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CES 2008 TV-Related Recap

Andy — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 10:21:01 +0000

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CES 2008 finished up in Las Vegas, yesterday and it was a show that saw many an amazing gadget, device, deck, console and set announced, revealed, unveiled, showed-off, demoed, and hands-onned, many of which were some pretty amazing TV-related technology. In case you’ve been living under a rock, CES is the Consumer Electronics Show and it runs every January for a few days, allowing anyone who’s anyone to show of their electronics for the new year. Naturally, there were plenty of TVs, video projectors, DVD decks, and more–enough to make a TV Ninja swoon. But to pick the best? That’s tough.

Could it have been one of the many projectors unveiled? Perhaps the crazily-high-priced, uber-high-end, Runco video projector that features Vivix II video processing, O-Path tech, CinOptx lenses, a 4,000:1 contrast ratio, 2850 ANSI lumens really lites your candle? Or was it the incredibly short throw of the Toshiba TDP-EW25U video projector that can project a 60-inch image with just four feet of distance between it and the screen? Of course, Sanyo has a projector that can do an 80-inch throw from just 3.15 feet.

Maybe it was electronics grand-daddy Marantz and their six input HDMI switcher? Then again, Samsungs 82 inch QuadHD TV didn’t fail to impress–that QuadHD brings four times the resolution of regular HD. Eye-witnesses say it’s like looking through a window. Then again, the biggest TV moment of CES 2008 had to be Mitsubishi’s Laser TV–a new kind of projection-screen TV that replaces a light bulb with three lasers.

Come to think of it, the most (un)amazing thing seen at CES 2008 was probably PumpTopTVs. Yep, TVs that are mounted atop gas pumps. No joke–learn more at PumpTopTV.com.

TV Highlights from CES 2008 (So Far!)

ThePete — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 13:10:07 +0000

CES 2008 has been a virtual, or rather, a literal playground for any true TV Ninja. Just look at that picture above–LOOK AT ALL THOSE TVs! Between Mitsubishi’s Laser TV unveiling yesterday, Westinghouse’s announcement of it’s ample stack of new LCD TVs or the non-stop flow of TV-related announcements coming out of Las Vegas these days, it’s enough to drive any TV geek to drink! And most amazing of all, there are still two days left in CES 2008–today and tomorrow!

Putting together any truly representative list of highlights would be impossible since there are just too many amazing new TVs, gadgets and miscellaneous devices being presented each day. However, here is a sampling:

1) Myvu and Dreamax revealed their plans for Head Mounted Displays (HMDs), AKA portable video. Myvu, who is already well-known for their light-weight Head Mounted Displays, announced their new Crystal HMD, which looks like futuristic sunglasses but provide VGA resolution (640×480) and allows you to still see in front of you. Meanwhile,Dreamax is releasing their HMD along with their Indicube personal media player (PMP), which doesn’t seem to have a built-in display of it’s own. The Dreamax HMD brings SVGA resolution (800×600) and it’s media-playing-pal sports 20GB of storage (upgradeable to 32).

2) Hitachi announced their affordable 42 inch HD Multi System Plasma TV, Pioneer showcased their Project Kuro flat panel displays that are just 9mm thick, and Panasonic unveiled their LifeWall which, believe it or not, lets you play HD content, surf the web, and more all on a wall of your home.

3) HP demoed their MediaSmart line of media extenders that come with a pocket-size, removable hard drive, a DVD drive and a lot more, Sony showed us all how it continues to dominate the world of electronics, and Sling showed off all of their new streaming-your-video-over-the-Internet boxes.

It’s a crazy handful of days, to be sure. Be sure to stop by TVNinja.com on Friday for a recap of the madness!

(Photo credit: CESWeb.org)

Mitsubishi Laser TV Unveiled at CES

ThePete — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 10:09:32 +0000

In case you missed yesterday’s post, CES 2008 is here and Mitsubishi has joined Westinghouse and a stack of other companies unveiling their newest TVs at this huge electronics event. The catch here is that Mitsubishi hasn’t announced their new line of LCD TVs. Nor have they announced any new HD TVs. No plasma TVs or flat panel TVs or even old school CRT TVs are they talking about. Nope, they’ve unveiled a whole new kind of Television–it’s called Laser TV. The funny thing about it is that it’s not actually all new. In fact, some of the technology that goes into Mitsubishi Laser TV might sound pretty old fashioned to most of you TV Ninjas out there.

