Displays / Industry

SED: Time to memorize a new acronym?

- by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

A blog quoting a Japanese source suggests that Toshiba is abandoning LCD and plasma and instead putting its display R&D into yet another display technology: SED.  SED stands for Surface-Conduction Electron-emitter Display, which, if I understand it correctly – and I probably don’t – is an array of millions of tiny tube TV sets.  Advantages include many of the same claims made for another technology working its way through the labs, OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode – don’t you just love these terms?): really really thin incredibly bright, sharp images more energy efficient than plasma a technology that [insert Korean …

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Computing

Workable PC Convergence Demands More Convergence, Less PC

- by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

I was interviewing a custom installer about using PCs as video scalers, and he said something that applies, more or less, to any serious use of PCs for home theaters: the only way to have a reliable PC-based A/V system is to have a PC dedicated solely to A/V.  I’ve had several XP Media Center Edition systems in over the past couple of years, and that’s certainly one way to do it.  The downside to Media Center PCs is that they’re pricey if you don’t need the full suite of functionality, and though they’ve gotten much better, they are still …

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Accessories / Displays

Are Furniture Vendors In Too Deep?

- by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

It’s right before CES, and I’m inundated with press releases.  Bell’O sent over a preview of their 2005 lineup, and I noticed something that struck a nerve: like all furniture vendors, they claim that their stands are ideal for hot selling rear projection TVs using digital technologies (DLP, LCD, and LCOS).  They even go so far as to list a few specific models such as Sony’s 60" Grand WEGA LCD TV.  Except that the stand doesn’t match the TV’s depth.  None of them do.  All the stands are at least 19" deep, and most are 21" – 24", while the …

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Displays / Games

DLP Ideal Display for Gamers

- by Avi Greengart - 1 Comment

Joe Wilcox saw Samsung’s DLP promotional tie-in with Halo2 for XBox and liked the notion but asks whether it could be more than just marketing.  Samsung does note that their sets offer easy A/V hookup for video game consoles (like nearly every TV on the market today) and digital image processing. But Samsung and TI, the makers of DLP technology, have really dropped the ball here, because it turns out that DLPs may be the ideal display technology for videogames, and I’ve yet to see any marketing pushing that message. Here’s what they should be saying: DLP sets are big …

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Accessories / Industry

Secrets Debunks Its Own Review: No Audible Differences Among Power Cables

- by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

Here’s an experiment/article that’s going to echo throughout the audiophile world and possibly hurt sales of high end accessories.  The online magazine Secrets of Home Theater is renowned for taking a geeky enthusiast’s view of home theater and audio; they’re best known for publicizing the DVD chroma bug, an obscure problem in some DVD players that makes bright colors in certain scenes bleed slightly into the next color. (I like to think my reviews and articles for Secrets have been a bit more accessible). Lately, Jason Serinius has been writing glowing reviews of CD demagnetizers and aftermarket power cables for …

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Accessories / Industry

RTI Focused on Dealer Training

- by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

RTI makes complicated programmable remote controls, and they’ve hit upon a winning strategy – focus on their customers.  Brilliant!  (It should be obvious, right?) Well, there is a twist – one that many CE companies selling to the CEDIA (custom install) channel haven’t quite figured out: RTI’s customers are not end users, but the custom installers who buy the remotes and program them for the end users.  The whole purpose of a custom programmed remote control is the programming, and this is an area where RTI can stand out (more on this later).  Therefore, RTI announced online training earlier this …

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Audio / Computing

New Ways to Listen To Music

- by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

Musicmatch is one of several music playback programs for PCs, along with offerings from Microsoft, Real, Apple.  With a good multimedia sound system — I’m working on reviews of THX systems from Klipsch and Logitech — you can use these programs to listen to music at your PC.  The programs also allow you to transfer music to portable devices, or stream music around your house with various add-on gadgets (though access to copy-protected music is usually not available in that scenario). The programs now also offer access to online music stores for purchasing music (by track or by album) or …

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DVD / Industry

NY Times Does the Impossible

- by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

The New York Times today reviewed upsampling DVD players.  What I found remarkable was the balance between making a somewhat difficult concept easy to understand for non-enthusiasts, while still being technically accurate.  As a bonus, it was a reasonably vigorous review, and even offered clear conclusions.  But this exception to the rule highlights just how bad a job the consumer electronics industry has done complicating the products and the jargon.  Even efforts to simplify things on a practical and technical level come in acronym form with compatibility notes back to other acronyms (think HDMI and DVI). The industry as a …

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HDTV

Purpose-built HDTV antenna slightly better

- by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

In a completely unscientific test, Gemini/Zenith’s high tech HDTV antenna slightly beat out Jensen’s adjustable loop antenna in my basement.  With proper windowsill placement, both can pick up seven over the air HDTV channels, and neither can pick up NBC no matter what I do.  Neither of them get perfect reception: despite what you’ve heard about the "cliff effect" (the signal is either there or not there, as if dropping off a cliff), HDTV is not an all or nothing affair in my house.  Perhaps it’s the grade of my street, the angle to the Empire State Building, or the …

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Displays / Industry

TI Taking Over Where Intel Left Off?

- by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

I was wandering through IKEA yesterday and noticed that Philips appears to have an exclusive on all the A/V display props; an interesting product placement ploy.  Even more interesting were the sheer number of plasmas sitting on top of $79 build-it-yourself furniture.  Plasmas and LCDs may win on decor friendliness, but not on budget, where microdisplays offer a reasonable compromise between the size of the unit and the size of your wallet. Usually, microdisplays means DLP or LCD, but I’ve always been a fan of LCOS, which can offer the resolution of a digital technology and the fatigue-free experience of …

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