International Winter Consumer Electronics Show

The semi-annual gathering of the manufacturers and retailers, writers and ad reps, innovators and imitators in the consumer electronics industry: it’s a fabulous show, lasting four days in Las Vegas every January. This year, over 55,000 people in the consumer electronics industry gathered to find out about the newest, latest, the most creative, the best and indeed, the worst in the consumer electronics industry. CES is a trade-show. Most of the products shown there are not immediately available. In fact, many manufacturers, particularly those from Hong Kong, Japan and Korea are sending up trial balloons— they show products hoping to take home enough orders to justify manufacturing them. In many cases just a prototype has been built and in some cases the prototype isn’t even a working model.

The big U.S. manufacturers in the hi-fi, television, car radio and related fields spend big at the Consumer Electronics Show. At a typical computer show the average booth size is 200 or 300 square feet; at the Consumer Electronics Show typical booth sizes run 1000-1500 and even 2000 square feet. Some of the manufacturers actually erect two story booths on the show floor. The second story is a maze of rooms where buyer and seller sit together hammering out terms and delivery agreements on products for the coming year.

The entertainment and displays at the Consumer Electronics Show are lavish. At the Sanyo hospitality suite over 20 huge bowls of shrimp were brought out in less than one hour. This is not unusual. Texas Instruments introduced Bill Cosby as their new advertising spokesman and had him give a private show to TI’s distributors and employees. Even smaller manufacturers hold lavish cocktail parties with hot hors d’oeurves in the hotel suites.

This was the year of the video disk. The video disk, introduced some five years ago by Phillips/MCA. has now assumed the position of the most important growth product of the consumer electronic industry. Over eight manufacturers were showing new versions of video disk systems. Initially we had hoped that there would only be one design of the video disk so it would not lead to the same situation that now exists in the video tape field with two competing formats. We had hoped that with Phillips behind it the rest of the consumer electronics field would adopt their design much as they had with the Phillips compact cassette design introduced many years ago and now the industry standard. But, alas, it was not to be. There are now three major competing designs of video disks in the field (as discussed in Creative Computing , January 1981 ).

As expected Sinclair announced the 16K memory module at CES. It has received FCC certification and should become widely available in the first quarter of 1981. Retail price is $99.95. Housed in a small plastic box the size of two cassette tapes the module plugs into the existing ZX80 and increases its storage capacity by 16 times (one must remember that the ZX80 comes with only 1K of memory).

At $199.95, the ZX80 is the lowest priced personal computer on the market today. Second source software vendors jumped into the ZX80 market both in the U.K. and the U.S. broadening its applications and appeal substantially.