By the time JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was released last year, it had already been pre-ordered by over 100,000 people on Amazon.co.uk. The question is — will the same happen with the much-hyped Blu-ray and HD DVD disc formats? Online retailers Amazon.co.uk, Play.com and HMV.co.uk have now started accepting pre-orders for …

You have to hand it to Sony. The company danced around LCD for years, giving token gestures to the flat-screen fraternity and refusing to take it seriously. But all it took was a load of bouncing balls (and a decent product, of course) to make the Bravia range one of the most recognisible LCD ranges in existence, and a powerful …

Samsung’s stand at IFA 2006 would have brought tears to the eyes of HDTV’s early adopters. On display were the LE40M91 and LE40F7, which are the replacements for Samsung’s current crop of 40-inch LCD displays. The LE40M91 (pictured right) is an HD Ready set with a 1,366×768-pixel panel. It uses an LED backlight for better contrast and also offers Samsung’s …

All the talk at this month’s IFA trade show was about the arrival of ‘Full High-Definition’ TVs. Typical. We’ve only just got used to the HD Ready industry standard, and now there’s new jargon to get our heads round. ‘Full HD’ refers to screens with a maximum resolution of 1,920×1,080 pixels. Unlike the earlier HD standard, which required a minimum …

We all know children should be doing homework, running errands for elderly neighbours or sweeping leaves off your driveway, but thanks to television, they’re a bunch of drooling, brain-dead idiots. So it makes perfect sense for Hannspree to make a range of televisions aimed squarely at this demographic. We spotted a range of the company’s heavily stylised TVs at IFA 2006, …

Crave has just come back from IFA 2006, the Internationale Funkausstellung in Berlin, Germany. ‘Funkausstellung’ means ‘radio show’, but IFA has moved on since the first event in 1924, when 180,000 visitors examined the first valve radio receivers. Today IFA is a consumer electronics show covering six main areas: television and entertainment, personal computer and games, sound and car media, …

Panasonic chose the Abbey Road Studios — the spiritual home of The Beatles — as the venue for the press launch of its first Blu-ray DVD player. Crave followed in the footsteps of the Fab Four across the famous zebra crossing and into the Abbey Road Studios, where we were greeted by several Japanese execs who proudly unveiled the DMP-BD10 Blu-ray …

Aiming to better compete with Apple Computer’s iTunes, Samsung on Friday announced that it will develop its own music service in conjunction with a new series of portable players that will debut later this year. Samsung is tapping New York-based MusicNet to power the service, which will offer both download sales and subscription options. The service will initially be available …

In the continuation of a long-running arms race, both Apple Computer and Microsoft have seen their music protection technologies come under fire in recent days. In the past month, separate programs have emerged to strip away the digital rights management (DRM) tools that the two technology giants use to protect music from unauthorized duplication. One of the programs counteracts Microsoft’s …

The music industry’s educational video about copyright law is full of baloney, according to several trade and public interest groups. The Consumer Electronics Association and Public Knowledge are among the groups to issue a joint statement condemning some statements on the Recording Industry Association of America’s video, which the RIAA has plans to distribute to the nation’s universities. The RIAA’s …