CES 2026: Fuji's Fake 8mm Camera, LEGO Smart Bricks, Atlas Robot, and More

0:00All right, welcome back to the noise. In this episode, let's talk about all the cool things that we saw come out of CES in the film and technology space. Ready, Addy? Let's do it. Let's go.

0:15All right. Welcome back to the Denoised. We're here in the new year. First episode back, sort of. I mean, we had our predictions, but it was the first time we're actually recording in the new year. So good to see you, Addy. Yeah, good to see you, too. Thanks for commenting on our predictions, everyone. It was a lot of fun making that episode. We'll see how things pan out over the next 12 months. All right. So, yeah, CES happened. And neither of us went this year, but we've been tracking some stuff online to kind of see some of the news that came out. Obviously, everything at CES, Consumer Electronics Show.

0:46So more on the consumer end, nothing that I saw that was like amazing for the professional film industry end. But a couple of cool things and trends. So, yeah, the first one that is the most camera specific thing is a new camera from Fujifilm, the Instax Mini Evo Cinema Camera. It's a hybrid Insta camera. oof great name that i can't pronounce i did it had a better i thought i had another name no instax mini evo okay anyways this camera seems definitely modeled off the kind of super eight old school cameras it's got the pistol grip it's got the pistol grip it's got that kind of narrow body design but it's got a couple modern things so it's a hybrid still in video camera and the thing that's getting a lot of traction has a little dial where you can pick can choose what type of era film you want to replicate it's like custom built for yeah gen z and under right and it has a built-in printer so you could also take photos and print photos which i know is also a very popular trend yeah fujifilm already has products that do that so yeah this is an extension of that if you if i'm guessing yeah so uh it's called the era the eras tour it's called the dial and uh it features 10 eras uh such as 1960 inspired by eight millimeter film cameras in the 1960s and 1970s era so you pick the era and it replicates a film stock obviously it's a fun kind of toy gimmick if you were shooting something for real and you wanted to emulate a specific film stock look or era you would shoot it normally and then post-process it later because you don't want to bake in these looks and settings as you're filming yeah and let's keep in mind like fuji film has been making film stock since the 1970s and and so on and they have some legendary film stock looks already so they you know they have the expertise in-house hopefully to get these looks right i'd be curious how if you know you take a professional colorist or something you take like actual stuff shot on fuji film film stock from that era and then stuff shot with this camera that mimics it, like how well they match up if it actually does emulate that specific Fujifilm stock?

3:03Yeah, I mean, like eight millimeter film wasn't as capable as, let's say, 16 or 35 millimeter film, right? It was like, you know, it would tend to blow out a lot and was very grainy and there was not a lot of detail. So if you're mimicking eight millimeter film, I think a small sensor on this camera is probably good enough to do so. But again, film usually outperforms digital sensors most of the time. Yeah, I mean, it also depends on how you scan it. But yeah, you have the resolutions there. You're not actually talking about resolution. I'm going to guess it's just regular HD. I don't even know what it is.

3:35Yeah, and it looks like it's really, because it's like a pistol grip, it's really built for vertical videos. I don't know. I mean, are you saying the pistol grip? It seems like it's geared for that. 8mm cameras in the 60s, they were shooting vertical video with their pistol grip. They had no idea that would be the future, right? Turn the projector sideways. If I was Fujifilm, I would build it so it goes right into Instagram or TikTok. Upload to it. Yeah, it's got some app that connects with it too. I'm sure the app will send stuff directly to Instagram. It definitely seems to target the kind of Gen Z nostalgia trend.

4:15It's a toy, but it looks like a fun toy. I'll take it though, because in the age of where we're questioning if something is synthetic or not, I'll take a bunch of creators doing a vintage look video capture and then using that as a creative output. Yeah, and something that kind of does it in the product right there. It's not like, oh, let me, I mean, we're talking about let's film it and post-process it later as part of a professional pipeline. But when you're a creator and just having fun, the less kind of actual computer-y stuff you have to do, the more it keeps you kind of in the moment. Exactly.

