Lost in couch potato heaven

By ADAM GIFFORD

On the flight from Las Vegas to Los Angeles after attending the vast Consumer Electronics Show this month it all became clear to me.

Looking down on the vast sprawl of the Los Angeles basin with the sodium lights illuminating the grids of tract housing and cars crawling along the eight-lane freeways got me thinking.

If I lived in there I probably would want to go home, sit in front of my mega-flat-screen TV, put on a DVD and ignore the outside world.

CES is the ultimate couch potato show, a window into a multibillion-dollar industry that deals in escapism. There are screens of every size and price range, cameras and camcorders, music players, and, when you get bored with the couch, chairs that will massage you as you watch that big screen.

That's right. The Panasonic Real Pro massage lounger, due to be released in April for about US$3500 ($5200), incorporates Swedish and shiatsu massage techniques to provide what Panasonic calls Swede-Atsu massage.

Consumers can custom-design a massage program choosing the type, strength, and focus of the massage and the parts of the body treated.

As for those big screens, they come at a price. A big price, up to US$15,000 for some of the larger sizes. But the laws of volume economics mean prices are coming down. The average price of a plasma TV is expected to drop to US$4000 this year.

Next year it could drop even lower, if Intel succeeds in its plan for a new chip for digital televisions. Intel president Paul Otellini said that could help drive the price of 50-inch TV sets below US$1800.

Intel isn't the only computer industry player climbing on board consumer electronics.

Dell has turned to making TV screens - not leading edge, but priced to sell. Hewlett-Packard is also aggressively aiming for the consumer entertainment dollar. It will sell an HP-branded Apple iPod music player and load Apple's iTunes software on all its machines by mid-year.

HP also promised a digital entertainment hub, connecting its computers and digital TV projectors with HP liquid crystal or plasma screens.

Chief executive Carly Fiorina said most living rooms were overdue for a "digital makeover".

It's already begun. Auckland audio consultant Dennis Wickstead of The Blue Room said PC manufacturers were displacing traditional consumer electronics vendors at the centre of home entertainment systems. "Most of the systems we put in now start with a PC," Wickstead said.

"You can play your DVDs, your audio, organise files, look at stills, download material. And anyone can use a keyboard and mouse - it's so simple."

The digital makeover is also offered by guitar maker Gibson, which has picked up the Wurlitzer brand and is offering a digital jukebox for storing your CD collection.

It is sometimes hard to see where computers stop and recorders or playback devices start. The Kaleidescope DVD Server allows users to store up to 160 movies for playback at any time.

Phones aren't content with being phones any more. Many of those on display had built-in cameras - an application the market has adopted with enthusiasm.

A lot of the more useful miniaturisation seemed to be in the printer and scanner area. Kodak offered a portable photo printer that plugs into the bottom of its cameras, allowing instant printing.

And out of the spy movies comes the US$200 Planon Systems Solutions' DocuPen Scanner, a pen-sized scanner with 2MB of flash memory that can capture a page of text or graphics in four seconds.

* Adam Gifford attended CES as a guest of Panasonic.