For starters, it’s technically a rear projection screen TV. Another oldie-but-goody in the Laser TV’s tech department is the Texas Instruments DLP chip that has held the standard for quality video projection for years. However (and it’s a big however), both of these technologies used to use very old-fashioned light bulbs as their light sources (and later bright white mercury lamps). Sure, bright lamps could provide a great picture, but these new Laser TVs replace those old bulbs with semiconductor lasers. These red, green and blue lasers are said to be able to create much more vivid colors, higher contrasts and better pictures inHD resolutions.

Yep, that’s right–the Laser TV is an HDTV, too. So, it’ll be able to pump out 1080p. The truly weird thing about these Laser TVs is that despite these babies being “rear projection” TVs, because the light source is three lasers, the thickness of the TV is surprisingly minimal–in other words, it’s not a thick TV. While it won’t be as thin as your average LCD TV, it will be a great deal lighter because the LCD screen is so heavy on it’s own. The LaserTV’s screen isn’t a giant glass-and-LCD panel. Along with the weight improvements, you’ll also see Laser TVs that have almost no bezel–just the tiniest of frames for the screens on these TVs. This maximizes screen size without minimizing your shelf space.

Laser TVs are reportedly to be available later on in 2008.

Westinghouse Unveils New LCD TVs at CES 2008

ThePete — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 11:00:07 +0000

In case you haven’t been keeping your finger on the pulse of electronics, today is the first day of CES 2008 in Las Vegas and Westinghouse has loosed a stack of LCD TVs on us, as well as a bunch of other goodies. CES, by the way, is the Consumer Electronics Show which you can check out for yourself here: www.cesweb.org. In short, it’s a massive convention where all the hip electronics companies show off their wares for the new year. For the gadget-minded, it’s Christmas all over again just a few weeks later. For theTVNinja, it means a LOT of new TVs.

Cast your mind back to one of the original Television makers in America–Westinghouse. Originally founded in 1886, they were the first company to use AC current (that stuff coming out of your wall outlet). Nowadays, they make light bulbs, various home appliances and some various other consumer electronics involving screens (like TVs). This year at CES, in just the first day, they’ve announced a short stack of huge LCD TVs, medium (”portable”) sized LCD TVs as well as smaller LCDs in the form of LCD picture frames.

Sadly, limited pictures are available so far, but check out the specs on their largest (as reported by Engadget), it’s a 52 inch mammoth called the TX-52F480S LCD HDTV. The TX-52F480S brings you a whopping 4 HDMI inputs and 1080p along with a few more bells and whistles. Pretty impressive, even at the price of $2500. Meanwhile, the smallest LCD TV announced by Westinghouse this morning, pricing in at around $330, is their 16 inch PT-16H610S, which is part of their new “PT” or portable line. Since we don’t know what these babies look like we’ll just have to take their word for the “portable” part. However, they are being described as being “light weight” and having a “super thin profile.”

(Pictured: Westinghouse TX-52F480S)

Slingbox Pro HD On the Way

ThePete — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 09:50:19 +0000

Slingbox, the grand-daddy of the streaming media has finally gone HD. What more could you want from a machine that streams your media from your home to your favorite portable devices? The Slingbox, for anyone who’s not in the know, is a device that’s sort of like you in device-form. It controls your video recording and playback decks. From there, software on your laptop, tells your Slingbox to tell your VCR, DVD player, DVR (or other media-playing device) to play. The video plays into your Slingbox across it’s Ethernet connection out onto the Internet where your laptop, PDA or other Sling-enabled device can pick it up (BlackBerry support coming soon). This means that where ever you are on the planet, if you can get to a wifi connection you can watch your home video.

Until recently, the Slingbox couldn’t do High-Definition–with the new Slingbox Pro HD, that has changed. The Pro HD, which will be the high-end of the Slingbox line–when it drops later this year–allows you to connect to four different media sources featuring an HD input, coax, regular video-ins, and S-Video, of course. One wonders if the analog cable tuner in the current Slingbox Pro will be available in the Slingbox Pro HD what with the American change-over to permanent digital TV signals coming in 2009. With any luck (or thought), the Pro HD will have a digital cable tuner.

