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

In this week’s episode of Denoised, Addy and Joey break down that camera and a short list of other CES highlights that matter to filmmakers and content creators: Fujifilm's instax mini Evo Cinema, LEGO's Smart Brick, the Las Vegas Sphere LEGO Death Star installation, HP's EliteBoard keyboard PC, Boston Dynamics' new Atlas, a handful of consumer camera oddities, Hugging Face's Reachy Mini, Samsung's slim 3D display, and NVIDIA's Rubin platform updates.

instax mini Evo Cinema: a toy with a clear audience

Joey opens with Fujifilm's instax mini Evo Cinema, a pistol-grip camera designed to look and feel like Super 8 gear. The device pairs video capture with stills and an onboard printer, and it adds an "Aerys" dial that selects from ten era-based film emulations (1960s through 1970s, etc.).

The hosts treat it as a creative toy rather than a professional capture tool. Their main point: if a filmmaker wants a faithful vintage film look, the correct approach is to shoot raw and grade in post. That said, for creators who want an immediate, in-camera vintage vibe—especially for quick vertical clips for social platforms—this product hits the nostalgia button and removes friction.

LEGO's Smart Brick: interaction without a phone

Next, LEGO's new Smart Brick grabbed attention. It's a standard 2x4 brick with an embedded computer, NFC-tag-aware pieces, and Bluetooth mesh networking. Put the brick on a LEGO car and it plays engine sounds; collide it with another object and it plays crash effects. Characters and flat pieces carry NFC tags, so the brick can sense who or what is nearby.

The hosts liked this for tactile play. The critical design choice: the interactivity happens without a smartphone. For creative tech teams and studios, LEGO's approach highlights a trend—sensing and compute can be pushed into objects to keep interactions hands-on rather than app-first.

Las Vegas Sphere meets LEGO: a practical spectacle

On the Sphere, LEGO staged a Death Star wrap with X-wing cockpits where attendees piloted a multiplayer game projected live on the exterior. The hosts note the display looks impressive at scale, but resolution is limited—the outer screen roughly matches 1080p when measured across the massive surface.

HP EliteBoard G1a: a keyboard desktop

HP showed the EliteBoard G1a, a full desktop built into a keyboard chassis. Plug it into a monitor, add a mouse, and it becomes a desktop station. Joey frames this as a practical answer to people who mostly dock laptops and rarely use the clamshell form factor on the go.

For creatives, the EliteBoard is interesting because it shrinks the footprint of a workstation without removing compute. The device advertises an AI angle and shows a beefy cooling system in teardown photos—suggesting this could sit in a hybrid workflow where local interference or GPU-accelerated tasks complement cloud services.

Boston Dynamics Atlas: humanoid robotics moving toward real work

Boston Dynamics debuted a new, fully electric Atlas with greater articulation, a 4-hour battery, a 110-pound lift capacity and an NVIDIA-powered brain. The hosts emphasizes a key point: Atlas is a learning robot. Rather than preprogramming every motion, it can be shown a task and then learn to replicate it.

Why this matters to filmmakers: humanoid robots are being designed to fit the world humans already built. That opens possibilities for set automation, repetitive rigging tasks, and heavy-lift jobs—think chassis positioning, moving set elements, or even camera handling in controlled environments. Hyundai and other industrial customers were mentioned as early adopters.

Grab-bag: Birdbuddy 2 Mini, Dreame Leaptic Cube, and action-camera trends

Joey covers a few small-camera highlights from TechRadar: a bird-feeder camera that recognizes birds, and Dreame's Leaptic Cube, a modular-styled action camera from a company known for robot vacuums. The hosts push back on another crowded action-cam market, noting that 360 captures—where you reframe in post—continue to be the practical option for unpredictable action.

Reachy Mini: an entry-level platform for robot experimentation

Hugging Face and partners showed Reachy Mini, a compact, programmable humanoid aimed at AI hobbyists and researchers. Joey compares it to a Raspberry Pi for robotics: a platform to upload models, iterate, and learn robotics concepts without the cost of a full Atlas-like system.

Samsung's slim 3D display: thinner lenticular signage

Samsung demoed a slim lenticular display that tracks viewers and presents parallax 3D perspectives. The hosts point out the engineering challenge—optical layers and viewer-tracking make these panels complex—but the result is large-format signage that can deliver 3D depth up to about one meter.

NVIDIA Rubin platform and the push toward world models

The episode closes with NVIDIA's Rubin announcements: next-gen compute aimed at faster, more efficient AI workloads, a DLSS update, and autonomous-vehicle systems being shipped in production cars. Joey flags a broader trend—advances in vehicle autonomy and NVIDIA's world models will spill into image and video models, improving spatial reconstruction, scene consistency, and the ability to populate busy environments with realistic elements.

Closing thoughts

CES 2026 leaned consumer but offered useful signals for production: tools that reduce friction for creators, more compute squeezed into smaller packages, and robotics and world-model advances that will influence film and VFX workflows. The hosts expect NAB and SIGGRAPH to surface the next wave of professional-focused gear, but the trends at CES already hint at which workflows will change: physical interactivity without phones, compact but capable compute, and smarter spatial-aware AI models.