CES: Scribes find a new use for digital cameras

I've sat through many press conferences, demonstrations and announcements over the years at the International Consumer Electronics Show, and they all go pretty much like this: speaker (or speakers) introduced, PowerPoint presentation starts.

Some of these presentations are slick; some are basic. Most fall in between. Reporters take notes and ask questions when allowed. People with more questions then mill around the lectern to address the presenter directly.

That's the scenario that unfolded earlier this week while covering a presentation by pair of Consumer Electronics Association officials. They were giving the results of a recent survey of would-be electronics consumers. Their slides were full of numbers, charts, graphs and information. The officials did a good job of speaking to the graphics, but there was so much to jot down that you couldn’t keep up with the presentation’s flow.

Then a solution presented itself. Many people — perhaps one-third  of the audience — pulled out digital cameras and snapped photos of the screen showing the slides. They did this for nearly every slide, which was 50-plus. This idea enchanted me.

So after trying in vain to keep up with my notepad and pen, I whipped out my Casio Exilm and started snapping. I quickly saw the benefit; the photos of the slides looked very legible on my camera's review screen. I kept shooting whenever there was data I thought were valuable enough to devote space on my 1 gigabyte memory card.

When it came time to write my piece on the presentation, I had my camera sitting beside the keyboard. When I needed to, I went to the photos that had the information I was writing about. It worked.

I requested a copy of the presentation from the CEA folks, and it showed up in my inbox a couple of hours later. By then, my column was filed, and I'd learned a new trick. Life got easier thanks to my digital camera.

Cool.