The natural human interface has been a huge theme at this year’s CES. Bill Gates talked up the Surface Computer and voice recognition in the car, Paul Otellini talked up the gesture-based interface of Nintendo Wii, and there were plenty of new ideas around interfaces exhibited on the trade show floor. Attendees mill around Samsung …

What is Philips’ development process when following an Editors’ Choice winning product like the Aurea TV? Simple: just ask the ladies what they’re into. Introducing the new Design Collection of plasma and LCD screens, CEO Andrea Ragnetti explained their strategy: women, according to Philips’ research, are “more critical consumers who need to see the personal benefits of a product”. Not …

This is what CES is all about. Forget your fancy big TVs, your Lamborghini laptops and the Bill Gates keynote. No, if everyone was truly honest with themselves, the product we’d all like to take home is this. It’s a home cinema system in a box that just so happens to look like everyone’s favourite Star Wars character, R2-D2. Remember …

It’s all about women, or at least that’s what Philips tells us. The new head of the cloggy company has just finished telling the press how it’s preparing to unleash a raft of products aimed at nabbing the female dollar. The push is being led by the products in the Design Collection, which feature ‘holistic and iconic designs’, apparently. The …

One of the problems with flat-panel televisions is the sound. A huge amount of effort seems to go into making the case look nice, and producing an impressive picture, but this all seems to be to the detriment of the sound. Dolby’s Volume technology is setting out to fix some of the problems. Firstly, it can adjust the sound levels …

It wasn’t much of a surprise when Panasonic announced its 150-inch plasma at its keynote press conference. We’d been hearing rumours about it for some time, and you can always be sure that CES will bring the usual “ours is bigger than yours” TV punch-up. Still, Panasonic must have been laughing at the rumours, because no one actually managed to …

Today, the war ended. The war between HD formats, that is. As you’re probably aware, Warner Bros has ditched support for Toshiba’s HD DVD format in favour of an exclusive partnership with Sony’s Blu-ray. Well, after May this year anyway. With only two studios — Paramount and Universal — behind HD DVD, the consumer-unfriendly feud is, as our own Ian …

Toshiba didn’t actually admit HD DVD was dead and buried during its CES press conference, but it was quite clear it knew the game was up. The tech journalists were circling like vultures, waiting to pick the meat of failure from the bones of a seriously ill-looking HD format. The conference started with the head of Toshiba digital AV repeating …

“Contrast ratio is officially irrelevant.” That was the claim today from Pioneer, which unveiled two new concept TVs that have the potential to re-write the rules on flat panel displays. The first, codenamed ‘Extreme contrast model’ produces blacks that are actually black, rather than the slight grey seen on all flat-panel televisions today, with such a high contrast ratio “it …

If you thought TV was just for your living room think again — LG wants you to get square eyes when you’re on the bus, train or enjoying some time in the restroom, as the Americans call it. The technology, called MPH — which stands for Mobile Pedestrian Handheld — allows TV to be transmitted digitally to mobile devices such …

Fujitsu will no longer be selling plasma TVs in Australia following the decision by its Japanese parent company to cease production of plasma displays for the consumer market. Not so many years ago, Fujitsu held a very strong reputation in high-end plasma TVs, but recent models, such as the Fujitsu P50XHA58EB, did not seem to be keeping up with the …

We predicted some time ago that this year’s CES would bring with it some sort of announcement about the future of Warner’s HD format allegiance. It turns out that even before CES is officially underway, Warner has announced that it will stop selling both Blu-ray and HD DVD versions of its movies, and will focus exclusively on Blu-ray. If we’re …

Good news for those hard-working City types who’ve just received their massive yearly bonuses. But they won’t be able to waste it all on champagne and fast cars — they’ll need to spend a few grand pimping out their trendy loft apartment living rooms. Enter the £1,500 Arcam Solo Movie 2.1, a high-end upscaling DVD player and audio system for …

We had high hopes that with the end of analogue in sight, we would finally get some more bandwidth available for over-the-air broadcasting in the UK. An increase in the available capacity would allow us to have high definition programmes on Freeview and even add new services. According to ERT Weekly, a trade magazine for electrical retailers, Ofcom has decided …

If you splurged out on a smashing great big TV set before Christmas, only to fall into a deep, turkey- fuelled sleep in front of it, you’ll be kicking yourself. Now it’s the day after Boxing Day and prices are dropping faster than the nation’s eyelids during the Queen’s speech — here are five great deals on high-definition TVs. 1. …