HD Video Streaming Without the Wires from Ziova

ThePete — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 07:26:55 +0000

Ziova, is yet another in a long stream of electronics companies springing up to offer HD video streaming set-top boxes. Never heard of Ziova? You’re not alone, but thanks to the huge wave of people switching to video streaming as their predominant method of video watching, instead of DVDs, the number of new electronics companies popping up to produce devices like Ziova’s CS505 High Definition Network Media Player is growing.

The CS505 sports all of the bells and whistles. However, it’s core function is to connect to your LAN to stream video from any hard drives you have connected. The bells and whistles are impressive, too–it can wirelessly connect to your network as well as use wires. It also comes with an optical drive that (strangely) will only play DVDs, not record them.

If you’re not about the bells and whistles, that’s totally understandable. Sometimes bells and whistles over-complicate things and sometimes you want to just watch your media. So, if this is you,Ziova has just announced their CS615 HD Media Streamer. It supports a stack of formats, including the obvious WMV9, QuickTime, MP4, H.264, MPEG-1/2, and the less obvious FLAC, OGG, LPCM, WMA, AAC, WAV, AC3, DTS, JPG, BMP, GIF and PNG, according to a recent Engadget post. Of course, it can also do High-Def (back to the obvious). However, it doesn’t have an optical drive and doesn’t do wifi–keeping it simple, it still connects to your LAN to stream video via Ethernet cables. The advantage is that you don’t have to have thatwifi going if you don’t want to.

D-Link Brings the HD DivX with DSM-330

ThePete — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 08:52:34 +0000

D-Link, the folks that brought us a stack of great low-end, but generally reliable, multimedia and wireless products now brings us theDSM-330. A not-yet-available-in-the-US media streamer/extender-thing, that is an officially sanctioned DivX.com product. In fact, DivX.com features the DSM-330 as a “DivX Connected” device on their “DivX Connected” product page (http://www.divx.com/connected/product.php ). This is all fine and dandy, but what, you’re probably wondering, can the D-Link DSM-330 DivX Connected HD Media Player really do?

For starters, it can stream HD DivX. Which is, you’ll admit, pretty handy (as it is obvious). After all, DVDs take up a lot of space. Ripping them and storing them on a giant hard drive is a great way to save on storage and free up shelving for all those books you’ve been meaning to read. Connect your PC to aWiFi LAN and the DSM-330 can connect to your PC and stream DivX , etc, etc… by now if you don’t know this drill, you might want to take a class to catch up since media streamers sure seem to be the future.

The DSM-330 comes with a handy remote and on-screen controls to “manage your PC media.” It also comes with conveniently located front-embeddedUSB port. This way you can plug an external hard drive or ultra-portable flash-based thumb drive to it and play DivX files from there. The sad news is that it’s not available in the US, as of yet, but you can order the D-Link DSM-330 from Amazon.co.uk for £149.99. Whether they’ll deliver it to you outside the UK, well, you’ll have to bring that up with them.

Passive Technologies’ LifeStation HD Delivers All the Goods Possible

ThePete — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 07:12:38 +0000

British company Passive Technologies has a new kind of media center–it’s called the LifeStation HD and it can deliver HD DVD and Blu-Ray DVD support, on top of a hard drive, all manner of video format-playing and a stack of other features. Sadly, the LifeStation HD’s webpage is not terribly specific about it’s features. Sure, they go on and on about what the LifeStation HD can do, but not how or how well it does it. As in, we know it’s got a hard drive that can be as big as 9 terabytes, but there is nothing mentioned on there about standard available sizes or whether you can stream video from other sources on your LAN. It does mention you can surf the Internet, but again, it doesn’t mention how. It seems like you may need to order it based on your own custom specs. Passive Technologies is a UK-based company, so if you happen to be in the UK you can stop in at one of their “authorised lifePartner Premium dealers” to find out exactly how to go about ordering one of these guys.