4:42How many people are like us who are tinkering in Resolve, like color notes? Not a lot. film emulator plugins to accurately get the halation. Five-click process. The grain characteristics here just aren't up to par. I think the professional of the groups will probably kind of say, eh, it's a toy, it's a gimmicky. I think it's a good push because it kind of correlates with the Sinners release, the Odyssey release, and all the film releases that are coming up. Like there's a resurgence in this vintage looking field. Yeah, maybe like Red or Ari will release a consumer level IMAX replication camera.

5:26Yeah, if Ari can figure out that bankruptcy situation. Yeah. All right. Speaking of more toys, this one is pretty awesome. Lego announced a new smart brick. And so it is basically a 2x4, their standard 2x4 brick, but it has a built-in computer system in the brick. And it could also connect with other Lego characters and some other Lego pieces that have NFC smart tags inside them. And it basically turns this brick into this sound and light emitting detection system. So you can put the brick on a car. It starts making car noises. If it hits like a person or like a wall, it kind of detects that. It makes a crash sound.

6:04So it's this super next level way of taking Legos, which like I was obsessed with Legos. and bringing some interaction to it, but without a phone or without any other kind of computer system. Did you say without phone? I'm in. I know. Because I remember a few years ago, Lego was doing this kind of like AR thing where it was like you could build a Lego set, but then you could load an app on your phone and kind of make it come to life. But it's like, eh, but you still got to bring the phone out and that kind of ruins the fun of Legos. But this is like very tactile, hands-on. Still keeps it fun. Or it still keeps it like, you know.

6:38I would love to play around with this. Yeah. Let me find it. Let me know when you buy a set. Demo video. Yeah. Here's one of the demo videos. Oh, wow. So it's got like, I'm guessing a bunch of NFC, RFID stuff built into an individual brick. Into other parts. Like that little flat piece was like a thing that detected it. And then the character it could detect. I mean, the miniaturization of it is mind boggling. I mean, it's a standard Lego piece. Yeah, like Arduino or Raspberry Pi is not even that small. So they've had to go into custom chip development, I'm guessing, to put all of these bricks together.

7:18Yeah, I mean, here's sort of like this animated cutaway of the brick. And it also doesn't, I don't think it has a microphone, so it also doesn't, here from Trung, Lego built its own. Yeah, the guy has like his torsio is all computer. Yeah, so some of these characters will have NFC tags, so it'll detect it. Also, the multiple smart bricks can make a Bluetooth mesh network, and they can tell the position and direction of the bricks, and they can trigger crash sounds, like if a brick hits the wall. Wow. Or if you have multiple bricks as cars, it can detect which car wins the race. Yeah, if you throw these bricks into your regular Lego dump, like the big pile of regular Legos you have, you're not finding them.

8:03that's that's awesome though do you know any have any idea how much it costs or how much i don't know how much are we looking at pricing yeah i wonder if you like step on this brick if it makes like an owl sound the age old leg of rick i mean i'm old enough to remember you remember their very first smart brick system i mean i'm calling a smart brick it wasn't called that it's called like a mind storm and it was like a computer brick that you can program yeah i had this as a kid this was old ass man this thing was like 200 bucks now you can buy it for seven dollars on ebay i mean look how big and clunky that was yeah and that one you definitely you couldn't even do anything on its own you had to like load their computer software it had this little like usb infrared plug that you would like point to the front of this thing and that's how you would like load the program onto it but i remember people just built some wild stuff with this like a photocopier where it would like you'd put like two pages on top of each other and it would like detect the writing and then like put down a pen and like draw it whoa yeah people built some crazy some crazy stuff there's like a robotics try to build like a car that could drive itself yeah yeah you know lego is like that one company that never really lost their way like they've always innovated but they've always been original in themselves it's it's pretty cool yeah yeah i I mean, especially with the Lego movie, which was like really good.

9:25And they've, yeah, they've kept it consistent. And they have IP now. They have like Ninjago and a bunch of other things. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Also, other Lego thing that was cool. Not really a product you can buy, but this is probably the coolest use of the Sphere. They turned the Sphere into a giant Lego Death Star and then had these Lego X-Wing fighters available for people to sit in. and then it seems like people are piloting the X-Star, playing a video game, but then that video game is also projected live onto the sphere, which is crazy. Wow. On the outside display. On the outside display.

