Sean Portnoy covers HDTVs, Blu-ray, home theater equipment, and anything else that turns the living room into your media center.
This year is shaping up to be the one where TV makers have decided they need to bring the Internet to their sets, in most cases in the form of widgets that display streaming information while viewers are checking out their favorite shows. Sony already announced a couple of networked sets back at CESthe Bravia Z5100 and XBR9but yesterday the company added three more in the form of the new W 5100 Series.
One of the Holy Grails of home theater setups is being able to have all of your equipment connected without a corresponding rat's nest of cables. We've seen a number of previews of technology that will allow for the wireless transmission of HD signals, though some are still in purgatory (like Belkin's FlyWire).
As if the LCD HDTV market isn't crowded enough (having not thinned itself out like the plasma segment recently did), a new player is joining. The heretofore unknown EQD is throwing down the gauntlet when it comes to already depressed prices, claiming it will undersell the competition by 20 percent.
With Hulu.com snaring more and more users watching TV programming online, cable and satellite providers are trying to figure out a way to make sure their subscribers' eyeballs stayed glued to their services.
Like Westinghouse, the Honeywell name is getting a dust-off for the new millenium in the consumer electronics market. But unlike Westinghouse, Honeywell was never known for consumer electronics, so it's a bit puzzling why display maker Soyo has been drafted to produce Honeywell-branded HDTVs.
Even though the federal deadline for TV stations to switch completely to digital broadcasting has been pushed back to June, some stations have already made the movea full 25 percent, according to the Associated Press.
If you believed the commercials, it would be clear that Comcast is the leader when it comes to providing the most HD programming. But anyone who has Comcast as their cable provider knows that the cable giant makes that claim based on the amount of on-demand high-def programming it makes available, not on the number of HD channels it provides.
Is plasma going to be the Betamax of HDTV technology? Despite still being regarded as providing better image quality than almost all LCD-based sets, plasma TVs have been on the losing side of the flat-panel equation for some time now.
If you wind up with the average household tax refund this year, you can set up a nice little home theater for around $2,500. Here's how I would configure it with that budget.
Widely regarded as producing some of the best plasma TVs on the market, Pioneer has nonetheless struggled as the HDTV landscape has moved more and more towards LCDs. Now rumors are floating around the Internet that the company will be exiting the TV business altogether, no doubt being influenced by the bad economy, which doesn't help Pioneer move its pricey plasmas.
Everyone's jumping on the LED-backlit LCD bandwagon this year, as even third-tier vendors like Haier are producing sets that rely on the technology, which is superior in color accuracy and black-level performance to the fluorescent lamps most other LCDs use. SIM2 Multimedia is hoping to stand out amid this crowd with its new Solar Series set, a 47-inch model that makes use of Dolby's new Vision technology to control each of the more than 2,200 individual LEDs in relation to the on-screen image.
It's getting harder to make an HDTV that really stands out, but Philips has gone to great lengths (well, widths) with a new set it's recently unveiled. Forgoing the 16:9 wide-screen aspect ratio most new sets have, the Cinema 21:9, a 56-inch LCD, extends to nearly the same ratio as movies shot in the 2.
According to a new report from market research firm In-Stat, 17 million of the 39 million U.S.
Once a consumer electronics giant, GE hasn't made a TV in several years, having lost out to Sony and other Asian manufacturers over the last couple of decades. But last fall, the company joined with Tatung in an HDTV venture called General Displays & Technologies (GDT).
I'll still wading through all the CES news, and didn't want to forget mentioning the new Blu-ray players from Panasonic and Pioneer, including the world's first portable Blu-ray player, the Panasonic DMP-B15 (pictured above). It includes an 8.
Hardware
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