If you want a glimpse of the technology consumers will be seeing in 2016, pay attention to the news from CES, the enormous trade show taking place in Las Vegas next week. Consumer Reports will be heading out to the show, where we expect to see tons of new tablets, laptops, drones, robots, gaming peripherals, cameras, and other products. While all those categories will generate news, we think that the following trends are the ones that will matter most to consumers.
4K TVs with HDR, Plus More OLEDS
Next year, 4K UHD sets will dominate store shelves—and at CES 2016, TV makers are moving on to other ways to enhance their displays. Many will be focusing on high dynamic range, or HDR, technology, which boosts contrast and color accuracy to make the picture more vibrant. Technical standards for HDR have now been set, and that should lead to a big increase in the amount of HDR content available—until now, it's been severely restricted, showing up mainly in a few Amazon Prime shows. (Confusion alert: Video HDR is different from HDR in cameras, in which multiple images with different exposures are combined to create a single, richer-looking photo.) In related TV news, 4K Blu-ray players will launch at CES 2016, and you’ll start to hear a lot about Chinese brands that most Americans don’t know. Finally, we expect to see more OLED TVs, which should be good news for television lovers who failed to buy a plasma TV before that technology disappeared. The rich, deep black levels of plasma have been reborn in OLEDs, which now top our Ratings. However, right now only LG is selling these sets; at CES, we expect to see one or two more manufacturers join in.
Virtual Reality, Now on Sale
Virtual reality headsets and games have been a hot, almost-here technology at CES for the past few years, with companies showing off prototypes or equipment meant for content developers. It was only in 2015 that the Google Cardboard and the Samsung Gear VR put this cutting edge technology in front of the eyes of everyday consumers. At CES 2016, virtual reality is taking over a sizeable corner of the Las Vegas Convention Center. And we expect to see real-people-ready versions of the Oculus Rift, Sony PlayStation VR (aka Project Morpheus), HTC Vive, and other headsets. The primary use for all this technology is gaming, but CES-goers will also see VR used in other applications. For instance, Lowe’s Holoroom, which is already in limited distribution at the company's home centers, lets customers design a room, then explore it in a VR environment. We also expect to see lots of 360-degree cameras for shooting VR content, along with demonstrations of how virtual reality can be used in education.