CES 2021 - latest news from the smart home technology industry

The Global Stage for Innovation

CES happened last week. It’s the Consumer Electronics Show in the US, where a raft of new products are announced. In truth it’s more of a concept electronics show, as most of what you hear about won’t see the light of day for a couple of years (if at all!), but it does give you a sense of what companies are planning. Here’s what we took from it:

TV - There were a number of small, iterative things really.

Brightness - some different technologies are coming that seem to focus on competing with each other over brightness levels. We’ll see how important this is, but for our money it’s tinkering around the edges. LG are the manufacturers of all the OLED screens out there (which are then put together as TVs by the other brands like Sony, Panasonic etc) and they’ve announced improved brightness levels with their OLED panels; rivals have announced Mini LED, which is claiming the same great colour and contrast levels of OLED, but even brighter. Spoiler alert - right now, the best TVs actually worth buying in 2021 are still OLED. Buy one with 4k and HDR and you’ll have a fantastic TV.

Built-in software - we’re noticing the start of a trend of supplying TVs with gaming apps built-in. TV brands make a sizeable amount of money by agreeing to pre-install apps (like Netflix etc), and this year we’re seeing the gaming app Steam being included. Apple started doing this with the ‘Arcade’ app on their Apple TVs - it’ll be interesting to see how they respond in due course. Gaming was one of the massive winners of 2020, keeping people entertained while cooped up at home.

HDMI 2.1 - this is already announced, but is being built-in to more TVs. The main thing it does is allow MUCH higher resolution or frame-rate (the speed at which images are updated) on TVs. 8K is one of them (it’s still not a vital feature to consider when purchasing yet); but serious gamers might be interested in this as the current HDMI 2.0 maxes out at 4k with 60 frames per second refresh. If you want 4k at higher than that, you’ll need HDMI 2.1.

Operating system - this is usually overlooked by many people, so can easily frustrate after purchase, because the operating system is what you see when trying to work your TV - select an app, view the program guide etc. LG has updated theirs (which, on first glance, looks like it might have made it less good, when it was very good); Sony are moving to Google TV from Android TV (which is probably a good thing: Android TV was only ever ok).