Avi Greengart – Page 16

Wired Offers Flat Panel Buying Advice

March 7, 2006 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

Logo28_wirednews_1 Wired offers flat panel buying advice, and quotes yours truly about plasma burn-in and the analog TV reception at my in-laws house: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70349-0.html?tw=wn_index_2.

A lot of that interview didn’t make it into the article. For example, the "gotchas" of buying a flat panel include:

Not budgeting for a wall mount (which can cost up to $500 plus installation)
Spending more to upgrade to a 1080p display (instead of 720p) in an environment where the extra resolution will not be visible (either because the user sits too far away for the eyes to resolve the added detail, or because most of the programming is 720p sports content which gains nothing by being upsampled to 1080p)
Stretching the budget to buy more video and assuming that the panel’s speakers will be "good enough" to provide a satisfactory audio experience. With all the good on-wall speakers coming out from reputable brands like Definitive Technologies and Polk, there’s no longer a stylistic excuse not to get a good set of speakers. On-walls also tend to be more affordable than in-walls for similar audio quality.

-avi

Accessories

Product Review: Football Universal Remote Control

February 3, 2006 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

With the Super Bowl just a couple days away, sales of big screen TVs are probably up a bit – after all, in consumer electronics as well as computing, software (must-see content) drives sales of hardware (televisions, in this case). That’s never more true than with sports content, whether football, the Olympics, or the big one, the World Cup (for my U.S. readers, that last one is a big soccer game. Billions watch it. Manufacturers alter their return policies on projectors and TVs so that "football" fans don’t buy just to watch and then immediately return the sets).

Other content drives large audiences, but not necessarily pull-through on hardware. Advertisers call the Oscars the "Super Bowl for Women," you don’t find Best Buy running specials on plasma TVs ahead of the big awards night. Perhaps they should – women are buying a much higher percentage of consumer electronics gear than in the past.

In the spirit of the big game, Excaliber Electronics sent over the Monday Night Football talking remote control (click on the image to enlarge). This is a remote control embedded in a padded football about the size of a Nerf, not a Wilson. ABC lost Monday Night Football to ESPN, so there may be a new version of this out next season. Still, this would be the perfect gift for the football obsessed couch potato if it wasn’t for several flaws.

The padding makes the MNF Remote appear to be tossable: throw it to your friends or slam it on the floor in disgust after a bad call or a missed field goal. But a prominent warning in the user manual strongly discourages this, though probably just for liability reasons – in my testing the remote continued to function after a few rough tosses across the room.
Despite its name, the remote is hardly a universal model. It supports three devices: a TV (though it lacks aspect ratio controls found on all of today’s 16×9 sets), cable box (though it lacks any kind of TiVo/PVR control buttons for today’s modern set top boxes), and a VCR. Yes, a VCR, not a DVD player.
This is a bit nitpicky, but the membrane-type buttons are flush with the remote’s surface, which means they can’t be selected by touch without looking.
Finally, and this may sound nitpicky, but it’s actually critical to the appeal of the product: it’s not much of a talking remote control. It says exactly one phrase, "are you ready for some football?" Now, the problem isn’t what it says, but how it says it. Despite this being branded with ABC’s Monday Night Football logo, when you press the button, Hank Williams Jr. does not growl out, "Areyoureadyforsome FOOTBAAAAAALL?!!!" as heard at the beginning of every Monday Night Football game. The Monday Night Football theme does not play, either. Rather, a rather wimpy, almost nerdishly earnest voice voice asks, "are you ready for some football?" Any serious football fan will be severely disappointed; it would have been better to leave out the voice capability entirely.

The Monday Night Football Talking Remote Control should still make a good gag gift (it’s available online for just $17.99 at Smarthome), and it’s certainly harder to lose among the couch cushions than most universal remote controls. But don’t expect it to actually be used much.

Enjoy the game.

