Displays

Accessories / HDTV

Monster “UHD 8K Cobalt” HDMI Cable

- by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

Monster pioneered the premium audio accessories business, starting with thick, oxygen-free copper speaker wires before moving to more questionable interconnect cables and other accessories, eventually landing on headphones and Bluetooth speakers. The original speaker cables were genuinely (and demonstrably) better than the thinner wires due to a combination of physics and quality control. They sold well because Monster did a tremendous job on marketing at point of sale; in some years, they made up the majority of consumer electronics retailer profit (sell the TV and VCR at cost, make money on the cables). With the rise of the Internet and …

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Audio / HDTV / Industry

CEDIA 2015: Focused on Core Custom Install Audience

- by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

This year's CEDIA has come and gone, and unless the journalists in attendance badly missed something, I didn't see many announcements with broad applicability outside the core custom install base. (I attended CES and IFA this year, but was not able to attend CEDIA live.) Sony showed off new projectors, including a native 4K model priced at "just" $10,000, but these had been announced at IFA in Berlin. JVC introduced a trio of projectors from $4,000 – $10,000 that create pseudo-4K from 4K source material. Kaleidescape is now offering a 4K digital storage/playback solution in the $5000 – If You …

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Accessories / Computing / HDTV / Industry

Roku Goes Retail

- by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

It certainly took them long enough, but Roku is finally graduating from online-only sales to retail. It wasn't doing too badly in the old business model – Roku's status as the least expensive and easiest streaming media box allowed it to rack up over a million units sold. Still, Roku always seemed something like a secret that only technically savvy people knew about – and that is not the target demographic for a product designed for simplicity. No, the ideal retail channel ought to be something like Target. Or Best Buy: Roku XD player is available for purchase at Best …

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Accessories / Computing / DVD / HDTV / Industry

Kaleidescape Ships Blu-ray Server (Sort of)

- by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

First a bit of background: Kaleidescape is a high end media server vendor. They make boxes you have a custom installer put in one spot, which connect over a wired network to smaller boxes your installer connects to each TV and projector in your home. You – or your installer – copies all your DVDs onto the big box, and then you can watch all your movies anywhere in your home. Basically, it's Sonos for movies for rich people. How rich? Kaleidescape was actually the reason I instituted a policy not to review anything I could not reasonably afford. Years …

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Audio / Industry / Television

New Onkyo Receivers Come with HDMI 1.4 and Buyer’s Remorse

- by Avi Greengart - 6 Comments.

The problem with 3DTV – aside from the glasses and the nausea and the total lack of content – is that you need to buy an entirely new equipment chain. It is not enough to replace your TV with a 3D capable set, you will also need a 3D-capable Blu-ray player, and – much to the delight of Monster Cable – you may actually need to upgrade your HDMI cables to handle the increased signal bandwidth. The typical HDMI connection in most devices today is 1.3b, but you'll need to upgrade to HDMI 1.4a for 3D.  This has implications for audio …

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Displays / HDTV / Industry / Television

Lessons From Panasonic’s Plasma Day

- by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

On Tuesday, I, along with a handful of tech journalists, was invited to attend a briefing by Panasonic in New York to show off their latest line of plasma televisions. The emphasis was on the technical capabilities of Panasonic's plasma technology relative to the latest LCD with LED backlighting.  Some things I learned: Never have a Japanese engineer who doesn't speak fluent English give a marketing presentation to journalists. Yes, there was a lot of technical detail included, but the fundamental reason Panasonic was doing the briefing was to spin the technical detail, otherwise they would have just provided a …

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