10:03Which is far easier. Yeah. Yeah, I heard that the outside display is only in 1080p resolution. Really? Yeah. Each pixel is the size of your head. That's true. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You could actually see it on the, Have you seen the Marty Supreme promo? Yeah, where he stands on it. Where Timothee Chameleon lays on top of the sphere? Yeah, so when he's standing, you can see how far apart those pixels are. They're like, I don't know, six feet apart or something insane like that. Yeah. All right, well, Lego lends itself well to something that's a procure resolution. But you're also saying to have this live update is easier to do on the outside because you don't have to push so many pixels.

10:41That's it. Yeah, and it's a fairly easy geometry to wrap around. like it's it's just a lap long wraparound sphere you know yeah like the death star so like the death star yeah this is awesome look a trench run on the sphere like that's that's super cool that's a cool use yeah absolutely and it seems like multiplayer and the player locations were updating on the sphere i don't know if that's actual real time like position or if that was just sort of like a pre-built thing but it's pretty cool i would i don't see why not i mean if it's It's most likely built in Unreal Engine, I'm guessing. And Unreal is just really made to be, it's a game engine.

11:24You can build a multiplayer game quite easily with all of the building blocks. Yeah, and as far as multiplayer games, I'm sure this is pretty basic. Just track three objects. Yeah, very cool. All right, next up. This was a new product from HP that is called I saw this. The Elite Board. and so it's basically a full-on desktop computer that's just built into the keyboard and so it's just a keyboard size computer and you plug it into a monitor bring a usb mouse or a bluetooth mouse and you have your whole computer system that's incredible i don't know why we didn't think of this like 10 years ago i mean i think they thought of this 40 years ago with the commodore 64 or the Apple 2C or whatever.

12:10That's right. Come full circle. Yeah, I mean, in this PCMag article, it was like sort of the idea was a lot of people just, they have the laptops, but then they just kind of take their laptop from home to work, plug it into an external monitor and keyboard and never really use the laptop as a laptop. So this sort of just cuts out the display, it cuts out the extra stuff that people might not use. And then you just sort of have your portable computer on the go. Do you have any idea of specs? What kind of GPU are we looking at? I didn't really say in this article. I mean, the one thing is it's sort of branded as an AI computer, which, I don't know, whatever that means.

12:47You know what? There was a photo of this with sort of the back open, and you could see a giant fan and possibly a full-size GPU or close to it. Yeah, let me show that photo in a sec. I'm just going to see if I can see any specs. Elite 4G1 next-gen AI PC. Yeah, man. HP gets slept on. They consistently turn out really awesome products, and they're always high quality, at least at the upper price range. But it's HP. It's not a sexy brand. Yeah, but they've been there kind of like IBM. They've just been around forever. Yeah. A lot of the monitors I use are HP-Z displays, which are solid monitors. Yeah, there it is.

13:30That's the picture. Yeah, so there's a cutout. Yeah, I mean, you've got the cooling system. You got SSD drive, RAM. It's an AMD chip. Yeah, see that giant fan in the middle? That's either for the CPU or the GPU, but that's a substantial fan. And here's the front. Yeah, that's a cool idea. I mean, obviously, you're not going to do any heavy-duty graphic stuff on this, but this is a cool idea for different interpretations sort of in the same realm as the Mac minis. Yeah, I was just going to say, this is their answer to the Mac mini. Yeah, and now if they have a display that goes hand-in-hand with this, something that's also a little bit more mobile, a little bit smaller footprint, I think that would be a really nice pair.

14:05Or if you could pair this with like a tablet or something or some other display, either that or like any of the smart glasses or something like that, that'd be another, unlock another feature. Now you're thinking. Now I'm thinking, yeah. Dude, in 2026, you're way more innovative. Reimagine computering. Big tank Joey. Yeah. All right. Other one. robot updates a new boston dynamics atlas robot oh man i've been following this one i am obsessed um i these robots are so freaking cool yeah i mean look at this thing move it looks it well that's a i think that's a cg but let me uh this live demo yeah show it like getting up from the floor because it has 360 degree hinges and rotation joints so like it could completely turn its torso around its hips and knees and everything i think this one does that yeah so the arms yeah that's pretty cool it's kind of creepy but it's cool it's creepy there's the torso yeah but then no when it gets down the floor fully back fully back and forward yeah so the way like uh it goes back and forth is it just turns his body back and forth it doesn't have to actually yeah like that yeah it's sort of like ah that's crazy yeah it's very black mirror for sure Yeah, as this future death machine comes towards you and you just rotate its arms.