-avi

Industry / PC Convergence

2005 In Review / CES 2006 Review, Pt. 5: Convergence

January 20, 2006 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

Part V, the final installment of my post-CES chronicles; each of these posts includes a quick look back on 2005 trends and a quick discussion of products introduced at CES 2006. This installment: Convergence

In 2005…

Windows XP Media Center Edition PC sales finally took off – but as replacements for home PCs (wherever in the home they may reside, not necessarily the living room), and using traditional vertical box form factors, not the electronics-rack-style Home Theater PC. With Microsoft dropping the requirement for TV tuners, many of the XPMCE PCs were just that – regular PCs with a nifty 10 foot user interface for media control. Meanwhile, PVR functionality was integrated into the cable and satellite box in a big way, and moved time shifting into many more homes. The tech media declared place shifting the next big thing. Place shifting, the notion of watching your content anywhere you are using a web browser, was first introduced by Orb Networks (limited to PC-based content), followed by Sony’s LocationFree TV (control primarily of live TV) and then by Sling Media’s SlingBox (which allows viewing and control of nearly all content, including shows saved to a TiVo or ReplayTV).

At CES…

Sling Media introduced a Windows Mobile client for the SlingBox, solving one of the big problems of place shifting: very few people spend so much time on the road that they would be willing to buy a gadget to gain access to their home content. But moving the content to any Windows Mobile smartphone is more generally useful; everyone has some down time in their schedule that could be filled with even more TV! SlingBox for Windows Mobile also bypasses a lot of the services that wireless carriers are hoping to sell to consumers directly, and in this sense, it is an extremely disruptive technology.

Audio / DVD / HDTV / Industry

2005 In Review / CES 2006 Review, Pt. 4: Media Formats

January 16, 2006 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

Part IV of my post-CES scribbles; each of the next few posts includes a quick look back on 2005 trends and a quick discussion of products introduced at CES 2006. This installment: Media Formats

In 2005…

The warring HD disc camps (HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Disc) could not achieve compromise, but did not actually ship anything to the market, either. With nearly no support from content owners, SACD and DVD-Audio essentially died in 2005.

At CES 2006…

Toshiba hyped its first HD-DVD player at the modest price of only $499. In contrast, Pioneer announced a single Pioneer Elite Blu-Ray Disc player for $1800. Sony is still expecting to sell PS3’s with BD playback capability (and a reasonable price point), but no live PS3 units were shown at the show. In general, 2006 does not look like the year of prerecorded HD disc adoption. Pricing is too high, the available content library is too small, and there’s the whole format war issue. Worse, the DVD revolution is winding down, and even on an HDTV, many consumers will find that DVD is “good enough” regardless of the outcome of the format war.

Audio / Industry / PC Convergence

2005 In Review / CES 2006 Review, Pt. 3: Audio

January 13, 2006 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

Part III of my post-CES rantings; each of the next few posts includes a quick look back on 2005 trends and a quick discussion of products introduced at CES 2006. This installment: Audio

In 2005…

Apple’s iPod ate up whatever audio interest there was left after the purchase of that HDTV. The audiophile approach (ignore it and it will go away) didn’t work, the competitive approach (building servers or portable products that compete with the iPod head on) dramatically didn’t work – though there were a handful of exceptions, and the conciliatory approach (if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em) of building iPod docks and add-ons got very, very crowded. One of the more notable exceptions to the “don’t compete with the iPod” rule was Sonos, which piggybacks on existing PC-based music libraries and distributes audio wirelessly around the house. The key to success here is both the flawless user interface and the premium consumer price point. Typical CE pricing would not support the margins Sonos needs to survive, but the Sonos system is still within reach of many consumers, as opposed to custom installed distributed audio systems which can often cost an order of magnitude more.

At CES 2006…

We saw more of everything. Competing with the iPod were several nano clones, Toshiba’s new (and impressive) GigaBeat Portable Media Center, and several Windows Media Center or set top box whole-house server products for storing your music collection (some piggybacking on Intel’s new VIIV campaign). The server efforts were at least partly conciliatory, as most included Apple iPod docking capabilities.

