Be alert, amigos. I’m spending this chilly Saturday afternoon watching my fair share of Fox Soccer Channel, and some company named Sylvania is advertising heavily. My concern is that someone, maybe someone you know, watching their commercials will be under the impression that an HDTV will improve their Fox Soccer Channel watching experience. I don’t see how, seeing as though the channel is only broadcast in standard definition. The commercial shows a TV with various match footage filling up the screen, as if it were broadcast in a 1.78:1 ratio; it’s not. All it is is a stretched image. You don’t want that. The commercial also boasts that games will look great, awesome, etc. The obvious implication is that, with a Svlania HDTV, these standard-def broadcasts will look, you know, amazing. As if the TV will magically make an SD broadcast something more than what it is. Basically, just be aware that advertising is a tricky business, one that’s not always as forthright as I’d like. With the holidays right around the corner, and things being what they are in the economy, I don’t want any of you unnecessarily spending money as a result of some silly ad. → Read More
Work on Plex, the Mac-enhanced port/fork of XBMC, continues, with the media player having been updated to version 0.7 two days ago. It’s not just a bugfix or anything—I wouldn’t bother mentioning it here if that were the case—as the developers have added several features that should compel you to upgrade. One word about upgrading, though: because so many internal settings have been altered with this latest release, the developers recommend that you trash your old preference file in order to prevent conflicts. Yes, that means you’ll have to re-do your Library, but it takes only a few minutes to re-scan everything. So what’s new? For one, the settings menu has been revamped. Now you’ll find more Mac-like names for settings (“Ken Burns effect,” à la iPhoto versus “Pan and Zoom,” a Windows anachronism) and legacy settings that didn’t really affect anything have been removed. Less junk to navigate through, then. → Read More
What’s this, an inexpensive Bl-ray player? From a brand name company, no less? What has the world come to? For $180 you can grab the Sharp Aquos BD-H21U from Sears. (They have a Web site?) Amazon wants $255 for the same player, by the way. Note that it’s only Profile 1.1, so you won’t get BD-Live. Also, it seems to be out of stock at the moment. Keep refreshing, then. → Read More
Round of applause for Best Buy, which aims to educate you all about the upcoming digital TV transition. (Remember the big day: February 17, 2009.) The lastelectronics retailer left standing will hold a series of workshops at 25 of its stores to “educate consumers about the transition to digital television broadcasting and help them choose the best solution for their television needs.” Here, let me save you (or someone you know) a trip to one of these workshops. (Remember, I have a certificate in this stuff.) If you watch TV via cable or satellite you’re fine. If you’re still watching TV using the old bunny ears—I doubt many of you guys are—then you need a digital converter box, which are free through a government-subsidized program. That’s it. You don’t need to buy a fancy new TV to watch TV come February 18. via Boing Boing Gadgets → Read More
This is a trend, turning garages into home theaters? Might as well, right—the car business won’t be around much longer, so you’ll need to do something else with all that space. To that end, Electronic House has put together a small gallery of some of the best garage home theaters money can buy. I liked this one the best, designed by some dude named Bjorn Kristensen. For one, red carpeting oozes trashy nouveau riche sensibilities, and the wall paper, for some completely illogical reason, reminds me of the movie Beetlejuice. The theater was also locally grown. That is, Kristensen bought most of items at area stores, thus propping up his local economy for a little while longer. Good on him. → Read More
Americans, it seems, are addicted to cable TV. Like every other addiction, we need our hit so bad that we’ll ignore the realities of our financial situation—we’re all going broke, fast—in order to watch Entourage and Down and Dirty with Jim Norton. It goes like this: with people tightening their belts around the country (and world) they’re going to have to cut back on luxuries. Thing thing is, for whatever reason, Americans don’t view cable TV (and cellphones!) as a luxury; we need it, even though we could be saving a nice chunk of change (around $100 I’m guessing… that’s what I used to pay) by eliminating it from the family budget. Next week is when a lot of the big cable companies, like Comcast and Time Warner, report their third quarter earnings. That’s when we’ll see whether or not the current financial crisis, which started in earnest in September, has affected their cable TV consumption habit. Further evidence: sales of HDTVs this holiday shopping season aren’t expected to be all that bad. Maybe sales won’t be great, but people are still expected to spend a few dollars on plasmas and LCDs. For the readers in the audience, be sure to check out Amusing Ourselves to Death, a book that says, essentially, our society is doomed because the only thing people do all day long is watch TV. → Read More
