Audio Video News

Toshiba is apparently going to attempt to swamp the market with HD DVD players ahead of the arrival in stores of standalone Blu-ray disc players or PlayStation 3, but is taking a high-risk route in doing so. The HD DVD developer and backer reached an agreement with and licensed their technology to Chinese manufacturers, opening the door to inexpensive players and the kind of price wars that have turned current standard definition DVD players into ubiquitous commodity items.

<I>UAV</I> readers have been flooded with so much news lately about the transition to HDTV- with respect to both the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray format war, and this country's transition to digital TV broadcast- that I almost feel bad bringing this one up. But it's true- in late October Warner Bros. began field trials of digital cinema presentations in Japan featuring so-called 4K resolution, which is, gulp, an image with a pixel count of 4096x2160.

Pity those poor manufacturers of portable audio and video devices whose names don't begin with an "A" and who don't make gadgets with a model numbers starting with a lower-case "i". HandHeld Entertainment, makers of one of those "not an iPod audio/video" portables, sees an avenue to fame and success in offering a handheld portable player that costs significantly less than an iPod from Apple. Prior to Apple's much ballyhooed introduction earlier this month, HandHeld Entertainment announced plans for the next generation of their digital video/audio/photo media players.

Some are calling it the end of the format war, others are calling it the beginning. Warner Home Video announced last week that it has joined the Blu-ray Disc Association and will release its films on Blu-ray, and, ostensibly, HD DVD as well. Universal is now the only studio of the six majors to be committed to HD DVD and not Blu-ray.

Last week Apple concurrently announced a new iPod digital music player that can play digital video as well as audio, and iTunes 6.0, which enables users to purchase and download music videos and TV shows from the iTunes Music Store (iTMS.

The strange and twisting-turning saga of the next-generation optical disc format war just got stranger with reports that China announced plans to develop and launch its own next –generation DVD format in 2008, seemingly placing China's massive manufacturing infrastructure at odds with the emerging Blu-ray and HD DVD standards.

There are cool products, and then there are cool products. While not quite living up to Bang & Olufsen's uber-cool status, some of the new "StyleFi" gadgets from Oregon Scientific certainly fall under the pretty-darn-cool category.