Devices View – Page 17 – a Techsponential Company

2005 In Review / CES 2006 Review, Pt. 6: Distribution

March 14, 2006 - by Avi Greengart - 3 Comments.

Part V back in January was supposed to be the final installment of my post-CES chronicles, but we’ll add a Part VI to look at how all these products are getting to market. Each of these posts includes a quick look back on 2005 trends and a quick discussion of products introduced at CES 2006. This one is less about CES and more an essay about the rising power of distributors in home theater… In 2005: Go back ten or twenty years, and there were two main distribution channels to bring home audio and television products to market: big box …

Displays / HDTV

Wired Offers Flat Panel Buying Advice

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

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 …

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 …

Computing / Industry

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 …

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 …

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