Accessories

Logitech has done really well with their acquisition of Intrigue Technologies, makers of the Harmony remote control line. With the broadened marketing and distribution muscle behind it, Logitech announced that they have overtaken Philips and Sony as market share leaders for programmable remote controls. This doesn’t surprise me, as most remote controls have a serious drawback – you have to program them. The Harmony essentially programs itself once you walk through a questionnaire online. While it took them a year or so before they had enough codes online to work consistently, I now consider the Harmony the reviewer’s best friend: add a new piece of gear in the rack; add a new piece of gear online to the remote. Done. And, because it’s task-oriented (“watch TV,” “watch DVD”), it’s spouse and babysitter friendly.

I’d heard rumors that a color Harmony was on the way, but they didn’t make much sense – the Harmony just uses its small monochrome LCD for simple status and help messages. Logitech unveiled the Harmony 880 at CES in Las Vegas this past week, and it has a color screen along with a strong rationale for the addition. The new screen is about twice the size of the traditional screen, is not terribly high resolution and is not a touch screen. The notion is that a larger color screen allows the Harmony to display more information and provide after-macro customization options (buttons flank the screen on both sides). Task-oriented remotes are great, but they can’t always deal with complex options. For example, if you have a widescreen TV, once you’ve “watched a DVD,” you may need to adjust the aspect ratio. Or not – depending on the movie. In my home theater, we added a “slowly dim the lights” command every time you pressed “play.” Unfortunately, that meant that any time you paused the movie, it was pitch black in the room, and the lighting controls were buried in a separate menu. With the new 880, you’ll be able to place those commands on the color screen after the main activity has launched. Colorful TV station logos for a favorites menu (part of the canned demo on the prototype units shown at the show) are merely a bonus.

The price point on the unit will be an astonishingly low $249, which is less than the original monochrome unit retailed for when it launched three years ago.

-avi

CES 2005: Logitech Sweetens the Harmony Read More

Convergence is such a loaded word.  Often people assume it means that your TV is networked to your TiVo which plays MP3s off your PC.  While that vision is well and good (and my 4 year old assumes everyone lives that way), most people adopt point solutions that meet their needs at much lower price points.  It’s not just home theater; even in the PC world, this is true.  Sneakernet is a prime example: rather than wire up their homes to share files, many people burn a CD or DVD, or put the files on a USB keychain drive and then walk the files over – thus using their sneakers – to the other PC.

SanDisk does a great job of enabling this slightly lower tech, less featured, mainstream-useful form of convergence.  Disclaimer: I think SanDisk is a great company for a lot of reasons, not least of all because they send me basically everything they make, sometimes without my having to even ask for it.  One of those products showed up the other day, their latest iteration of their Photo Viewer.  For $30 – 50, the first version of this product was cheap, ugly, and performed as advertised: plug the unit into your TV, place the memory card from your digital camera into the unit, and your pictures appear on your TV.  Simple, useful functionality included a remote control, the ability to rotate the picture, and basic slideshows.

Today’s version is a sleek gray/silver box, about the size of a thick checkbook. Aesthetically, it perfectly matches every gray/silver digital TV on the market. It still sells for under $50. It still has composite video outputs (limiting it to 480i resolution), but the user interface is dramatically better, it now supports xD memory (used in Fuji and Konica-Minolta cameras), it plays back the MPEG movies digital cameras take, and it plays back MP3 files and can use them as background music for slideshows.  In a naked push to increase memory card sales (the largest part of SanDisk’s product portfolio), it also has an additional memory card slot in back to allow you to move pictures off your digital camera’s memory and onto the secondary memory. This lets you create a master slide show always available for viewing on your TV, even when the other memory cards are back in their cameras.  I actually found this feature quite useful, and could envision this as a perfect “grandma gift” – whenever you come over, you upload the latest pictures to the rear memory card, leaving the memories behind.  [audience: awwwwwww.]

At the very high end of the market, Roku has a Digital Media Player that displays high resolution photos from memory cards or off a networked PC.  It’s beautiful, and, Roku, if you’re reading this, I want one.  But it costs $299, and the SanDisk product is likely “good enough” for most people.  Roku should watch out, too – if SanDisk’s next version supports high resolution output, Roku will be limited to the market segment that cares about home theater networking.

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Digital TVs as Oversized Picture Frames Read More

There have been several new entrants into the A/V cables market lately. 

Accell has been an OEM for others’ products for a while, and has decided to launch their own brand.  The packaging isn’t especially eye-catching, but the products are well priced and well constructed.  Accell sent over a large box of goodies around the beginning of the year, and I’ve been using them interchangeably with traditional AV brands such as Monster and Acoustic Research with no noticeable performance problems.  I haven’t seen them distributed anywhere at retail yet in New York/New Jersey, so that could be a bigger hurdle than anything else.  (I wrote a report for JupiterResearch — where I used to head up home theater research — on home theater distribution models; it should be published soon.)  Secrets of Home Theater – for whom I’m a Staff Writer – has a short review of Accell’s cables as well, faulting them primarily for the unopenable packaging.

Belkin is well known for their computer cables, and you could easily make the case that A/V cables are a logical brand extension for them.  While their analog audio cables are nice, I’m particularly impressed with the DVI-to-HDMI breakout cable.  It’s long and shrink wrapped in a semi-flexible plastic jacket.  The overall construction is top notch, and the moderate stiffness can save the cable’s life by preventing sharp bends. I have nothing on hand to compare it to, but I’m using it to connect an LG HDTV tuner/upsampling DVD player to JVC’s 50” D-ILA (LCOS) HDTV, and there were times during the 720p World Series broadcast that I could tell which direction the player had shaved in. The packaging looks fabulous, the pricing is competitive with Monster, and I’ve started seeing the Pure AV line at retail.  If my experience is a guide, it should do well.

Note: Belkin’s packaging is semi-openable, as it has a pre-cut “window” in the back.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t extend far enough into the rounded box, so you can put your hand in, but can’t get the actual cable out without resorting to a chainsaw.

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Cables: Are Other Monsters Lurking About? Read More

One of the hottest areas of home theater – consumer electronics in general, actually – is accessories. Accessories have high margins for everyone in the chain, don’t require frequent discounting, and (compared to TVs, anyway) don’t take up much shelf/inventory space. Now, when you think of accessories, you probably think of cables, remotes, and perhaps furniture. There are other interesting opportunities, such as label makers. Yes, label makers, one of the most critical tools in any home theater owner or installer’s toolkit. All those wires look the same when they’re plugged in, so if you don’t label them, you’re asking for trouble. But paper labels rip, and, let’s face it, you can’t read your own handwriting anyway.

Dymo sent over their model LabelPoint 200 over a year ago, and I’ve used it to label both ends of every audio, video, and power cable since then. I still haven’t run out of the original label cartridge, so this appears to be an exception to the razor/blade business model. The handheld shape and soft touch plastic coating make it easy to hold, though the unusual arrangement of the qwerty keys makes typing a hunt-hunt-hunt-and-peck affair.

Recently, Brother sent over a P-Touch 1400, which they promised would perform better than the Dymo. And it does, because it manages a few tricks especially useful for tagging wires: it prints vertically across for short text tags, and it will automatically print horizontal text on either end of a label strip – wrap it around the wire, and you can see the text on either side of the tag. The alphabetical keyboard arrangement is no easier to use than Dymo’s and the unit is physically larger. Either unit is a must, and the Brother is highly recommended.

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Unusual Home Theater Accessories Read More