We can’t persuade you to love Ambilight, but if you do like Philips’ system for extending the TV experience by shining lights on a wall, you’ll be thrilled by the 42-inch 42PFL9703. But can the TV live up to our expectations and become a Crave fave? Ambilight is hardly new, so what differentiates this set …

I can hardly believe how idiotic our government can be at times. The latest report designed to prove how little politicians understand technology is the proposal from the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee that video-hosting Web sites restrict content based on the time of day, just like TV companies do with broadcast content. Yes, that’s right, the clunky …

Our living room is getting out of hand. You walk in to a wall of hot air, with electronics stacked floor to ceiling and one small seat in the corner where you can perch, to enjoy the fruits of our dangerous wiring and potentially fatal heat output. As much as we like to discourage strangers from disrupting our audio-visual pleasure, …

Harman Kardon has unveiled some surprises in its 2008 range of AV products which include an updated iPod dock and a media streamer. With companies such as Onkyo leading the way in terms of features, it’s taken Harman Kardon a while to catch up. But with this new range featuring up-to-the-minute functionality, the company appears to have redressed the balance. …

The LG DP391B truly is a pretty little thing. We’ve seen a fair few portable DVD players in our time, and almost without exception they’re the same drearily functional clamshell design, where the lid flips open to reveal the disc compartment and a screen. Clearly someone at LG got bored of that, and came up with something different. That’s the …

If you’ve persuaded the love of your life to accept a large-screen TV into your lounge, please accept our hearty congratulations. But have you managed to get the seal of approval for a surround-sound speaker system? We didn’t think so. The reason for spousal speaker hatred is simple: speakers can be as ugly as a shaved cat. Luckily, not everyone …

Crank up Green Day’s Time of Your Life and keep the aloe vera tissues close to hand, because it’s time for the final instalment of Whaddyareckon? Yes, after two seasons, 51 episodes, hours of chasing down interviewees in Sydney’s Pitt Street Mall and much energy expended shooing away school kids who run in front of the camera, the end is …

A new certification program, which aims to simplify the purchase of an HDTV with a digital tuner, may actually complicate matters due to its flexible definition of what HD actually is. The HD Tick logo will start appearing on many new TVs. The new ‘HD Tick Logo’ aims to ensure compliance with Australian digital receiver standards and provide for better …

Full high-definition recorders, plasma televisions and Blu-ray-with-everything were the main focus of yesterday’s Panasonic 2008 AV launch in Sydney. The company is gearing up for its partnership of the 2008 Olympic Games coverage and even had sports stars — runner Matt Shervington and swimmers Ky Hurst and Bronte Barratt — on hand to say how much they love using Panasonic …

Blu-ray is all well and good, but DVD remains the market leader in disc-based entertainment. Indeed, DVD sales still make up most of all sales in the US, which almost certainly means that the UK numbers are even more skewed in DVDs favour. With prices tumbling, what do you need to get the best quality out of them? Upscaling DVD …

Less than a year after it announced the revolutionary Kuro range, Pioneer has unveiled two new products which promise to overturn the industry again. The first is the Extreme Contrast Concept which Pioneer claims renders the contrast ratio rating meaningless — it says there no is measurable light emitting from the television. Black is finally black, it seems. The second …

In Crave’s ideal world, we’d be able to project TV out of our eyeballs whenever we wanted to watch it. We despise this hopelessly old-fashioned process of waiting for a programme to start and then sitting down and not being able to go for a wee until the first advert break. Obviously, this model of convenience doesn’t suit the television …

It’s been a big year for Pioneer. First it announced that it would be ceasing production on its own plasma panels and then we found out it would be producing an LCD TV, which on the face of it sounds like heresy. But they are coming nontheless, and today we’ve been at Pioneer’s UK head office to take a look at …

We got a first look at Pioneer’s LCD TVs on Friday, but that wasn’t enough. While at the company’s head office, we had a poke around to see what other technological goodies the manufacturer was producing, from high-end AV receivers with ‘Air Studios’ certification to new Blu-ray players. We could hardly keep our camera steady. Pioneer once had a significant …

Now that gadgets and the internet are an essential part of our lives, the notion of geekdom is largely moot. Nerdy, cultish pop-culture predilections are no longer so niche — the 2009 Star Trek movie, being directed by Lost‘s J.J. Abrams, will bring the franchise to a generation that missed The Next Generation. So where, then, does that leave the …