freesat is here, and has been for a while now, but without the simplicity of Freeview can the service ever really take off? Sure, it’s great to have access to HD channels, even if there are only two of them, and they’re both part-time. What will make or break the service is the availability of …

There have been far too many truly cack superhero movies. Even the otherwise brilliant Batman franchise lost its way with Batman and Robin, which despite Alicia Silverstone was a bloody mess. When Batman Begins came out, we were frankly amazed that director Christopher Nolan had brought it back to the level of Tim Burton’s films, albeit with a very different …

Barely half a year after Blu-ray won the format war we’re now being told that Pioneer is working on the next big thing, and when we say big, we really do mean it. The Japanese company has announced that it has successfully created a 400GB optical disc, similar in construction to Blu-ray. The new discs aren’t really designed for movie …

It seems like every TV review we write, we end up saying the same thing: “The sound on flat-panel TVs just isn’t good enough.” People don’t usually see the investment in sound as anywhere near as important as that of the picture. And that’s troubling, because sound is 50 per cent of the experience — and what’s more, bad sound …

Black is the new grey — at least it is for Pioneer, which cares more about making TVs reproduce black properly than any other company in the world. When Kuro was introduced last year we weren’t sure how far Pioneer could take the technology. Could it keep increasing black levels each year? Yesterday, the Kuro PDP-LX6090 landed on our doorstep …

It’s a sad fact that all DVD players aren’t created equal. You get ones that churn out a lovely picture, and ones that don’t do such a good job. The same is true of Blu-ray players, but of course with 1080p video it’s much harder to tell what problems there are — because everything looks amazing, even on the lower-quality …

It may not seem like that long, but we’ve had digital TV in the UK now for ten years, with the ill-fated OnDigital starting up in 1998, around the same time Sky launched its own digital service. Ten years is a long time in technology, and as with all such things, there have been significant advances since the DVB-T and …

Sharp is having a productive year: it recently bought a fairly large chunk of much-loved plasma TV producer Pioneer, and in so doing triggered the Kuro manufacturer to accept LCD into its ranks. Not a bad achievement for the company that introduced the LCD TV to the world. So what about its latest B20 range? Well, the 37-inch model, the …

If you aren’t one for harsh, unforgiving corners in your living room, you should take a look at the Samsung HT-X715 DVD home cinema in a box, which doesn’t feature a harsh edge anywhere on its seven-part system. Everything is rounded to within an inch of its life, and we love it. Not only is everything as well rounded as …

Let’s not beat around the bush: TVs are great, but for the proper movie experience you need a projector, in a dark room, with an epic surround-sound system. Because that’s the way to enjoy a really good film — it’s even the way to enjoy a bad film. The problem is that projectors are rarely cheap, so when we heard …