Currently, it is extremely hip to be hating on Blu-ray and to explain to all five people who read your blog that Blu-ray won't be successful because everyone is totally happy with their upconverting DVD players. The other herd mentality...
When JVC produced the world's smallest 1.27-inch 4K2K Direct-Drive Image Light Amplifier device last June, it was lauded as completely revolutionary. Not willing to rest on its laurels, JVC just announced a 1.75-inch 8K4K D-ILA high-definition...
Much to the industry's chagrin, the prevailing price for much downloaded music is free. Perhaps not coincidentally, that's the pricetag of The Slip, the new Nine Inch Nails album download.
"A boxer, like a writer, must stand alone," so wrote A.J. Liebling, a journalistic contender in his own right. Similarly, in the squared circle of knock-down, drag-out consumer electronics, a video display must stand alone too. Or at least be able...
Competition is a good thing, right? Competition fueled the growth of cable and satellite services as each one tries to outdo the other. Unfortunately, at least one lucrative market is a virtual monopoly, and one competitor has been sitting back,...
As I drive around L.A. and see gas prices approaching—and exceeding—$4 per gallon, I wonder how this might affect people's entertainment activities. I'd love to know how it's affecting you...
A new crop of entry-level projectors makes big-screen 1080p more affordable than ever.
There’s been a lot of fuss over the rapid drop in price of big-screen flat panels, but that ain’t nothing compared with the free-falling MSRPs you’ll find over in the 1080p projection realm. Two years ago, the going rate for one of the first 1080p projectors was about $10,000. Last year, we saw a number of high-quality offerings around the $5,000 mark. This year, companies like Optoma, Sanyo, and Mitsubishi have released 1080p projectors priced under $4,000. These entry-level models feature a nice complement of advanced image-adjustment options and all of the desired video inputs: HDMI 1.3, PC, and component video. But the important question is, how does their performance measure up with pricier competition? You’ll have to read on to find out.
To Americans accustomed to seeing other Americans waddling through shopping malls—and let me be the first to admit I’ve been doing a fair amount of waddling myself lately—the streets of Paris come as a pleasant shock. How do people who feast on duck liver and red wine stay so lean and sexy? Perhaps that eternal mystery springs from the same source as Cabasse’s fashionably thin Artis Baltic Evolution tower loudspeaker. Like one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s amazing cantilevered houses, it seems to defy gravity, the sphere holding its coaxial driver array floating on a skinny diagonal slash of solid wood. I suspect that the people who designed the speaker sat down to an excellent dinner afterward.
No one likes to look at speakers. (You and I don’t count.) Thus the quest by many manufacturers to find the Holy Grail of speakers: the totally invisible wall-o’-sound. Unfortunately, the invisible stuff I’ve seen so far has been pretty uninspiring and by no means anything you could call close to high performance. At present, short of an acoustic miracle, we’re stuck with speakers that are going to be seen, be they in-wall, on-wall, floorstanding, or whatever.