Audio / Industry

2005 In Review / CES 2006 Review, Pt. 2: Speakers

January 12, 2006 - by Avi Greengart - 1 Comment

Part II of my post-CES ravings; each of the next few posts includes a quick look back on 2005 trends and a quick discussion of products introduced at CES 2006.

In 2005…

To try to appeal to the flat panel TV crowd, speaker manufacturers at all price points built flat speakers, small speakers, and speakers intended to be mounted on the wall (some with just one cabinet to simplify wiring, or wireless rear speakers). Big brands did well with these offerings, but they tended to pull sales from elsewhere, not grow the category. The other approach was to develop a line of in-wall speakers, some with high end pedigrees and/or THX certification. Unfortunately, it takes time for CEDIA installers to pick up new brands (installers are a conservative bunch, as you don’t ever want to have to service something installed in a wall or built into a cabinet), so the jury is still out on this strategy. To compensate for lower ASPs and margins, most speaker manufacture was moved to Asia.

At CES 2006…

We saw more of the same. What we have not seen yet are Chinese speaker manufacturers selling direct to U.S. consumers under their own brand names, taking the Aperion.com business model and eliminating the middleman (Aperion). That has started in the enthusiast space to a degree with companies like nOrh, but has not moved into the mainstream. Yet.

We also saw one company move decidedly in a different direction: Jamo introduced the 909’s, a $15,000 pair of speakers that do not have a rear cabinet. The idea is simple: no enclosure, no possibility for audible colorations of the sound due to the cabinet. From a market perspective, this makes even more sense – audiophile consumers who are willing to have a free standing set of speakers in their room probably want to show them off. Why not let them really show off the guts of the speakers by doing nothing to hide them? If Jamo is smart, it will release lower priced versions of the 909’s including a center channel and matching surrounds for home theater (the surrounds will probably need cabinets for wall mounting).

Displays / Industry

2005 In Review / CES 2006 Review, Pt. 1: Flat Panels

January 11, 2006 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

I have just returned from CES 2006 in Las Vegas, where 150,000 geeks showed up to gawk at the bodacious sights to see in Las Vegas (103" plasmas) and ignored everything else (it seemed like half the shows in Vegas were dark). I’ll be breaking out the next few posts into a quick look back on 2005 trends and a quick discussion of products introduced at CES 2006.

In 2005…

LCD, Plasma, and DLP TV sucked the life (or, more accurately, the money) out of every other aspect of home theater. Prices on the big panels dropped enough that consumers who weren’t looking to upgrade did, and in most cases, all the money went to the display.

At CES 2006…

1080p was the spec to beat – everybody had at least one product with full progressive 1920×1080 resolution. New technologies included real world demos of SED and LED-based DLP systems without color wheels. The other big trend holding down pricing is the influx of no-name brands sourcing panels from the same fabs as the big brands and selling it direct for less. In cases where the display/upconversion electronics in the no name brands are good, this presents a major problem for the majors. And even when the quality is lousy, the glass is often the same (or just a generation or so behind), so the specs look good on paper, and the price looks great.

Accessories / HDTV

Product Review: Newpoint argo XL lifestyle antenna

December 21, 2005 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

The word "lifestyle" in this industry usually refers to speaker systems, designed to be as small and unobtrusive as possible. This often leads to poor sound quality – after all, physics are involved when pushing air, and its harder to do with less volume for the pushing. You can beat physics with unique designs like the tiny subs with huge excursion (from Definitive Technology and Sunfire, among others), or simply tune products to what consumers are looking for (bright and punchy) and forget absolute musical accuracy. Bose saw tremendous success getting way ahead of the lifestyle trend, but with general audio sales down and the flat panel TV market booming, it seems that every manufacturer now has at least one "thin and flat" speaker system.