In the meantime, we can tell you that the LifeStream HD supports HD and can output in 1080p (nice but hardly special these days), it can play iPod formatted files and, since it comes with an AMD processor and sports a tweaked Windows Vista UI, you can probably play other file formats after installing the right codecs. It also comes with something called “Silent Passive Cooling” but the LSHD’s page doesn’t explain what that is. It does explain that Dynachill 3, which also comes with the LSHD, allows the box to function without any loud fans. In fact, a quick jaunt about their website results in no easily-found information about either Silent Passive Cooling orDynachill 3.

All in all, this sounds like a great device. However, since deets are sparse on their site and the company only sells in the UK (though it’s reasonable to assume you could order from elsewhere on a dealer’s website) it seems like theLifeStream HD is probably something best left to British gadget freaks since they can more easily return the thing if it doesn’t work as advertised. Generally speaking, it’s probably more effective for Passive Technologies (or any electronics company) to be up front with specs, prices and general details as opposed to relying solely on advertising copy. Sadly, this is exactly what the Passive Technologies website does. Perhaps Passive Aggressive Technologies would be a better company name?

iViewer Provides Wireless Media to Your TV

ThePete — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 09:53:26 +0000

The iViewer, according to its web page, takes any video input and sends it, wirelessly, to your TV. If the concept of wireless video transmission rings any bells for you, you might recall that old-fashioned technology grampa used to use–it was called “Broadcast Television.” The theory was this: using radio waves, one could transmit the video signal through the air to your TV set. It’s basically how TV has run for over half-a-century, and in a pinch, you can still catch the odd TV signal using nothing but an antenna and your Television. Of course, these days the idea of getting your media to your TV without wires seemsunnecessary what with long cables and wifi media extenders being all the rage. However, that hasn’t stopped Homer (D’OH!) Technology from duplicating that age-old technology on a very small scale for your home.

Quite literally, according to the iViewer’s web page, this little guy is a miniature TV station. It takes a composite input from anything, though its page seems to think an iPod or PSP would be the target gadgets, and then broadcast it on one of four channels you can then tune your TV to. Since this thing is a fairly diminutive 5 inches by 3 inches, it’s probably pretty portable. Think: the FM transmitter you use to listen to youriPod on your car stereo with only with a TV. Now you can begin to see how something like this could come in handy. No need to carry extra cables around, just this little device. Just plug youriPod into and broadcast to your TV.

Of course, that’s the rub–if you need to plug the iPod into the iViewer, why not just plug your iPod into the TV in the first place? All this device does is give you something else to carry around and allows you a bit more freedom when you watch something from your iPod or PSP on a TV. This one can probably stay off your “must get” list. Unless you have $26.99 (at eCost) burning a hole in your pocket and you don’t want to spend it on something useful.

Toshiba Qosmio: TV or Laptop?

ThePete — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 01:00:10 +0000

Convergence continues to blur the line between devices with Toshiba’s Qosmio G40 multimedia laptop. Already, Toshiba has the Qosmio G45-AV680 which is almost as good. Both laptops come stacked with some amazing multimedia bells and whistles on top of a pretty impressive set of specs for a laptop. For starters, the G45 comes with a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, 2 gigs of memory, 320 gigs of hard drive space and a recordable optical drive. All, perfectly reasonabledeets by today’s standards. But the features that make the G45 worth the $3000 price tag just might blow your mind.

To begin, the laptop features a somewhat predictable 17 inch display featuring “WUXGA with Ultimate TruBrite® Technology”. That’s definitely cool for a multimedia laptop. However, what does adding HD DVD recordability to that optical drive do for you? How about throwing in an HD TV Tuner? How about Bluetooth, 5 USB ports, webcam, remote, fingerprint reader, iLink, an S-Video output and an HDMI output? Yeah, pretty impressive huh? That’s all on the G45–the newer, better G40 has two TV tuners, a 2.2Ghz processor and a 400 gig hard drive.

While Toshiba has the G45 available right now on their website for $3000, currently, and sadly, the G40 looks to be only available in Japan and will run you around $3500 if you were to buy it there. Hopefully, the price will drop at least a little when it reaches Western shores. The thing to note with theQosmio line of Toshiba laptops is that the TV and the computer have merged to create a whole new type of multimedia device. That’s the very concept of “convergence,” where, slowly but surely, devices are merging into one.

Source: AkihabaraNews