Devices View – Page 17 – a Techsponential Company

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 …

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 …

Audio / Computing / Industry

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) …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Audio / Industry

Sonos Expands Distribution Through the Front and Back Doors

September 14, 2005 - by Avi Greengart - 1 Comment

Sonos announced today that Tweeter will be carrying the eponymous product at more than 150 retail locations throughout the U.S. (mostly in the Northeast). Tweeter is now the largest retailer in the country to carry the Sonos Digital Music System, and Sonos claims a "quality over quantity" approach to signing up retail partners. Nonetheless, Sonos is on track to have 500 retail location partners by the end of 2005, the first holiday buying season that Sonos is available. Tweeter should be a good fit for this mid-tier product: Sonos fits in between the half dozen $200 – $300 streaming music …

DVD / Industry

Format Wars II: Revenge of the DVD

August 31, 2005 - by Avi Greengart - 1 Comment

Tekrati picked up my post last week on the death of VHS, and implied that I said that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD killed off VHS. Nothing could be further from the truth! I often question whether there’s any mass market demand for a high definition format in the first place (and before I get flamed, yes, there is strong enthusiast demand. I certainly want to go beyond 480p). But only 11% of households have an HDTV, and anamorphic ("enhanced for widescreen") DVD looks pretty darn good on those sets. We’re also going into the format war without clear and massive support …