Al Griffin

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CES 2015
Sony, Hacked, Attacks Back with 4K and More
Al Griffin  |  Jan 05, 2015  |  Published: Jan 06, 2015
Sony’s 2014 CES press conference was all about 4K. Sony’s 2015 CES press conference was about...lots of stuff.
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CEDIA 2016
Sony’s New 4K Projector Does HDR and More
Al Griffin  |  Sep 15, 2016
Projectors with real 4K resolution—or close to it—will make news this year at CEDIA, with a new D-ILA model anticipated from JVC and a number of DLP models coming out that incorporate Texas Instruments’ new 4K chip with pixel-shifting technology. Sony, on the other hand, has been offering native 4K projectors for several years now. The company dropped the news at its press conference on Wednesday that a new 4K model, the VPL-VW675ES, will be available in November.
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CES 2014
Sony’s Reference Standard for UHDTV
Al Griffin  |  Jan 08, 2014  |  Published: Jan 09, 2014
Of the three series of XBR Ultra HDTVs announced by Sony at CES, the X950B is the only one it’s calling a “reference standard.” (The one directly below it, the X900B Series, is merely a “statement in picture, sound and design.”) What makes an X950B Series set so good? For starters, it’s got a full-array LED backlight with Sony’s X-tended Dynamic Range Pro processing to dynamically deepen blacks and boost highlights. It also has the same Triluminos tech found in select Sony HDTVs and UHDTVs from 2013.
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Editor's Eye
Spatial Is the Place
Al Griffin  |  Oct 08, 2021
A regular complaint aired in Sound & Vision’s Letters section is that the 5.1 surround discs covered in our Remaster Class column are 1) out of print, and 2) too expensive to buy on e-commerce and collector sites like eBay and Discogs. And while I commiserate, the reality is that disc releases, be they LP, CD, SACD, Blu-ray, or whatever, don’t remain eternally in print. That’s why there’s a thriving market for vintage vinyl, and why albums and movies are regularly remastered and reissued on disc.
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Speaker, Speaker on the Wall
Al Griffin  |  Jan 05, 2004

Photos by Tony Cordoza The next time you go to the movies, take a look around for the speakers. Where'd they go? Pull back the screen and you'll find the front left, center, and right speakers stashed behind it, while the side and rear arrays are mounted high up on the walls. The idea is to make the audio system unobtrusive, and it works.

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Home Movie Theaters
Star Wars: A Home Theater Adventure
Al Griffin  |  May 22, 2019
Most of us remember the first time as a kid that seeing a movie had a profound impact on our young mind. For plenty of kids who came of age in the 1970s, that movie was the first episode of the original Star Wars trilogy, which was released in 1977. For Kelly Sterne of Flower Mound, Texas, a fascination with Star Wars led to an obsession...
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CEDIA 2019
Stewart Filmscreen Shows its Edge
Al Griffin  |  Sep 15, 2019
Stewart Filmscreen’s CEDIA 2019 booth served as a showcase for two products: the Luxus below-ceiling screen system, and the all-new Balón Edge fixed-frame screen.
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CEDIA 2013
Stewart Filmscreen Transformed
Al Griffin  |  Sep 26, 2013
Stewart Filmscreen is a company whose name is strongly linked with the dedicated home theater concept, but even they acknowledge that the concept is in decline. People are starting to gravitate toward viewing movies and TV in open, multiple-use living spaces, not dark, isolated viewing vaults.
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CEDIA 2016
Stewart Filmscreen’s Phantom Steps Into the Light
Al Griffin  |  Sep 17, 2016
With dedicated home theaters giving way to multipurpose media rooms, high ambient light rejecting screens have become an increasingly popular option for those seeking the ultra-large image that only projectors deliver.
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Editor's Eye
Stream Theater
Al Griffin  |  Feb 10, 2021
Home video streaming received a boost in 2020 for obvious reasons, while movie theater attendance took a dive for equally obvious reasons. But even with a massive paradigm shift in the way people experience movies and other forms of entertainment clearly taking place in real time, it still came as a shock when WarnerMedia announced in early December that its full slate of theatrical releases for 2021 would drop day and date on the company’s HBO Max streaming service.
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