It’s not a surprise to see Pioneer launching a Blu-ray player — we’ve been waiting for it for some time now. The good news is our thumb twiddling hasn’t been for nothing, because Pioneer has come up with a fantastic-looking player with some nifty features: pray silence for the BDP-LX70. The most exciting feature of the LX70 is its ability …

CES is here, and this is going to be a fantastic year for audio and video gadgets. We’re not expecting a revolution — just loads of big TVs, plenty of good old-fashioned fisticuffs in the HD DVD/Blu-ray war and even better quality images on the TVs we’ll be buying next year. A new technology called “surface-conduction electron-emitter display” (SED) is …

It was supposed to be the awakening of a new era in entertainment history, but high-definition video seems to have overslept its alarm clock. HD Ready TV sets have been startlingly popular, but there’s nothing to watch on them. Blu-ray and HD DVD could still be sleeping giants, but sales projections for 2006 have fallen drastically — so why are …