Proving you can’t stop a good trend, Newpoint, a maker of surge protectors, cables, and other A/V accessories, has introduced the argo XP lifestyle antenna. Yes, an OTA HD antenna, with a flat panel main antenna, all in plasma-approved silver. Newpoint makes a big deal out of its HDTV-readiness on the box, and literally calls it the "lifestyle antenna." You can’t get more decorator friendly than that. Newpoint was kind enough to send over a review sample.

In my last go around of (completely unscientific) testing, I found that Zenith’s futuristic looking thing beat a standard loop antenna for pulling in HDTV for three reasons: the signal stregnth meter generally reads higher on the Zenith than the Jensen, it’s easier to adjust the Zenith because it basically can’t be adjusted, and the Zenith looks cool (I’ve included a picture). I have two of the Zeniths – one came with the HDTV tuner card I use in my Media Center XP box upstairs. Since I wrote that review, I’ve become somewhat disenchanted with the product, because its odd design makes it easy to adjust but difficult to stay put in exactly that spot. It also has a habit of breaking loose from its base and stabbing me in the foot. I hate it when that happens.

Surprisingly, for a "lifestyle" product, the Newpoint got just as good reception as the Zenith. It isn’t better than the Zenith. For example, it still won’t pull in certain stations like PBS – I suspect I’ll need a roof antenna for that. However, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and the WB all come in fine, weather permitting. The key difference is that there are a limited number of adjustments you can make to the argo XL, but the hinge mechanism is fairly tight – once you get it right, it stays put. The base is reasonably well weighted, so a jolt from the subwoofer won’t change its position, and it doesn’t stick out into the room and launch itself at your feet when you walk by. Finally, it too, looks like it belongs in a modern home theater, despite the rabbit ears on each side of the panel.

I admit to being biased against lifestyle products, but Newpoint’s argo XL lifestyle antenna is inexpensive (under $30), looks good, and performs as well as its peers. I can easily recommend it as a first step before spending more on an amplified antenna or something for your roof.

-avi

Displays

720p Projectors For the Holidays

November 21, 2005 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

Evan Powell provides an overview of the state of DLP and LCD front projectors. (The key to ProjectorCentral isn’t that Evan is unbiased, but that he explains his biases, and he tests pretty much every significant product on the market.) Bottom line: there’s a lot to like for under $3,000 this holiday season.

-avi

Industry

Sony’s Qualia Hunt Ends Without a Kill

November 20, 2005 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

The high end of the market is evolving: mainstream brands offering the same thing – only better – are having a tough time. A couple of months ago Sony pulled the plug on its Qualia brand, despite excellent reviews of its SXRD projector and RPTV sets. It seems Qualia was one luxury Sir Howard Stringer couldn’t afford in his reorg. No reasons were given for the move, but I’d speculate that having a high R&D halo brand only helps when the main consumer electronics business it fuels makes money. Since Sony is losing money across the line, it makes more sense to build the high end technology into mainstream products themselves, hopefully enabling a bit higher margins and injecting some profitability down the line.

That isn’t to say that the high end is dead – far from it. The key is to provide a unique and differentiated experience. Two examples:

When I met with Kaleidescape earlier this year, they emphasized not just the features and functions added to their $25,000 -$50,000 video archiving and distribution systems, but also the growing number of customers they have. Kaleidescape is an example of a high end product that is not just a slightly better DVD player, but with the new bookmarking features, an entirely new way to watch movies. Movies start up in the right aspect ratio without any setup, resume exactly where they’re left off, and can be set to jump just to specific scenes – similar to listening just to specific music tracks across a genre instead of listening to an album at a time.

The D-Box lineup is another high end product creating a new market – something like an amusement park ride, physically moving your couch around in synchrony with the movie. This is a step well beyond bass shakers that vibrate your couch when something goes "boom." The D-Box X3ME (supposed to be pronounced "extreme") line recently added vertical motion to its entry level line. Entry level is a matter of perspective: the MSRP is $10,000. An add-on field installable system is $4,299 plus either $3,000 for the controller or your own PC plus an $800 kit. The idea is to extend this beyond "the sky is the limit" crowd, but it is still a very high end product by anyone’s definition.

-avi