Some years ago, owning a flatscreen TV endowed one with a certain status. It sent a message to anyone who might gaze upon it: “My owner is cashed up to the gills, and premium entertainment hardware is a lounge room priority”. Now that the price of plasmas and LCDs has plummeted, flat TVs no longer …
Read More »Blog Layout
Hi
It’s not often we see significant advances in the high-definition disc format war, but yesterday — in a move that had us re-reading the press release with our mouths wide open — Paramount announced that it would shift from supporting both formats, to exclusively releasing movies on HD DVD. The announcement also includes Dreamworks Animation, MTV Films and Nickelodeon Movies, …
Read More »PURE Digital Siesta: DAB radio for treehuggers
Caring about the environment is trendier than ever in the tech world, with massive companies such as Apple and Dell at least paying lip service to the idea that our obsession with new products shouldn’t take an unnecessary toll on old Mother Earth. Keen to jump on the eco-bandwagon is PURE Digital, whose DAB radios lead the digital radio pack. …
Read More »Samsung DVD
The Samsung DVD-HD870 is designed to do one thing — breathe new life into your DVD collection and make your standard-definition discs look like high-definition ones, using upscaling. Upscaling offers wildly varying results — no DVD player can create information that isn’t on the disc — but when a DVD is properly produced, using a decent bit rate, there’s enough …
Read More »Perfect Picture: A professional explains TV calibration
Buying a new television is often fraught with difficulty. The vision you see on screen in the store showroom may look totally different when you take your new TV home. Why? Well, a couple of factors come into play. In store, you’re probably looking at a high definition feed (good) that has been split to display on multiple screens (bad). …
Read More »Crave Football: Which channels are showing the new season?
One more day. That’s all. We can manage one more day, right? One more day of football-less tedium, with only the sickly sweet methadone of transfer gossip and pre-season friendlies to replace the true heroin of real league action. Tomorrow the country will return to its natural state — football crazy, football mad. And this season there are more options …
Read More »Onkyo DV
Toshiba’s HD DVD division is like the kid who doesn’t have anyone to play with — overweight, lazy and beginning to develop an odd smell. Until now, that is — there hasn’t been much competition in the HD DVD market, but that’s about to change with a new player from Onkyo, the DV-HD805. But unlike the aforementioned loser, Toshiba has …
Read More »Crave Football: Digital radios for footy fans
Football season is upon us. It’s time to raid Sainsbury’s for Carling, ignore your wives and children and hysterically scream “THE REFEREE’S A BANKER!” Though why people insist on shouting such an obvious lie is beyond us — referees are professional now, they don’t have other jobs any more. Dumbasses. Anyway, if you’re lucky enough not to have to sit …
Read More »IceTV win ensures ‘free’ EPG still on track
The little guy has won out on the end, as Channel Nine has lost its case against IceTV in which it claimed that the company’s IceTV Guide infringed the station’s copyright. Credit: IceTV The decision was handed down at the Federal Court in Sydney this morning. According to IceTV’s website, the court found that “IceTV did not and does not …
Read More »KiSS 1600: The DVD player that likes to stream media
It’s not often we get so excited about a DVD player these days that we jump up and down when it arrives in the office. That wasn’t always the case though — we remember when DVD was the most amazing thing we’d ever seen, and KiSS is keen to evoke such emotions in us once again with its funky new …
Read More »