Past the monumental fortresses built at CES by the big names, tiny booths are stacked with tech from faraway places. Most of it is garbage: trying to find a unique MP3 player amid the copies from Eastasia, it soon becomes clear that if something looks original, it means simply that you've forgotten the original it knocks off. And yet, among the iClones, LED volume-manufacturers and industrial pipe extruders, there were sights to be seen. Most of them involving bright, shiny lights.
You know those slowly shifting backlit photos of waterfalls and rivers, typically found in infrequently-renovated restaurants? The motherlode was at CES and its name is Shenzhen First Mountain
Industries.
Blinding up-close, LED adver-displays make for awesome, electricity-sucking game monitors. Why have High Definition when you can have your brain destroyed by a barrage of photons?
From a couple of inches away, the tiny LED elements of a massive display screen form a shifting matrix of color.
Cut by Norco, this fanless PC enclosure its its own heatsink
Many of the small exhibitors at CES manufacture, and even design, equipment sold in the West under leading brands. Their only product may be tiny screens, network connectors, image processors or cellphone enclosures. Shenzhen Xwoda Electronic makes the latter.
Tasteless overclockers rejoice! Xindong Lin embeds huge, smiley system-monitoring displays in the front of their PC enclosures.
Remember just a few years ago, when it was said cellphones would soon project laser keyboards onto the table in front of them? Now this technology seems to be an ignored commodity lurking in the cheap corners of CES.
If your ears can feel pain, it might be prudent to check out
Techwin's MacPro-styled headphones before buying them. Heavy-duty industrial design looks great on a glass desk, but on your head? I'll take 3.
The intricate, almost-imperceptible labyrinth of dots on Pen
Laboratory's paper appears as a light grey wash to the casual viewer.
Combined with it's special optical ink-pen, however, and everything you write is rendered on-screen. Buy the pen once, and the paper by the ream. Anyone remember when optical mouse mats required these patterns?
Do you like holes? If so, you will like this PC case from Chieftec.
And when you're done using it as a computer, it can be put to use as a walkway in a steel mill.
Speaking of steel, even that gets the boutique treatment at CES.
Pick a color, select a texture, and decide what kind of finish you'd like. For corporate buyers, it's like buying socks.
Somewhere abroad, a factory churns out armies of nearly-identical game controllers. A second company takes these to CES. There they try to sell them to Western retailers, who, ultimately, try to sell them to you. Are these clones of major brands, or the major brands themselves, without the logos? It's genuinely hard to tell. Click for a 4000-pixel panoramic closeup.
After a few days at CES, everything begins to fray at the edges.
