From dual-screen laptops to smarter smart rings, the top tech of CES 2023 took existing technologies and made them practical enough to finally buy. Here are our favorites.
Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza — they just built up a ravenous demand.
From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.
Many of our Top Tech of CES 2023 award winners improved on previous generations in ways that elevated new technologies from merely “novel” to truly “livable.” From dual-screen laptops to smarter smart rings, here are our favorites in every category.
While Samsung’s S95B QD-OLED TV garnered nearly universal acclaim in 2022, a common request quickly arose from consumers: Make it bigger! Chalk it up to never having enough of a great thing. At CES 2023, Samsung answered the call for a larger QD-OLED TV, introducing the 77-inch S95C OLED. And it could have stopped there, but it didn’t.
Thanks to improvements in the display tech developed by Samsung Display, Samsung Electronics’ new QD-OLED TVs aren’t just available in an expanded array of screen sizes, they are now brighter and more vibrant as well.
With peak brightness measurements promised to push past 2,000 nits, perfect black levels, and exceedingly accurate colors, the new S95C and S90C QD-OLEDs offer picture quality unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. Toss in a premium onboard sound system and sleek design, and the S95C QD-OLED appears to be the TV to beat in 2023.
Now celebrating its 10th anniversary as a pioneer in OLED televisions, it seems fitting that LG would bring an element of innovation to its OLED legacy at CES 2023. It did just that by introducing its all-new M-Series OLED, a model whose defining characteristic is a feature many of us have long waited for: completely wireless 4K video and high-resolution signal transmission.
That’s right, the days of running cables and wires to our TVs will soon be over, and the LG M3-Series OLED is proof. The M3-Series OLED allows users to connect their cable boxes, game consoles, Blu-ray players, and antennas to a cube-shaped “Zero Connect Box” roughly the size of a cigar humidor that can beam totally uncompressed wireless audio and video to the paired TV from anywhere in the room, up to a distance of 30 feet. It’s a feature so convenient, we’re inclined to forget about wondering why it took so long to get it.
Younger readers may know Nakamichi best for its Shockwafe soundbar-based surround sound systems and the cultlike following they’ve built. But those Gen-X and older people probably recall Nakamichi as a high-end audio brand whose heyday was in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, punctuated by outlandishly high-end (and expensive) cassette decks, turntables, and CD players bearing the Dragon moniker.
This year’s CES sees the return of the Dragon in the form of a surround sound system so over-the-top, so brutally powerful, and so aggressively designed, it feels like a crime to associate it with the term “soundbar.”
With over 3,000 watts of power delivered to four subwoofers and over 22 mid-bass drivers and tweeters, many of which are packed into a solid slab of steel, the Dragon has more in common with an elaborate home theater system than anything else, yet it possesses the simplicity of a soundbar with entirely wireless signal delivery.
The sonic experience it delivers is simply transcendent. We’ve never heard anything quite like it and, frankly, we’re still in disbelief. It actually exists.
TCL’s meteoric rise to fame has forced the company to adapt its TV lineup to a more scalable model. As such, the 4-, 5-, and 6-Series TV model names with which so many have become familiar are now gone. But the tremendous value TCL’s TVs have always offered isn’t going anywhere.
Sitting at the very top of TCL’s new Q-Series TV lineup is the QM8, a 4K QLED TV with a remarkably powerful mini-LED backlight system and extremely granular backlight dimming control that enables a picture so rich and vivid, you’d expect to pay many thousands of dollars to get it.