15:32Dude, this thing can run. There's a video of this, like it's running and dancing. It's quite agile. I bet. All right, so some of the specs. It has a four-hour battery life, six feet, two inches tall, weighs about 200 pounds, 56 total degrees of freedom. It is now fully electric, no hydraulic systems, which were on the older version. A 110 pound weight capacity can reach up to 7.5 feet. Brain is powered by NVIDIA chips, which I think it also, Google's DeepMind AI models are also being integrated. Yeah, the important thing here is that it's not a program robot per se, but this is a learning robot.

16:11So if it doesn't know a task, you can actually show it the task like, hey, fold my laundry like this, and it'll kind of figure it out just from you doing it, which is nuts. And yeah, I mean, so this came up, the older Atlas robot, we did that episode, I don't know, like last summer, on that demo where it was filming and operating with a gimbal on set. Yeah, in a VP stage. On a VP stage, yeah. And I remember we sort of had that discussion of like, if you're building robots for stuff, why make them humanoid? But then it became obvious where it's like, it's the easiest for the robot to integrate it with how the world is already built, because everything's already built for humans.

16:51And so if you build a robot with that same design as a human, you don't have to modify stuff for it. You could just automatically use it. So it could just grab a gimbal or grab a camera and operate theoretically smoothly. It can sit on your office chair and do your job. Just kidding. Listen, the thing that's to be mentioned here is that Boston Dynamics' I believe first customer is Hyundai, like the car company and the big industrial company. And they were showing examples of this thing like picking up an entire side of a car and then giving it to like a welder to weld it into place. Yeah, like that's pretty cool.

17:36that's i mean for a human to repeatedly do that task they would have some long-term injury right like nobody's gonna lift an entire panel of a car yeah i mean yeah 110 isn't i mean that's a lot of amount but also like that's such an awkwardly shaped 110 pounds that you know it's not like i'm just like picking up a heavy box that's like a very weirdly shaped thing that maybe someone could do like once but to do that all day yeah exactly it's too repetitive and exhausting for person. Yeah, I mean, this is look, this just makes it so clear to me that robots are going to come for us not like in an offensive way but robots are coming to take a lot of repetitive, monotonous jobs sooner than you think.

18:18Yeah, and also, you know, going back to that world understanding, this is like, this is what the AI world models video models, this is the road they're leading to, you know, making the videos is cool, but this is the bigger market of how do robots understand the world? Yeah, and look, we didn't get here overnight. Boston Dynamics, they have been showing the robot, not just Atlas, but the dog one for over a decade. So the robotics mechanical technology has been evolving since then. And NVIDIA has been building world models and all types of optimization for their learning AI for over a decade. And so these things are just coming into fruition at the same time we're experimenting with image and video generation and LLMs and all the things that's happening.

19:03So it feels like everything's hitting us at once. But these were all sort of origin story back to over a decade ago. Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right. Next up. Actually, so these are camera specific updates. Not a lot, but this is a grab bag of some stuff from a tech radar roundup. I won't cover, you know, technically it's a camera, but Bird Buddy 2 Mini, a bird feeder camera that can see and hear birds. That was released. Technically a camera. not shooting any uh maybe that'll shoot planet earth or something but no this one is there's a new action camera from the robot vacuum manufacturer dream they launched a modular action camera a small modular ak action camera called the dream leaptic cube how is it special good question uh it's basically the same category as the osmo nano oh it's self leveling the dji Osmo.

