Apparently, chefs never go out for dinner on Valentine’s Day because it’s busy and the food is rubbish. But what else can the modern lothario do to impress their lover? Take them to the theatre? Cook dinner themselves? No, if you’re really going to impress your lover this year, you’d better go all out and buy them …

The story that dominated CES this year was the standards war around high-definition DVD. This is no longer a phony war: both Blu-ray and HD DVD players will arrive in less than six months. What’s clear from talking to people at the show is that this format war is bad for everyone, most of all the consumer. Toshiba’s HD DVD player …

We’re cheeky little minxes here on Crave — when the mood takes us, we’ll ditch the all-in-one HDD/DVD combi recorders and keep it old-school with a ridiculously expensive dedicated DVD player. The Denon DVD-2910 was our last extravagance, a £550 player that was less a mere DVD player and more of a universal disc spinner — there wasn’t anything that baby couldn’t …

Asian LCD manufacturer Mirai is better known for its computer monitors, but like many other companies it’s getting bored of making displays for Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations, and is branching out into the television market. Why should you care? Because not only are its new TVs officially ‘HD Ready’, they’re cheap as chips too. Not only that, but the range stretches from a …

We thought that the award for the year’s most stylish DVD home cinema was in the bag for the Denon S-101. But that was before the equally demure Philips HTS8000S arrived — its pure good looks complementing kick-ass features such as SACD music playback and DivX video compatibility. The system also boasts component outputs, so if you’ve got a flatscreen TV you can watch …

Our AV setup is so complicated that just watching a DVD these days requires a complex series of button presses on three different remote controls. And that’s assuming we can even find them in the first place — usually they’re hidden under a mountain of Chris Stevens‘ MP3 players. Which is why we’re so enamoured with Logitech’s new Harmony 885 all-in-one remote — …

Try as we might to suck all the goodness out of CES 2006, there was simply too much great stuff to digest. So, back on UK soil and with interview notes dredged from the depths of our suitcase, we can now serve up another platter of delights that we’ll be gorging on throughout 2006. While rear-projection TVs might be shunned …

Everything out here in Vegas feels twice as big — buildings reach into the sky, an average car can carry ten people, and we won’t even talk about the Americans. It’s something that Samsung has taken to heart in designing its stand at CES — it’s impossible to miss, stretching out across the Convention Centre. The company’s flagship 102-inch plasma may have been beaten by an …

Pioneer has put its foot down and said it will stick with plasma TVs at this year’s CES. Thankfully, its TVs have always been stylish and of high quality — Crave has always maintained that they were the best plasmas on the market. However, if you want the very best, you’ll have to be prepared to make an upgrade, because the PRO-FHD1, launched at CES …

We’ve long maintained that the Toshiba RD-XS34 is the best combi-recorder on the market, only recently facing a decent challenge from Panasonic’s DMR-EH60D. However, Toshiba is already fighting back with the highly attractive RD-XS55, shown off for the first time here at CES today. The hard drive is bigger — the initial 160GB offering has now been upped to 250GB. …