Digital Trends

"Best Of Show" and Conclusion

With so many innovative and interesting products, it's hard to pick just one product as the best. Several of the products we already mentioned stand out in their field.

Small form-factor or home-theater PCs were also the rage at CES 2004. FIC introduced a few models including some with integrated 17-inch LCDs and Windows XP Media Edition that will be re-branded. Taiwan's Tsunami caught our eye with their striking blue metal and acrylic industrial design and hardware based decoding. MSI and Shuttle also expanded on their HTPC product lines.

The product that most stands out in our minds though, is the TekPanel 300 by Hy-Tek. This is the ultimate HTPC and in our thoughts, the wave of the future. The TekPanel is an HTPC built into a 37" LCD flat panel display. It is packaged in a clean and modern looking custom brushed aluminum enclosure that can be wall-mounted or sit on a flat surface.

The innovative TekPanel - front view of the 37" LCD (left) and side view of media slots (right)

The TekPanel features a display that is 48 lines denser than HD — which is achieved by a built-in proprietary scaler. Inside is a regular ATX motherboard running a Pentium 4 with an ATI Radeon graphics card, built in media readers, DVD drives and all of the expandability of a desktop computer. With all of this, the system is still only about 5-inches deep. Hy-Tek had two TekPanels networked playing Halo and there was no ghosting at all. This was by far the most impressive gaming display on an LCD we have ever seen. The image was sharp and clear and viewable at all angles.

Showing what can be done with mostly off-the-shelf components, the TekPanel gives us a glimpse at what our home-theater of the future will be. The ultimate HTPC comes with quite a price tag at over $6,000, but with more entries in this arena, we'll hopefully see lower prices soon.

With the lines between home A/V, mobile A/V and computers blurring more and more, true digital convergence is just around the corner. CES 2004 showed us just how close we are to the "killer app". We're looking forward to the innovations of the next year and CES 2005. Hopefully we'll see some of our dream products, such as an "instant-on" HTPC similar to the Tek-Panel, smaller digital media players with more storage, and 40+GB drives integrated into PDAs.

In the next few weeks and months, Designtechnica will bring you product reviews and news on these devices and much more. Stick with us, it's going to be a fun ride!