Panasonic is promising a plasmatastic (Crave’s word, not Panasonic’s) year. The company continues its whole-hearted support of plasma televisions, claiming they offer the best picture quality of any flat panel. (Despite this, it continues to make smaller screens using LCD, because it’s much cheaper.) The most exciting announcement from Panasonic this year was that it’s …

We do so love cracking open a new gadget, but we also love animals. So imagine our surprise and delight when the HANNspree HANNSZ.elephant arrived in the office. The HANNSZ.elephant is a 10-inch LCD TV which has an appealing, soft-toy elephant cover. HANNspree doesn’t just do elephants (or capslock) either: there’s a zebra, a giraffe and even a lion — …

TVs aren’t supposed to be clever. They’re supposed to sit quietly in your lounge showing reruns of Emmerdale, but HP in its infinite wisdom has decided to increase their IQ exponentially by releasing what it calls the HP MediaSmart TV — a real boffin of a telly. What makes it so smart is networking capabilities. The MediaSmart TV is fitted with …

Toshiba has announced launch dates and prices for the first stand-alone HD DVD players to reach Europe — the HD-E1 and HD-XE1. This follows the US launch of the HD-A1 and HD-XA1 players back in April. Speaking at a well-attended press conference at IFA 2006 in Berlin, Olivier Van Wynendaele, Toshiba Europe’s deputy general manager for HD DVD products, described the …

Can you imagine a television that makes LCD and plasma sets look as fat and ugly as their CRT predecessors do now? Well, hopefully soon you won’t have to — Sony is demonstrating prototypes of new ‘OLED televisions’ at CES, which do just that. Crave is, of course, bitterly disappointed that we won’t be getting our hands on a fancy …

The Gates soft-shoe shuffle at CES kicks off the gadget show each year with the same forlorn regularity as a Windows blue screen of death. It’s comforting to watch Bill climb up to the stage, but prepare yourselves, people: this can’t go on for ever. Gates began his remarks by saying that next year’s keynote may well be his last. …

At CES 2006, Sony delighted us with the Reader, a silicon sylph that displays electronic books. It still isn’t available in the UK, and we still don’t know when or even if it will be, but it remains high on our wishlist. This year we were hoping for something just as innovative, but instead we got the Bravia Internet Video …

Here we are in Paris, sorry, Vegas (big cities all look the same these days). Crave is ready for CES 2007, but is CES ready for us? It is not. To be fair, the press events don’t start until tomorrow and the show proper doesn’t open until Monday, so we’re a day early. Right now there’s very little evidence that …

These days Tesco will sell you a DVD player for £16, so who’s gonna cough up £220 for the Denon DVD-1930? Crave, that’s who: because we care more about quality than cost in these high-definition days, and we can’t bear Scart leads to sully our DVDs on our glorious hi-def screens. Denon’s DVD-1930 offers plenty of extra features for the price. Firstly, it can play …

I am far from a tech expert and read with interest your review of the Sony Bravia KDL-40W2000. I’m seriously considering purchasing this model, but how long can I expect this television to last? Although £1,500 isn’t a fantastically expensive amount to spend, I am certain it will be a fair while before I am able to afford this much …

We’ve not seen a Mustek portable DVD player for a while, so when a new silver box arrived, we were keen to see what the Taiwanese company had been up to. The MP70D is the same basic DVD player and Freeview receiver with built-in LCD screen we saw in the company’s DTV-407 model, but we were pleased to see this …

Shortly after we’ve unwrapped our Christmas presents, and hopefully before we’ve broken them, Crave will be heading off to Las Vegas for the 2007 International Consumer Electronics Show, or CES to its many friends. It’s the world’s largest annual tradeshow for consumer technology, with over 2,500 exhibitors showing off their stuff in over 150,000 square metres of exhibition space. The …

Crave loves gadgets that plays nicely with the other kit we adore, and the TVMax sits so perfectly under a Mac Mini you could forget it was even there. Apart from looking cute, it enables you to record analogue TV via an aerial or from your cable box. You can give it your cable feed for up to 125 channels, …

“We’re gonna to need a bigger chimney”, Santa might say, in his best Chief Brody (Jaws) impression, at first sight of my Christmas wish list. But, as far as anyone knows, I’ve been a good boy, so even if it takes a few extra elves to cram my ultimate home-cinema system beneath the tree, I deserve it! The centrepiece of …

Like the fable involving the hare and the tortoise, there are two routes you can take to home-cinema happiness. There’s the long, arduous but ultimately rewarding trek taken by separates, or the quick, convenient shortcut offered by all-in-one systems — but as Aesop will tell you, speed is often undone in the end. Most home-cinema systems give you affordability at …