Televisions

Developments in the Blu-ray/HD DVD format war kicked into high gear in the past couple of months. November and December saw the bulk of the long-delayed HD product lines finally hitting store shelves: Blu-ray players from Sony, Panasonic, and Philips; the PlayStation 3; the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on; and the second-generation Toshiba HD DVD players. In the new year, both camps came out swinging at CES 2007. With so much news to process, we've taken the opportunity to collect all the major developments into one easily digestible chunk.

Enter the combo player: LG officially unveiled the BH100, … Read more

The LG BH100, the combination Blu-ray and HD DVD player selected by CNET as the best product of CES 2007, is definitely coming out on time, according to LG spokesman John Taylor, but it won't have the official HD DVD logo. The logo pictured on the CES demo unit will not be printed on the shipping player because the BH100 did not gain approval by the DVD Forum, the body responsible for HD DVD licensing. The reason is that the BH100 cannot support HDi (formerly known as iHD), the interactive layer of HD DVD discs.

I've read reports … Read more

OK, so not all you Cravers were sold on the idea of the "Icebox" for your kitchen computing needs. Then how about a stainless steel TV?

As part of its new "Regza" line, Toshiba is offering a 26-inch model with a high-gloss steel panel to offset its black cabinetry, according to BornRich. It's designed specifically for the kitchen to match the fridge, dishwasher and other appliances, complete with a built-in DVD player so your kids can watch Ice Age 2 while you're heating up the dinosaur chicken for dinner.

How do companies decide what images to show on their huge TVs at trade shows like CES?

"You look for stuff that's challenging for a display. Fast motion, snow," said Bruce Tripido, senior director of the marketing entertainment products division at Sharp Electronics. "If you see images that don't move much, you know their screens can't handle it."

After you see a few hundred displays, however, they begin to blur together and form a new visual art form. It's a commentary on our times really. Here's what I saw in a … Read more

It's been a year since we were first introduced to Monsoon Multimedia's Hava device, a placeshifting product that delivered a handful of features--Wi-Fi connectivity, multicast functionality, and Windows Media Center integration--not found on the category-leading Slingbox. Hava went on to release its flagship product in late 2006, and the company has since licensed the technology to Pinnacle, which sells a Hava clone called PCTV To Go.

At CES 2006, Hava was showing off a new entry-level product called the Hava Gold HD. It's housed in a different enclosure than the Hava Wireless HD, and it loses that … Read more

Plenty of attention has been paid to Sharp's 108-inch LCD, but once you get to 100-inches, is anyone still counting? LG can play the size game too and we saw some whoppers at CES. Coming just in at just 8-inches too short for the LCD crown was LG's 100-inch LCD. We knocked Sharp's behemoth for its picture quality, but to be fair, the LG actually looked a little worse. Luckily for LG, it seems like its set was only a demo unit, unlike Sharp who will actually be selling its TV to consumers eventually.

We also saw … Read more

First there was 1080p. Now there's something called "Quad Full" or 3,840x2,160 resolution, which Westinghouse showed off in a 56-inch LCD HD monitor at this year's Consumer Electronics Show. The company says that equates to a resolution greater than 8 megapixels and that the LCD offers "stunning, never-before-seen picture reproduction."

The Quad Full monitor may be the flashy headline act, but the real meat of the story is that Westinghouse is serving up several new LCD televisions, with a full lineup of moderately priced 1080p models in 42-, 47-, and 52-inch sizes. … Read more

Hitachi's main television-related introduction at CES 2007 might engender a certain amount of confusion about an already-confusing topic to many HDTV buyers. The company is marketing its new plasma TV, the P50H401 (February, $2,500), as the world's first "50-inch 1080 HDTV flat panel for under $2,500." If you're paying close attention (and really, who is?), you'll notice "p" is a big deal, however--the panel's pixel array is 1,280x1,080, not the 1,920x1,080 that qualifies for 1080p native resolution. But the price is definitely better than that … Read more

Finally, a TV that even Zsa Zsa Gabor would like.

To celebrate shipping 1 million of its "Ambilight" TVs, Philips took the millionth one of the line and inserted 2,200 diamonds from the DeBeers Company into the bezel. Ambilight, which adjusts the TV light level to suit the room, has been one of the more successful technologies in consumer electronics in the past few years for the Dutch giant.

The diamonds are swirled in the white part of the bezel. Plasma TVs of this size weigh about 300 pounds, and the Philips booth is located deep in … Read more