Procrastinators hoping to get good deals on pre-Christmas sales are being rewarded this week at online electronics sites. Low-end digital cameras are especially hot Christmas gift bargains this week as retailers try to reduce inventories with last-minute blowout sales. At RadioShack, stocking stuffer cameras include a Vivitar V25 2.1-megapixel camera, reduced to $14.99 from $19.99, and a Crayola 5.1-megapixel model discounted $10, to $29. Other deals include a Polaroid i1237 camera, cut 25 percent to $59, and a Kodak 14-megapixel model slashed to $79 from $149. To sweeten the pot further, RadioShack is tossing in a 7-inch digital photo frame with cameras priced $69 and up.
Worldwide factory equipment revenue generated by mobile communications will approach the quarter-trillion-dollar mark by year end, said iSuppli. Global mobile communications factory equipment revenue for 2010 is forecast to be $235.5 billion, up 7.9 percent from last year, on the expansion of mobile broadband worldwide and by sales of 3G phones, the industry research firm said. For 2011, revenue for the segment is projected to hit $271.3 billion. 3G mobile handsets will account for the largest share of revenue at $86.4 billion, up 34.6 percent from $64.2 billion in 2009, the firm said.
Potential seat kills led ESPN to designate six of its nine 3D cameras as robotic models as opposed to manned cameras at Friday’s first NBA basketball game televised on ESPN 3D, according to Anthony Bailey, vice president of emerging technologies at ESPN. Seat kills are the practice of putting cameras where paying customers ordinarily would sit. Bailey told Consumer Electronics Daily at a special TV viewing of the Miami Heat-New York Knicks game at New York’s Madison Square Garden that seat kills will remain an issue for 3D sports telecasts. He said games held in arenas as opposed to larger football stadiums are especially susceptible to seat kills.
One in five LCD TVs sold in the U.S. during Q3 this year used LED backlighting, said a survey by iSuppli. LED-lit LCD TVs accounted for 19.6 percent of TV purchases last quarter, up from 17.9 percent in Q2 and 4 percent in Q3 2009, iSuppli said. The share of 3D TVs among overall purchases, meanwhile, barely registered “a blip,” according to iSuppli, which said those purchased were in the 50-inch and larger segment.
Thiel Audio held the first of a series of webinars for dealers and current and potential customers. The company plans to use webinars for distributor and dealer training, consumer support and media events, said Dawn Cloyd, Thiel director of international sales. As evidence of the hazards of first runs, Cloyd said the Thursday webinar was designed and intended for consumers, “but lots of industry friends,” including anyone who had signed up for Thiel consumer e-news on its website, received the invitation, “an error on our part.” The upside was a “great response,” Cloyd said, resulting in overbooking beyond the 25-person limit.
Technicolor will demonstrate at CES an app for “all handheld devices” that will extend the functionality of the BD-Live feature on Blu-ray discs, Bob Michaels, vice president of worldwide DVD for Technicolor’s Digital Content Delivery group, told Consumer Electronics Daily. Called Media Echo, the app will “align itself to what society is starting to evolve to,” Michaels said, “especially with the invention of the iPad.” He compared the feature set of the “second-screen” app to fantasy football apps that enable viewers to follow stats on players while they're watching a live game. Media Echo will wrap details including actor bios and interactive games around a feature film, he said.
ORLANDO, Fla. -- 3D TVs with passive 3D glasses and the evolution of standards will mark 3D TV’s sophomore year, said executives from content creation company 3ality we spoke with at the 3D Vendor Testing Event at ESPN Wide World of Sports. “You'll start to see some consumer-priced passive models at CES” or “soon after,” said Steve Schklair, CEO of 3ality Digital Systems. And in contrast to previous conventional wisdom that passive 3D technology is inferior in performance and more expensive to produce, Schklair said, new technologies have overcome previous issues. “I've seen them, they look great, and they only add pennies to the manufacturing cost,” he said. He said the industry keeps talking about a standard for 3D active glasses, but “the easiest way to create a standard is to get rid of the process altogether."
LOS ANGELES -- IMS Research, which hosted the Television 3.0 conference this week, predicts that by 2014 40 percent of U.S. households will have a 3D TV and worldwide penetration will be nine percent. To get there, though, someone will have to find a way to make 3D TV pay off, it said.
CENTURY CITY, Calif. -- Giving what he called a 3D “reality check,” David Poltrack, president of the CBS Vision research arm, thinks consumers have a “wait-and-see approach” toward 3D and are willing to endure “delayed gratification” to experience 3D at home, he told the Television 3.0 conference in a keynote Tuesday. It could be two, three or four years before consumers buy 3D TV, he said, due largely to “increased knowledge about how products come to market.”
Despite interest from distributors in the U.S. and around the world, 3D’s future “is hard to tell,” David Zaslav, CEO of Discovery Communications, said at the UBS conference in New York Monday. “It’s very expensive,” he said, adding that Discovery chose to work with Sony and Imax to minimize the costs of developing a 3D channel and to share information along the learning curve.