Android Mania: Engadget's gear of CES 2012

Sunday, 22 January 2012

Engadget's gear of CES 2012

Announcements, Cellphones, Cameras, Internet, Laptops, Misc. Gadgets, Networking, Portable Audio / Video, Wireless, Meta, Engadget's gear of CES 2012By Zach Honig

posted Jan 14th 2012 6:27PM

We see an enormous number of gadgets each year at CES, and while the veil comes off a handful of notebooks, cameras and smart phones during the show, the gear that really makes the week for Engadget is our own. In each editor's gear bag, you'd likely be able to find a notebook, camera with external microphone, an Android / iOS / Windows Phone device, an AT&T LTE USB modem and enough bottled beverages to make trips to the "posh restroom" as routine as checking email. Pizza, pasta, chips and beef jerky keep us going during 20-hour days in the trailer, where a stable (and pricey) Ethernet connection let us bring you dozens of posts each hour without interruption. Jump past the break for a look at our gear in a bit more detail.

Without our computers, we might as well have spent our days dropping chips at the roulette tables. There's too much at stake this week to take a gamble, however, so we insisted that the entire team use an Apple notebook -- a required component for our Elgato turbo.264 HD hardware-accelerated encoders, which we use to process each and every video that ends up on this site. And while many members of our team use Windows-based systems at home or in the office, everyone used either a Mac Book Pro or Mac Book Air during CES. Members of our Distro design team paired their machines with 27-inch displays. Miraculously, we made it through the entire week without so much as a hiccup on the hardware front.

A wired Ethernet connection and Netgear N900 router WiFi router kept us up and running from the Engadget trailer, but with several dozen editors roaming the Las Vegas Convention Center halls at once, staying connected on the move was equally important. We equipped each editor with a Momentum LTE USB modem, which let us hop on AT&T's brand-new (and therefore little-used) 4G network from the floor, at liveblogs and while in-transit between The Strip and the LVCC. An enormous variety of smart phones kept us in the loop as well, including such devices as an imported Samsung Galaxy Note running on AT&T's HSPA+ network (though most often EDGE), the Verizon LTE Galaxy Nexus and a small handful of iPhones. We also brought along a Netgear N600 wireless router for a shared connection when traveling in large groups.

We tried something different on the camera front this year, equipping our entire hands-on team with Sony NEX-C3 mirrorless ILCs and external shotgun mics. We also relied almost entirely on SanDisk's line of Extreme Pro memory cards, which managed countless transfers with nary a hitch. Nearly all of the hands-on photos and videos you saw on this site were shot with that setup, with the exception of all of our liveblogs, which require a tethered solution with a much more powerful kit. In addition to the Canon and Nikon cameras and lenses that we keep in rotation throughout the year, lens rental needs were handled by BorrowLenses.com, which yet again came through with a healthy spread:
5 Nikon AF-S FX 60mm f/2.8 Micro3 Nikon AF-S DX 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II2 Nikon AF-S FX 70-200mm VR II f/2.81 Nikon AF-S DX 17-55mm f/2.83 Nikon AF-S DX 35mm f/1.83 Nikon D300 Digital SLR3 Nikon D700 Digital SLR3 Canon EF-S 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 IS3 Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro2 Canon EF 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6L IS2 Canon 5D Mark II Digital SLR

We also used a variety of other photo gear, including a Think Tank Photo Airport International V 2.0 rolling bag for transporting cameras from New York, the Pico Dolly compact DSLR dolly unit for rolling shots and several Joby GorillaPod SLR-Zoom tripods for support. And, as an extra special treat for the week, Red Digital Cinema sent us a Red Scarlet-X on loan, which we paired with our Canon lenses.

We spent the majority of our time at the Engadget trailer, parked just outside the LVCC, but a good chunk of the staff also dropped by the indoor stage (seen just above), which was centrally-located just outside the LG booth in the public area of the Convention Center. As always, the Engadget Classic team was joined this year by our Chinese, Japanese and Spanish counterparts, who also chimed in yesterday to help sum-up the show. This was a record year for both Engadget and CES as a whole, and we're already counting down the days until we get to do it all again.