19:58The Osmo, it was like DJI's GoPro cam thing. In the day where everybody's smartphone has a really decent camera on it and that's doing image stabilization and all that stuff, you really need to have a very specific reason to buy another camera and then put it in your pocket. Yeah, I mean, most of these action cams, it's like you're doing an action sport or something where you're underwater, skiing, biking, you know the thing that kind of gopro found its sweet spot and then kind of i mean gopro's got really good and then i was like well you buy the gopro and then they're really good cameras and it's like well what do i need to buy like what do i need to buy the next gopro for and kind of similar with these things i mean it looks like it has a much bigger screen i don't it's not clear if these break apart it's like a camera like a like a little modular little camera yeah yeah it doesn't every photo has them together so that's also kind of weird because it just makes it big and bulky i could see the fuji film one taking off like that's a very specific thing that you can get with smartphones that's for being out and about it's fun it's good it also looks and it's stylized it's cool yeah exactly it prints photos you know so you can actually make something tangible when you're like out and about yeah i don't know this doesn't looking at this even more where i don't think this monitor and they haven't they haven't showed me any demos where it breaks off um that just makes it even weirder and less useful so now it's just like a big bulky action cam i don't see it i don't know i don't quite get the point i mean the dji stuff's good but i mean as far as action cam goes like the insta grid has been my go-to for anything i would have used a go pro for like five years ago because it just the quality is really good and just shoots everything and then you can just reframe it later so you don't have to worry about oh did like we get the right angle in the car because most of the time with gopro and filming you just kind of have to set it up and hope that you set it up at the right angle and hope you captured it.

21:52You're just like, yeah, we got it all. So we can just figure it out later. All right. And then let's see what else we got. Okay, this one I've been seeing. I saw a couple of demos popping around. The Ricci Mini. So this is a this is sort of like a fun robot from Hugging Face and some other companies. Wait, Hugging Face? The AI repository? Yeah. Okay. The open source robot for today and tomorrow's AI Builders. But they announced this. This was announced last summer, but now it's actually, I still don't know if it's fully out yet, but it's like there were demos and people playing with it at CES.

22:28So it's like a pet robot, like one you keep at home? It's more like a, I think it's like a learning, like a programmable learning robot, AI robot. That's why I hug your face and bald. Okay. Yeah, like a Raspberry Pi for AI kind of thing. So what, Comfy's going to drop a robot next? that's how they're going to make their money

22:52subscription model it's a comfy robot but it's it's ambition is to keep you comfy and it like makes you coffee and it gets you a bike i i had i thought i had a demo link say let me that is pretty cool now that i think about it like a robot that you can upload new ai models into and have it learn and sort of learn from its mistakes and get better with robotics models, I guess. Yeah, if you... Yeah, this guy is doing exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah, if you're like, you don't have the money for the Atlas, but you want to mess around with programming robots as a hobby or as a learning process, I think this is what this is for.

23:31Yeah, I think in that realm of like a DIY robot, if you will, the best option right now is the unitree which is the chinese robot i've shared clips of the unitree with you before it's it's a it looks like a skinnier smaller brother of the atlas and i think it's only i mean it's not cheap but for a robot it's cheap it's sixteen thousand dollars and it'll ship like from alibaba or like a chinese website okay oh wait is that is that the one it's like a mini man's version of the atlas is that the one where the guy kicked himself in the balls yes the mocap robot yeah so they were using yeah unit trees are used a lot for testing he learned he learned about testing where to position yourself he may never walk again but i think the funniest part of that clip was the robot bending over in pain because he was bending over in pain oh yeah because it was Mimicking the mocap data.

24:34Because it was mimicking him. Yeah. All right. Let's see. A couple other random ones. Yeah. Just a couple other last random ones. Samsung demoed a new 3D display. Oh, that's cool. So this one, we can see it looks super flat, like as flat as a regular display. And in this demo, it's tracking their position. And you see, it looks like, you know. Yeah. it's a lenticular display that's tracking the um the viewer's eyes essentially yeah this is nothing new but um it's a signage it's much more portable right because it hasn't everything else before that's been like huge way bigger yeah it's chunky yeah and also this is big like the previous lenticular stuff is maybe you know 30 inch 40 inch tops like this is like full human height like that sony display yes monitor yeah it's really hard to do because you need a lot of optics in front of the display.

