Audio Video News

German speaker manufacturer, Canton, has replaced the company's popularly priced LE series with the new GLE series of full-range speakers. Canton says the new speakers utilize some of the materials and designs from the higher-end Vento, Ergo, and Karot lines. The GLE series includes a total of six models: two floorstanders, two bookshelfs, a horizontal center channel, and an on-wall version.

In a turnabout from the traditional consumer electronics paradigm in which the hardware is given away for free or at drastically reduced prices in order to entice potential subscribers to sign on the dotted line and pay juicy monthly fees to the content provider, the HD Radio Alliance is now promoting the availability of a pricey HD Radio add-on for car stereos that will enable users to access free HD Radio content and services.

Could it be that Apple, Amazon and Netflix might face their toughest competition in the movie download space from a brick and mortar retail chain? Wal-Mart is entering the movie download business with deals in place with six of Hollywood's major studios, a claim no other download site can match currently. Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner have all signed on to sell movies and TV shows with the retailing giant.

Canon's new HV20 HD Camcorder joins the ever growing field of consumer-oriented high-definition camcorders. Although it's not as small nor as inexpensive as Sanyo's $699 720p Xacti HD2 MPEG4 HD camcorder, at $1,099 the 1920 x 1080 Canon entry includes enough features and performance that it's a significant bargain for the money.

Recently released independent sales tracking from Nielsen's VideoScan has shown that Blu-ray Disc has nearly caught up to HD DVD in total number of discs sold since launch, and that the Sony-backed format outsold HD DVD at a rate of better than 2:1 in the first two weeks of January. While this is certainly too short a window to draw conclusions from, there are some significant reasons that this news bodes well for Blu-ray.

One of the stories of CES 2007 that didn't make it into <A HREF="http://blog.ultimateavmag.com/ces2007/"><I>UAV's</I> Blogs</A> is Sony's Internet TV, which is a two-part concept that includes an add-on module for its BRAVIA TVs and streaming broadband content provided by Sony's music and movie arms and partners like AOL, Yahoo, and Grouper. The BRAVIA Internet Video Link requires an Ethernet connection and is compact enough that the BRAVIA LCD flat panels can still be wall-mounted with the module in place.

Whither SED? That was a question on the minds of many journalists walking through Toshiba's city block-sized booth at CES 2007. As it turns out, Toshiba has sold its stake in the burgeoning flat panel display technology to Canon, its partner in the venture.