Geoffrey Morrison

Battlefield is back, though thanks to an endless supply of add-on packs, it doesn’t feel like it ever left. Right now you can play the upcoming BF4 for free, as part of an open beta. Is it worth checking out? What does the beta say about the new game? Will it be worth buying? I’ve been playing for many, many hours, so that should probably tell you the answer to at least one of those questions. The rest revealed after the jump.

The PSB M4U 2 and M4U 1 headphones are some of the best you can get. The M4U 2s even won our product of the year last year.

The same guy behind those headphones, Paul Barton, has designed some in-ear headphones, VISO HP20. Color me intrigued.

A sneak peek at the biggest tech story of the year.

The greatest thing to happen to LCD, ever.

The coolest demo I saw at CEDIA 2007 was a demo I saw at CEDIA 2006. The original demo was at the Planar suite. Dolby now owns the company that was working with Planar, BrightSide Technologies, and the technology shown in these demos has a name—Dolby Vision. The short version is this: Using LEDs, you can dim specific areas of the backlight to go along with what is happening with the video. In other words, you can dim certain areas of the screen, while keeping other areas bright. In the simplest form, picture a split screen with black on one side and white on the other. Local dimming would allow the LEDs on the black side to be off and the LEDs on the white side to be lit. The result is a fantastic, legitimate contrast ratio, along with possible energy savings and a host of other potential benefits. But first, we have to understand the problem before we can talk about this solution.