CES 2013 Preview: HDTVs and Home Theater - PC Magazine

CES is upon us again, and PCMag will be out in full force to cover the show from the convention floor. All the major technology players will be in Las Vegas unveiling their 2013 product lines, and HDTV and home theater manufacturers will be well represented.

LG, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, Vizio and dozens of others will be showing off new televisions, Blu-ray players, and AV and entertainment products, as well as offering glimpses of next-generation technology for your living room.

4K: Plenty of Buzz, But Still Not Here
With nearly every television made today displaying at least 720p, if not 1080p video, HDTVs have matured, and they've become so common that we're ready for the next step in display technology. 4K, or ultra high-definition television, offers four times the resolution of 1080p video. It has been around, as a concept, for a few years, but it's seen very limited commercial adoption, and no consumer adoption. Some movie theaters might have 4K projectors, but you won't see 4K TVs appear in homes en masse as long as the screens cost well over five digits.

Get ready to see a few more "consumer" 4K HDTVs hovering around the $20,000 price point. While that might be a lot for most consumers, it's a slow shift in the right direction. In 2014, we might start to see 4K televisions creep down low enough where early adopters will actually start checking out these screens for themselves. Then it's just a question of finding 4K content, which is pretty much non-existent.

3D: Here to Stay, But Not Much Is New
3D HDTVs have been the focus of many manufacturers over the past few years, and they won't stop making them any time soon, despite lukewarm adoption. While plenty of 3D HDTVs have sold, few users are bothering to get glasses and 3D movies to take advantage of it. 3D has just become a standard feature set for high-end HDTVs, so if you spend a lot of money on a big screen, you'll probably just get 3D as a feature even if you don't shop for it. Toshiba's glasses-free HDTV, which we've seen at CES before, hasn't seen commercial release yet. Still, manufacturers will likely tease more glasses-free HDTVs, but we probably won't see any that will actually be sold this year. The technology has proven much more difficult to put on a big screen comfortably than it is to put on a smaller device like the Nintendo 3DS.

OLED: New, Here, But Certainly Not Cheap
Organic LED displays have shown a lot of promise ever since the first retail screen, the 11-inch, $2,500 Sony XEL-1 HDTV, which came out more than four years ago. OLED seems like a magic bullet technology, with manufacturers claiming it can offer better colors, higher contrast ratios, lower power consumption, and thinner screens than LED-backlit HDTVs. OLED has appeared in mobile devices, and that might finally change for larger HDTVs this year as manufacturers start to announce pricing and availability for OLED models. They'll be more expensive than the XEL-1, but they'll also be much, much bigger, in the 50- to 60-inch range. LG this week revealed that its $10,000 55-inch OLED HDTV is currently available to pre-order in South Korea. We might finally see OLED HDTVs trickle into the market by the end of the year, but they won't be cheap.

Connected HDTVs: Still Buzzing
Like 3D, online services have become an increasingly common feature in mid-range and high-end HDTVs. We won't see many big steps in connected HDTVs at CES, but many manufacturers will unveil new iterations of their online service selections and app ecosystems. Google TV has yet to find much of a footing in the market, but a few more Google TV devices will find their way onto the show floor.

Blu-ray Players: Not New, But Faster, Less Expensive
Blu-ray players have made a lot of progress since they were first introduced almost 10 years ago. It no longer takes several minutes to load a movie, and the players are no longer heavy, hulking beasts. They haven't made any massive steps in technology in the last few years, but they've been incrementally improving, and that's going to continue. Expect new, smaller, faster less-expensive Blu-ray players at CES, many of which will have built-in Wi-Fi and even more online features besides the standard selection of Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon Instant Video.

Speakers and Headphones: Plenty of Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary Products
Speaker technology hasn't fundamentally changed for decades. At its core, you have a small thing vibrating into a large thing to deliver sound. There won't likely be any revolutionary technology that will change the idea of sound systems as we know them, but we might see new advances in audio processing and surround sound. These will be back-end advances that receivers and other home theater components will see, but we won't necessarily readily notice. They'll just be evolutionary steps in how digital sound is put out through different speaker configurations.

Besides that, expect to see soundbars continue to expand as a sound system category, and lots of new Lightning-equipped, Bluetooth, and AirPlay speaker docks. Many speaker docks are combining wired and wireless connectivity, and while combination Bluetooth/AirPlay speakers are still very rare, expect to see many speakers with both Lightning connectors and either Bluetooth or AirPlay connectivity. High-end audio always gets a lot of floor space, and it will be interesting to see if manufacturers figure out how to better integrate Android connectivity instead of just catering to iOS devices.

Celebrity headphones will continue to be a trend this year, with 50 Cent and Motorhead rolling out new lines of headphones at the show, joining luminaries like Dr. Dre, and Ludacris. Dr. Dre's Beats brand and the House of Marley have expanded into portable speakers and speaker docks, but plenty of celebrities are dipping their toes into the audio market with headphones.

For more, see PCMag's CES previews for laptops, desktops, as well as phones and tablets.