Mitsubishi’s LaserVue HDTVs have been in the making for a while but the critically acclaimed high-def set is now available at select specialty retailers. You still might need a second mortgage – good luck getting approved – to foot the $6,999 MSRP, but the TV apparently produces a Pioneer Elite comparable picture at 1/3 the power consumption. Plus, you can tell your trendy poker buddies that you HDTV is powered by frickin laser beams. How sweet is that? → Read More
Netflix has convinced some 500,000 people to subscribe to its Blu-ray rental service. Netflix is all “Look how well we did!” because it charges a $1 premium to be able to rent Blu-ray discs. The question was, would it be able to convince people to pay a premium (even though $1 is hardly a premium, I think) in order to rent the high-def discs? Well… Keep in mind that Netflix has some 8.7 million subscribers, meaning that a whopping 5.7 percent of its subscribers made the Blu-ray jump. Netflix added that it expects the number of Blu-ray subscribers to increase as the price of players drop in price. Imagine that. → Read More
Jason Calacanis apparently has it on good authority that Apple’s next big thing might be networked high-definition television sets — basically, a TV with all the Apple TV stuff already built into it. This actually makes a lot of sense, as Apple’s been pretty good at the whole digital content thing. It’s got iTunes onto most people’s computers and has made steady progress in hooking up with TV and movie studios, so why not get into the hardware – TVs — that people want to use to consume this content? After all, getting stuff from your computer to your TV set hasn’t exactly been an easy task for non-techies. And Apple made it relatively easy for “regular” people to get music from their computers to their portable audio devices, so it’s not totally out of the realm of possibility that the company could do the same with television sets. → Read More
GE-branded TVs are back, thanks to a partnership with Tatung, a Taiwanese company. The next joint venture will produce LCD HDTVs that are slated for a spring, 2009 release. The last GE-branded TVs to see the light of day came out in 1987. The TVs will come in sizes between 19 and 65 inches, so it looks like they’ve got a nice little spread there. There’s also reports that at least one of the upcoming models will include a built-in Blu-ray player. Might that be the thing needed for Blu-ray to hit critical mass? (Will it ever?) → Read More
My hopes of owning such a righteous HDTV have been severely dashed. Mitsubishi has priced their 65-inch LaserVue HDTV that will begin shipping to Diamond stores at the end of this month and you may want to sell your car or take out a second mortgage. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but the 65-inch set will cost a smidgen under $7,000, which is on par with other 60+-inch HDTVs, but there’s no word on the 73-inch set, yet. → Read More
And you wonder why people are still uncommitted to Blu-ray. Denon, by no means a cheap brand, mind you, has said that they’ll begin shipping its “low” priced DVD-1800BD this October, for $749. Denon hasn’t even released its full specs yet, so it’s impossible to evaluate if this is even worth the money. Once again, I think I speak for most of the gang here: if you’re thinking about going Blu-ray, especially in time for the holiday season, your best best is to go with the PS3. Not only is it future-proof, but, eventually, it’ll have some decent games on it, with apologies to MGS 4. → Read More
Today at CEDIA, Sony announced that the US will soon get their hands on some slender 9.9-mm thin LCD HDTVs. The KDL-52XBR7 has a whopping 240Hz frame rate displayed on a 1080p 52-inch LCD screen with 80,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio. No word on price but it ships in December. The 40-inch 1080p KLV-40ZX1M LCD weighs a mere 26 pounds, but this one can only claim a 120Hz frame rate. This, too, will be available in December. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
