it launches later this year.
Soundbar Vizio's P-Series Elevate aluminum soundbar
Innovations in soundbar hardware are few and far between -- these are slabs that sit of front of your TV after all. The addition of Dolby Atmos was one of the most significant in years, but the Vizio P-series Elevate takes this and adds to it in meaningful ways.
The Elevate in the name refers to the motorized drivers which flip ceiling-ward when the soundbar detects a Dolby Atmos or DTS:X soundtrack for overhead effects. The rest of the time the drivers are used to bolster the stereo channels for a bit of extra heft. Meanwhile, the soundbar's aluminum construction helps add a touch of class.
Home Entertainment Dabby
Dabby is a home entertainment device that consolidates every TV streaming service, free video site and social media site into one tablet-like box -- saving you from toggling between all of the options when you're looking for a certain show or video. It also includes a subscription manager to help you keep track of all of your different services, how much they cost and how often you use them, to fight subscription overload. It costs $400 and ships in April.
From Gizmodo
Streaming Service for your Phone Quibi
The new phone-only streaming service from the guy who brought you Dreamworks. But there are a lot of talented people making content for Quibi, and it’s the rare streaming service that’s still studio agnostic—with content planned from Disney even! But what’s really cool is the way it serves up two different films with the same soundtrack. You decide the experience you get all by the orientation of your phone. — Alex Cranz
Best TV TCL 6-Series of 2020
The cheap 4K TV keeps getting better. Not only is the 2020 TCL 6-Series outfitted with future-forward ports like HDMI eARC. It’s also getting new backlighting with mini LED technology. This means that, whereas last year’s model had 100 local dimming zones, the new model will potentially have thousands, which should greatly improve contrast and viewing angles. In other words, this upgrade could bring the picture quality closer to that of an OLED TV for a fraction of the price. — Adam Clark Estes
Home Automation Linksys Wellness Pods
By monitoring signal disruptions in your home’s wifi, Linksys Aware turns your wireless network into a home security system that doesn’t require any additional hardware to install. At launch the feature was limited, simply alerting homeowners to the presence of potential intruders while they were away, but in 2020 Linksys will be expanding what Aware is capable of through optional Wellness Pods that increase the feature’s sensitivity, allowing it to detect someone having a restless sleep based on subtle movements and even their breathing rate. The Pods will also allow Linksys Aware to detect and react to someone falling, such as an elderly relative, triggering an emergency response which includes contacting help and even reassuring them through a smart assistant like Amazon’s Alexa. — Andrew Liszewski
Reader Comments (1)
Hey Guys,
Always enjoy the podcast.
Sorry, should have sent the Caf-Pow last week because a couple editions ago you mentioned Tivo's new streaming stick. And you pointed out that it's not, for the time being, going to allow the stick to interact with a Tivo box. That's exactly what I've been waiting for!
The wife and I came to realization about 95 percent of what we watched and recorded for TV viewing was available over-the-air. So, after researching recording devices, I specifically chose Tivo Bolt OTA because it has HDMI out to the big TV in the living room. Channel Master's Stream + is the only other in-home recording device with HDMI but it does not have any app for remote viewing. Tivo does, allowing programs to be uploaded or streamed to a phone.
I know you have had questions about the viability of Tivo and they are warranted. But when it came to having the media physically (that's how I'll put it) inside the home, the Bolt OTA was the choice. My DVR-Diva wife loves the commercial skip function. And don't get me started with how watching a program on-line requires sitting through the same ads over and over every 7 minutes or so.
However, to get Tivo recordings to the bedroom TV, I refuse to spend another $150 for a Tivo Mini. That's not how the rest of the media world is going. It took time to find a hack for the upstairs TV using Fire Stick's silk browser, though it's very shaky if you try to rewind or fast forward a recording.
Tivo has promised an app for more than a year now that would allow streaming to the bedroom TV. But they seem to want us to spend money on the Mini. So, at least when you talked of a Tivo streaming stick my ears perked up. It would be cheaper than the Mini. But my media sadness was extended when you dropped reality that the streaming stick would not interact with the Bolt. (I say that with tongue in cheek; as a first world problem.)
Anyway, keep up the good fight and thanks for a podcast that often makes my ears perk up!
Bob Costantini