In a few years the heady days of analogue will be over, and we’ll all be forced to watch TV via digital. That’s all well and good if you have a state-of-the-art flat panel TV with a built-in digital tuner. But there are still a vast number of TVs in the country that don’t have …

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 hardware, so Panasonic‘s PZ81 range …

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 …

TiVo will be available for sale in Australia next week with a price of AU$700, after being beaten to the punch by Foxtel’s new HD+ service by almost a month. TiVo is expected to go on sale on 1 July 2008. Harvey Norman executive director, David Ackery, told industry publication Current.com.au that the TiVo box will be available for sale …

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 …

High-definition displays — whether plasma, LCD or rear-projection — offer startling clarity in vision and sound. 2008 is the year that the Olympics will be broadcast in HD for the first time in Australia — and at a reasonable time. Also, with pay TV making tentative steps into high-def it’s a good time to investigate what a new HD TV …

Seven yesterday confirmed that the TiVo HD digital video recorder will be released in Australia for AU$699 on 29 July, but users will have to buy a software upgrade next year to unlock some of its features. TiVo and Seven representatives unveiled the TiVo HD box at a press conference in Sydney, but streaming music and photos from your home …

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 …

Sony has unveiled its latest “Bonus PlayStation 3 with a Full HD Bravia TV” promotion with a new “armaggedon clock” gimmick, and the announcement that all HD Bravias are included. Sony has set up a webpage with a countdown clock — available here — which starts counting next week, and tells you how many of the 35,000 PS3s are still …

Samsung is set to announce a bundling promotion of a free Foxtel iQ2 box with its new TVs in order to compete with Sony’s new PS3-and-Bravia deal. Samsung is expected to pay the AU$200 installation cost to Foxtel customers buying one of its HD TVs, according to The Australian. “We are extremely excited about our partnership with Foxtel and hope …

Despite some teething problems with its previous promotion, Sony has decided to give its “free PlayStation with any 1080p Bravia” deal another whirl. This time around the company is limiting the month-long 1 July promotion to the first 35,000 customers, and will be composed of mostly last year’s models, according to TweakTown, despite new TVs coming out at the same …