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TVonics MFR

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 …

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Photos: Panasonic Viera TH

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 …

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Batman Begins on Blu

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 …

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Onkyo TX

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 …

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Photos: Pioneer Kuro PDP

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 …

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Aussie TiVo to go on sale next week

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 …

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Pioneer BDP

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 …

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Is it time to go HD?

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 …

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Seven to launch crippled TiVo

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 …

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