Looking for the Next Big Picture

LAS VEGAS

The electronics industry has just about won its biggest victory in decades by gaining acceptance for digital television, and now it doesn't quite know what to do next.

Just 10 years after its debut at the International Consumer Electronics Show here, digital TV has become regular television for everyone here. What was once a $7,000 to $10,000 indulgence for the rich has become a less-than-$1,000 product available in any store.

More than half of American households own a digital set, according to statistics gathered by the Consumer Electronics Association (the Arlington trade association that runs the gigantic CES show), and many have more than one.

This transition has happened even as the goal posts for digital television have moved. Where once digital might have been enough, high definition is the new benchmark for most people, as the superior picture and audio quality of HDTV broadcasts have won them over.

The TV screen has gone flatter as it's gone HD. Cathode-ray tubes and projection TVs look hopelessly bulky and obsolete next to plasma and liquid-crystal-display screens.

The downside of this is that the evolution of TV is about to slow. Pay no attention to the experimental flat-panel sets here that display three or four times the resolution of HDTV, which exist only to show how brilliant each company's engineers can be with a generous budget. Nor are there are any breakthrough technologies ready to change the shape or size of TV in the way that flat-panel sets did.

So what's the next big thing for the industry? Nobody seems to know. The 2008 edition of CES shows a business that isn't sure what customers will want next.

High-definition movies would be an obvious fit for an HDTV, but electronics manufacturers and movie studios have wasted much of this decade on a fratricidal war over competing formats. Some have backed a movie-disc format called HD DVD, while others have pushed a competing, incompatible standard called Blu-ray.

That war may finally be ending, but an end to the hostilities may not cure customers of their skittishness about high-definition movies in general.

Just before CES, Warner Home Video announced that it would stop releasing high-definition titles on both types of disc and would instead ship them on Blu-ray only, starting in May. (In making this unexpected switch, it effectively abandoned HD DVD viewers who had bought into its earlier support for that format.)

Blu-ray players, however, cost more than HD DVD players, which in turn cost more than the DVD players that many movie-watchers still regard as providing a perfectly good viewing experience.

Meanwhile, Internet video downloads, for all their inconvenience and sometimes puzzling selection, have gotten good enough for a lot of consumers to consider them -- not a new plastic disc -- to be the next big video source.

As a result, many companies exhibiting here have pushed the idea of stereos and TV sets that connect to the Web one way or another. Panasonic showed a plasma TV that doubles as a YouTube browser; Sony demonstrated an add-on module that lets its Bravia LCDs play clips from a variety of online video sites.

Samsung adopted a different strategy, showing a box that connects its TVs to computers running Microsoft's Media Center software. That was one of a surprisingly small number of new products built around Microsoft standards; the company that once dictated the course of home computing finds that its digital media software isn't an easy sell.

Instead, far more vendors seem to have cast their lot with Apple. Docks for iPods showed up on stereos and TVs from numerous companies, even those selling media players that compete with Apple's.

Portable devices in general may be the most exciting part of this year's CES. Digital cameras and camcorders are slowly starting to fuse, as the video modes on cameras grow sharper (some can now shoot HD video) and the still-picture modes on camcorders approach the resolution of digicams.

In a similar way, Global Positioning System devices are becoming more versatile, including new functions such as the digital-media playback once confined to iPods or ever-more-clever smartphones.

Getting all those different devices to play well with each other remains a trying task. LG, Panasonic, Samsung and Sony each boast that the products in their latest line of video gear can be controlled through a single remote control. But that's dismaying news for anybody yearning for simplicity -- particularly for people who don't want to buy all their electronics from one company.

And then there's the confusion created by different media file formats and varying "digital rights management" usage restrictions, and the increased need to read user manuals or call tech-support lines.

These problems don't seem likely to get any better, as a parade of lower-cost competitors continue to drive down prices. As the market gets bigger and broader, it gets more difficult to coax competing companies to agree to standards that would let all these gizmos work together. Your next device will almost certainly cost less and do more than the current model. But you can't count on it being much easier to plug into the TV or sync with the computer.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrobp@washpost.com. Read more athttp://blog.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/