One of favourite elements of 50s American youth culture is the drive-in cinema. The combination of gorgeous cars, Technicolor movies and the company of a member of the opposite sex on the back seat was enough to drive adolescents mad. In the dreary, repressed UK, there wasn’t enough room and the weather is utterly hopeless …

Freeview recorders are exactly like arms. When you’ve got them, and they work perfectly, you take them for granted. But get one munched off by a shark or alligator and you’re really going to miss it. The cruel vagaries of review loan periods, rather than animal attack, mean we’ve gone without a recorder for a while, and it’s actually painful. …

With the ‘shock‘ announcement yesterday that Toshiba would be supporting Blu-ray with its own hardware this year, we sought some chatting time with the company’s very own Olivier van Wynedaele. A senior executive at Toshiba Europe, he’s involved with optical storage and we’ve spoken to him before about Toshiba’s DVD upscalers and HD DVD players. He’s certainly a chap who …

Sleet, hail and widespread flooding of the UK aside, apparently it’s summer. And with summer comes holidays, and with those come bored, listless and fidgety children. Happily, Philips wants to reduce the massive harrassment under-occupied youths inflict on their parents and provide a way to anaesthetise them against the pain of imagination and creativity. That’s right, the Philips PET744 is …

Let’s be honest. Toshiba doesn’t generally make TVs with all the bells and whistles you’d find on some Korean tellies. Neither are its models as sparsely populated with extras as Panasonic‘s excellent but rather straightforward sets. Toshiba is, like its TVs, a company aiming for the mid-market. That’s possibly what makes its Regza 42RV635 so appealing. Its 42-inch screen is …

Over the weekend, Engadget reported that Toshiba is planning to launch a Blu-ray player before the end of the year. There are so many better things Toshiba could be doing with its time. Allow us to explain. With prices tumbling for Blu-ray hardware, making a Blu-ray player doesn’t seem like a reliable way for Toshiba to make money — there …

We’ve been promised wireless HDMI for years now and frankly, we’re getting impatient. This is especially infuriating for tech journalists who attend CES each year to see an amazing array of wireless devices, only for them to never see the light of day. This year is different though, because right from the start, Panasonic and Sony both promised wireless HD …

Here are some things that aren’t dead: Jeff Goldblum and plasma TVs. Of course, if you’re reading this in 2050 there’s a good chance that Jeff Goldblum is now dead, but if it’s 2050, why on Earth are you reading about a plasma from 41 years ago? That’s like us reading about a black and white TV in a little …

When you first pick up the Digital Vision GiGo Freeview receiver, you’ll almost certainly have the same reaction as us. Namely, this thing feels like it’s made out of cardboard. This is not a sturdy device: it’s what we’d say the exact opposite of an Apple product feels like. The whole thing reeks of cost-cutting, right down to the fact …

In a post on its blog, the BBC has announced that we’ll start to see some high-definition services appear on Freeview from the end of this year. It looks very much like these channels will be broadcast in 720p, and will comprise the usual terrestrial stalwarts in HD form. Expect BBC HD, ITV HD, 4HD and Five HD to launch …