Touring the floor at Ceatec

By CNET.com.au | October 4, 2006

Models and company marketing executives gear up for Ceatec, a weeklong consumer technology show held outside Tokyo.

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Behold Pioneer's mountain of high-definition TVs, on display this week at Ceatec, a consumer technology show held outside Tokyo. Supposedly, the woman at the top has magical powers.

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Panasonic "C-level" executives gather to watch the performance at the company's booth before the show. Unlike those at many American trade shows, head executives attending Ceatec troll the floor to see what everyone else is up to.

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The Frepar Networks display was a big hit. Crowds of people stopped to watch the big-screen images of bubbles floating to opera music. The company sells home-networking equipment.

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Wooo-eee! No, it's not some company from the bayou. Hitachi has used "Wooo" as its tagline for a few years, but only in Japan.

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The Sony PlayStation 3, due for launch next month.

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Toshiba's 55-inch surface conduction electron emitter display (SED) TV. The company will come out with these in late 2007, a little later than even the last display. Toshiba, though, says the performance will outdo that of LCDs and won't be too much more expensive.

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The Toshiba SED TV in action.

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The Toshiba SED TV. The lines on the sumo wrestler are caused by the way the camera interacts with the image on the screen. The lines are not visible to the naked eye.

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Toshiba brought along a woman to demonstrate traditional Japanese theater during its SED demo. It was the best use of puppets since Wayland Flowers and Madame.

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This is PaPeRo, a companion robot from NEC. It has a vocabulary of about 550 words. It can also connect to the Internet, so if you ask it what the weather is going to be, it will link up to a weather site and report its findings. It also makes cute comments, but only in Japanese.

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Sometimes you have to root for companies just because of the optimism their names inspire.

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The Nissan Serenity, a concept car, is rigged with all sorts of entertainment equipment and Internet connections.

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The interior of the Nissan Serenity. Wood is back.

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The key watch from Citizen has been on the market since late 2005. Users can start their car or unlock their house with it.

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Fujitsu's digital paper is a thin LCD screen that uses almost no power once the image is printed. It takes power to create the image but then the screen goes into a near-still state to conserve energy.

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A robot rides a bicycle from MuData. (It's just an exhibit.)

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