25:30I think thousands of optical elements in front of the display. So it's quite an engineering challenge. And does it still only work if it's like, does it have to track a specific person? Yeah, it tracks multiple people. So different people can see different perspectives at the same time. Right. So everybody has a viewing angle and that viewing angle has to line up directly with where the optical elements are going to show you that part of that parallax, if you will. Okay, but it can work. Because the Sony one, I think it's only one person. And if there's people hovering over it, then it starts trying to find which person to track.

26:08Yeah, yeah. And some of them are adaptive to multiple people. Some of them are really dialed in for one person. Sony being Sony, they do really high-end stuff. So that's probably why. The use case, the Sony one, is intended to be like a workplace monitor. Yeah, like a reference monitor. This is a digital signage. So you would expect this to be able to track multiple people because this would be in a store or on the street or something. For sure. And on that bezel, I'm guessing there's probably cameras and LiDAR systems or whatnot to kind of track who's looking at the display. Yeah. But yeah, very cool.

26:40I mean, this is like the smallest, thinnest that we've seen. What does it say? Experience 3D effects with a one meter depth powered by signage. Oh, so does it need to have a certain distance behind it? No, the one meter depth is the Z depth of the three-dimensional space that you're looking at. Oh, like how far the... Yeah, if that model is in a one meter deep room, white room, that's what it's talking about. Yeah, it's just weird because they're showing this measurement behind the monitor instead of in front of the monitor. Oh, no, no. It has nothing to do with how far you are from the display.

27:14It's the level of Z depth or parallax that you're getting. Like, see the back of that room? I see. Okay. I get what you're saying. So you're mimicking a one meter deep room in like a few inches. The 3D space is. Exactly. Got it. That makes more sense. That's pretty damn deep, I gotta say. Last one. I mean, this is probably one of the bigger ones, but it was the NVIDIA's updates and stuff. And so the bigger one was the announcement of the Rubin platform, which is sort of the next evolution of Blackwell. Yeah. Yeah. They've been hinting at Rubin even last year, last CES. I think we covered it. Yeah, and I mean, we're not super technical, but the kind of big bulk headlines was like, AI compute, faster, cheaper, less energy.

27:59Yeah, the big takeaway for me was, and I was quite shocked at how production-ready their autonomous vehicle systems were. And I think it's going to ship with the new Mercedes CLA. So it's actually tied to an actual car that you can buy. And I mean, look, Tesla has always been - an NVIDIA self-driving model in it? Yeah, it has a weird name. The architecture is called Marjoram or Maloram, something like that. But it's a full-stack system from the hardware all the way up to the AI model. Everything is completely built by NVIDIA. There also was a DLSS 4.5 update. Nice. Yeah, I was looking at just up frame rate, but I'm like 185 frames per second to 247.

28:43It's just getting more efficient and running leaner as you expect NVIDIA to figure out. That's cool. Anything else we missed that you saw? Just a big note that autonomous vehicles and that world is directly contributing to what we do here because all of that is making the world models better and run leaner and so on. As the world models get bigger, the image and video models will tend to lean into that and grab some of that sort of world awareness, if you will. And I think we're going to see in 2026, and I don't know if I predicted this or not in the last episode, like a lot of the video models, image models are going to lean a little bit more towards world models.

29:33They'll be better at like spatial reconstruction of places. they'll be better at populating, let's say, a busy street with cars and people and so on. I mean, Nano Banana Pro does it really well. I don't know if there's direct ties to Genie at all, but we're going to see a lot more of that. Everybody that makes a solid image model, video model, also has a world model, including NVIDIA. So yeah, it's funny, all the industries and all the AI models kind of help each other out in a way. Yeah, I'm thinking about it. I think we touched on predictions like a consistent world model, like a genie that would be, you could generate and walk through and be more consistent.

30:13You predicted that, yes. More like indefinitely, not like, you know, for five minutes or whatnot. Two minutes. Yeah. But I think in the denoisies, when we're talking about forgotten, forgotten model, forgotten companies, you mentioned mid journey and then, or maybe I mentioned mid journey. One of us did. And then we were like, can they shift gears to be more of a multimodal model? Because it seems like they'd have to rebuild the entire thing. Because every other company that's doing really big pushes in generative imaging and video, they're multimodal world models. So I think maybe that was where we were talking about that.