News Day is Over - On to Meetings, Meetings, Meetings, Meetings by Robin Liss Published on Jan 6, 2005 2:45 PM

Well, pretty much all of the major news in the camcorder industry that was going to come down at CES happened yesterday. It certainly was a very, very long and stressful day. It started at 5 AM, I didn't get back to my hotel until 1 AM, and I woke up at 5 AM today to make some news edits.

I'm pretty happy with our news coverage. I feel we certainly got a lot of information out, and I think the new spec sheets which were debuting here at the show are really helpful to drill down the information. I'm a little disappointed with our photo flow - that is, we've been slow to get pictures for some of our stories, but we're working on it and should have images in all of them over the next few hours.

As for what I saw? Not a super exciting show in my opinion. I like breaking the $600 barrier with the Panasonic camcorder, but I wish they'd made some bigger changes to the camcorders, maybe tried to fit 1/4.7 in. CCDs into the 250? As for Canon, it's what I expected: less innovation and more about driving down prices. As for Sony, I'm really unhappy with the move to take off the microphone in jack and change the accessory shoe - it really dampened the 3 chip CMOS news for me, because I just don't feel that it can be taken seriously by many consumers.

I've been walking the show floor today and there are many neat, cool things which I'll blog about over the next few hours. Check in!

P.S. We're working on our first video tour with a manufacturer and we hope to have it up later tonight or tomorow.