Al Griffin

Of the three series of XBR Ultra HDTVs announced by Sony at CES, the X950B is the only one it’s calling a “reference standard.” (The one directly below it, the X900B Series, is merely a “statement in picture, sound and design.”) What makes an X950B Series set so good? For starters, it’s got a full-array LED backlight with Sony’s X-tended Dynamic Range Pro processing to dynamically deepen blacks and boost highlights. It also has the same Triluminos tech found in select Sony HDTVs and UHDTVs from 2013.

Bang & Olufsen’s CES press event was held in a comfortable, stylishly decorated room that drove home the company’s message of merging good sound with good design.

Despite the word “Consumer” in its title, the Consumer Electronic Show is basically a B2B event: It’s for companies to introduce products, technologies, and concepts to other companies with the goal of getting down to bizness and making money. That’s one reason why there are hundreds of conference sessions and press events related to stuff other than huge TVs, headphones, and other gadgets.

Drones are big news these days (a recent 60 Minutes piece on Amazon’s drone package-delivery plans drove the hype machine to full throttle), so it comes as no surprise that drones—or Unmanned Aerial Systems, as manufacturers of consumer-grade drones like to call them—are a category here at CES. One maker, DJI, even held a press conference to introduce its new Phantom 2 Vision, a quadcopter with a built-in 14 megapixel camera capable of recording 1080p video (4 GB micro SD card included).