When you check out an electronics store, there’s a very good chance you’re going to find something made by Samsung on quite a few of the shelves, and while phones, tablets, cameras, and TVs are the things we know about, there are a few things you may not see coming.
We checked this sort of gear out last year, actually, when a trip to Samsung’s Regional Forum — basically, a smaller version of CES just for Samsung’s gear — revealed a whole bunch of products that will likely never make it to our own country.
Australia is just a small chunk of the world, with only around 25 million people populating our little slice of heaven, and so we don’t have a market for every product made by every manufacturer. In fact, it’s quite common to see products from all companies that won’t come down under.
But this year, some of the things Samsung is getting its mitts into surprised us.
For instance, we’ve known for a long time that Samsung makes big ships, but this year, we found it also has a hand in making big medical machines.
One of these is a massive device built for taking digital x-rays, the GU60, which is seen in this article depicted only as a model (relocating a demo radiography machine can’t be easy).
This machine could be seeing its way into local hospitals if they decide to upgrade their current radiography gear, and uses noise reduction to make clearer scans of your body, a help guide built directly into the LCD based control panel, auto positioning to remember the more frequently used positions, and an LED lighting strip to indicate what’s happening, such as green for “ready,” orange for “scanning,” and red for “emergency.”
Blood testing, and other forms of body liquids can also be analysed by something Samsung makes, with two types of immunoassay machines shown.
It might not be the thing you want to read about at breakfast or lunch, but these digital instruments we saw at the Forum make it possible to analyse fluids in portable ways, whether sampling the blood directly on the unit, or reading it from a DVD-like cartridge system.
Smartphones can apparently be linked up with the units, making it possible to transmit the information to people in the medical field, too, so the experts don’t just have to read it from a computer print out, and can send the information digitally.
One other gadget we saw was an ultrasound machine produced by Samsung, which did a little more than just provide a two dimensional flat look at the baby from above. Rather, Samsung’s UGEO WS80A seems to go beyond the grainy black and white images we generally see on ultrasound equipment, providing 3D images that can be shared to a smartphone or a TV.
Over on the smartphone side of things, the “Hello Mom” Android app can grab images directly from the ultrasound, as well as movies, while also being able to track the progress of the child.
Moving away from the medical field, Samsung also wants to show that it can produce things for your home that you might not think about every day.
That area is lighting, and while we haven’t yet seen the WiFi lighting that has been hinted to us earlier on, there will be lots of bulb types available from Samsung for regular lighting needs.
Warm, cool, bright, not-so-bright, with tubes and your regular bulbs, as well as lights for the kitchen, the office, the living room, and more.
We saw more really tall fans aimed at cooling your room that had a lot in common aesthetically with loudspeakers, just don’t expect the vibrations coming out of this to play back some music or movie effects: these are totally designed to cool your living room.
Oh, and those big stereo systems we saw last year?
Samsung is still making those, too, bringing the doof doof to people who like flashing lights and colours.
The company calls this “Giga Sound,” which is a nice way of saying “enough oomph to blow your ear drums out while dazzling you with colourful light patterns.”
Just as we noted last year, it’s unlikely we’ll see Giga Sound make it to Australia, but given that both Sony (Muteki) and Panasonic both have products available catering for this space, it’s possible we’ll see something locally at one point in time.
Leigh D. Stark travelled to the Samsung Forum in Bali, Indonesia as a guest of Samsung Australia.
