Gray skies ahead for electronics show?

The largest trade show in the Americas must be a great place to show off new products, right? Wrong. The International Consumer Electronics Show is quickly becoming a launchpad for products that fall flat.

When the annual conclave kicks off next week, organizers expect more than 140,000 people -- roughly the population of Syracuse, N.Y. -- to descend on Las Vegas. They will mill around 1.8 million square feet of booths and exhibits, equivalent to 31 football fields.

But a look back at the products heavily promoted at the CES in recent years reveals few successes. In 2009, "netbooks" -- tiny, cheap laptops -- were a hot category. They did have a good year, but interest was already waning when Apple Inc. obliterated the category with the launch of the iPad. In 2010, TV makers made a big push with 3-D sets, hoping to ride the popularity of 3-D movies such as "Avatar." Sales turned out to be disappointing as buyers balked at wearing glasses and found little to watch in 3-D.

So what products will be hyped this year? PC makers will show off ultrabooks. They're essentially Windows versions of the MacBook Air laptop, which uses chips instead of a spinning hard drive for storage. That makes the machines lighter and thinner but also more expensive.

Having failed to catch the iPad wave last year with $500 tablets, some tablet makers will try to catch the Kindle Fire wave with smaller, cheaper tablets.

And we'll see the first full-size TVs that use organic light-emitting diodes in place of LCDs. LG Electronics will be showing off a 55-inch set, to be sold late in the year. The price hasn't been disclosed but is likely to be high. OLED sets can be painfully thin -- in LG's case, less than a third of an inch -- and should boast improved image quality as well.