Monoprice’s HDMI Switcher – and its Customer Service – Work

A while back I tested ACCELL’s 4×2 HDMI switcher. In closing, I noted that budget cable site monoprice sells a similar unit for just $89, and "For $89, if it just turns on I’ll be impressed." Well, the first unit turned on, but didn’t do much more than that. The box was attractive and well packed – from a packaging perspective it inspired confidence. But it didn’t work. I could force it to manually switch between displays by turning one display off, the other on, and then unplugging/replugging the switch – not exactly what it is supposed to do. I …

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In NYC next week? Come “Downtown”

If you’re in the Wall Street area next Thursday, I’ll be moderating a panel at Digital Downtown on Flat Panel TV Trends: Plasma and LCD TVs are the center of any digital home. The category’s success is driven by the produts’ fashion appeal and picture quality as well as the DTV transition. Listen to our panel of industry experts discuss the current trends affecting the flat panel TV market and where it’s heading. The session is free to financial analysts, press, and "invited guests." You can register here.

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Product Review: Axiom Audio Audiobytes and EPZero Subwoofer

Axiom has been trying to get me to review a set of speakers from their home theater surround lineup, but I asked to start with something smaller, so they suggested their Audiobytes PC speaker system. I’ve been using what counts as “high end” speaker systems in the PC world on my media center PC for nearly a decade. My primary PC speaker system is a Klipsch THX Pro Media 5.1, which I have pitted against a 5.1 THX setup from Logitech, 2.1 systems from Altec Lansing, and others over the years. Axiom’s Audiobyte system consists of up to four pieces: …

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Product Review: mStation 2.1 Stereo Tower

Against my parents’ wishes, all my aunts and uncles got together and bought me a cheap stereo system as a Bar Mitzvah gift. (My parents would have preferred a set of Talmud, a computer, sports equipment – literally anything that wasn’t a stereo system I could use to blast horrible rock and roll and annoy my father. Yes, I grew up in the movie Footloose.) It was a thing of beauty: a Fisher record player/tape deck/am/fm radio and a pair of speakers that were at least three feet tall. Oh, those speakers were huge, and the system could play much …

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Product Review: Accell 4×2 HDMI Switcher

HDMI was supposed to bring the home theater world from the confusing age of multiple cables for audio and video (and sometimes multiple audio cables and multiple video cables) down to just a single cable from each component to your display. If your display doesn’t have enough HDMI inputs for all your sources, you need an HDMI switcher or a receiver which has an HDMI switcher built in. Then you need an HDMI cable from the each source to the switcher or receiver, but just one from there to the display. Fortunately, even some budget receivers now have HDMI switching …

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Come on in, the 1080p water’s fine!

Evan Powell over at ProjectorCentral has a short article on the massive drop in 1080p projector prices and he notes that this, plus the end of the format war, makes now an ideal time to buy. He’s not kidding. In some cases prices on models introduced just four months ago have fallen by hundreds of dollars as newer models have hit the market. The price on the Panasonic PT-AE2000U I bought at the end of the year seems to be holding steady; I’m not sure whether that means there is higher demand for this model — certainly a possibility — …

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HD-DVD is dead, but did Blu-ray win?

The quick post-mortem on HD-DVD: It was a better standard in almost every way but capacity (and double layer HD-DVD discs made even that a moot point). Blu-ray can be spectacular, but the specification is still evolving. HD-DVD died  because consumers bought more Blu-ray discs. Consumers bought more Blu-ray discs because there were more Blu-ray players sold. There were more Blu-ray players sold because most of those were Sony Playstation 3’s (PS3). Thus, Sony’s decision to include a Blu-ray player in the PS3 was the primary factor in the death of HD-DVD. That doesn’t mean Sony won. First, Jeremy Toeman …

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CES 2008: GizmodoGate

[Warning: rant coming] GizmodoGate really bothered me. I was at that Motorola press conference. This was Moto’s first time talking to press/analysts in the post-Zander era, and they kept starting and stopping and starting and stopping. It was annoying for me to watch, and very hard for them to tell a smooth story. If Gizmodo had characterized this as a prank gone badly wrong and apologized, it might have been forgivable (after all, some of us do have a sense of humor). Instead, Gizmodo’s unrepentent response left a really bad taste in my mouth. I’ve been a marketing professional in …

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CES 2008: High Def Disc Format War Over, Thin TVs, and Steve Jobs

Well, I’m back from Las Vegas, but my body is still on the wrong time zone. There were three main stories at this year’s CES: The death of HD-DVD. With Warner’s announcement that it will no longer sell HD-DVD movies, the high definition disc format war is effectively over with Blu-ray as the victor. Toshiba (one of HD-DVD’s primary backers) offered a weak reaction, saying that it is stunned and upset, but that HD-DVD has been declared dead before. That’s true, but formats are only as valuable as the content that they are tied to. With Warner gone, only Paramount …

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RIP: First CRTs, now RPTVs

The AP is reporting that Sony is now exiting its "money losing" RPTV business  to focus exclusively on flat panel displays; Sony’s technologies of choice are LCD and OLED. (As an aside, I thought Sony’s TV business had finally pulled into the black after years of losses – the Playstation business was supporting everything else until the PS3, and then the situation reversed. I guess the flat panels were profitable but the big sets weren’t.) This is the second major television technology/form factor to get the boot – outside of mass merchandisers its pretty hard to find a CRT any …

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