Into Tech

Bush used to be big in TVs, back in the day when they were made of wood and weighed as much as a small cow.

It’s not the popular brand it used to be but it’s still plugging away on the HDTV front. These days it’s all about being ‘pocket-friendly’ and it’s new 15in HD Ready TV is certainly not going to break the bank. The display boasts a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels and sports a HDMI input

It’s called the LCD15W008HD. Performance concerns aside it’s not a bad looker and what more would you expect for just £170. That’s cheap alright. It might not suit the living room but as cheap second TV for console use, it’s not that daft an option.

There’s also the LCD15W08DVDHD which sports an internal DVD drive due out in a few weeks.-Martin Lynch

HDTV LCD TV home

Black is the new white and skinny is in when it comes to new home cinema kit. That said, whereas thin and tall might equal good looking it does not guarantee that it’ll be good sounding.

Still, the design folk at Samsung have taken a leaf from their stylish TV designers and come up with this new glossy, piano-black home cinema system.

Launching now in Korea, the TWQ120 is certainly pretty but there’s not all that much information beyond the above photo and the fact that’s it a 5.1 system with an in-built DVD player. It certainly strikes a Habitat-type pose and would look nice draped around any glossy, piano-black HDTV.-Martin Lynch

home cinema audio movies samsung

Someone’s figured out a way to combine gadget obsession with chocoholism, and it doesn’t bode well for people with self-control issues. A company called “Corporate Gift Showcase” will sell you many pounds of chocolate molded into the shape of iPods, BlackBerries, laptops and HDTVs. They’re ostensibly meant to be as gifts from companies purchased in bulk, but there’s nothing stopping you from ordering 1,000 chocolate remote controls. That’s right, nothing stopping you. So what are you waiting for?! –Adam Frucci

Product Page [via CrunchGear]

Someone’s figured out a way to combine gadget obsession with chocoholism, and it doesn’t bode well for people with self-control issues. A company called “Corporate Gift Showcase” will sell you many pounds of chocolate molded into the shape of iPods, BlackBerries, laptops and HDTVs. They’re ostensibly meant to be as gifts from companies purchased in bulk, but there’s nothing stopping you from ordering 1,000 chocolate remote controls. That’s right, nothing stopping you. So what are you waiting for?! –Adam Frucci

Product Page [via CrunchGear]

Evesham is continuing its TV push, following last week’s stylish 9.2in LCD telly, with the introduction of a 26in addition to its Alqemi HDTV range.

Again, price is a major draw here with this good-looking LCD TV, the 26V, coming in at a pocket-friendly £349. It has a native resolution of 1366 x 768 so it’s ready for 720p and 1080i video. There’s one HDMI slot and the display boasts a response time of 8ms which should help with a certain amount of image smearing, or ‘ghosting’, during fast action video.

Other connections include twin Scart, S-Video, component and composite, VGA and DVI inputs. There is also a Freeview-ready version, the 26VX, for an extra £50 which sports a CAM (Conditional Access Module) slot for TopUp TV.

Possibly the most impressive feature of this TV – assuming it doesn’t suck on the performance front – is the 3-year, in-home swap out warranty.-Martin Lynch

HDTV LCD TV home

Japanese folk [who else?] will be the first to get Sony’s – and possibly – the world’s first OLED TV later this year.

Sony has revealed plans to launch an 11in model first onto the market and if they are anything like the prototypes I saw at the CES Show [above] in Las Vegas back in January, then TV design is about to get a real kick in the ass. Sony will be building a conservative 1,000 a month at a joint venture company, created with Toyota.

At around 5mm thin, the CES prototype had a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels. The 27in version [a whole 11mm thick] had a Full HD resolution of 1920 x 1080.

As you probably already know, OLED displays – unlike LCD or plasma technology emit their own light so need no backlight, are brighter, have much higher contrast ratios, use less power, offer superior colour reproduction and handle fast-moving images better.

Of course, they’ll also cost you a kidney or two. And your first-born.-Martin Lynch

HDTV oled TV Sony

Clutter. Anyone with a healthy gadget obsession will have lots of it. In the modern living room, it’s usually in evidence through a mass of wires and cabling snaking around the floor and walls and more remote controls than the fingers to use them. Sony thinks that by hiding the home cinema in the TV stand, it will make life easier and less cluttered. It could have a point.

This is the Bravia Home Theatre RHT-G800, a TV stand that cleverly houses a home cinema speaker set-up. The stand is home to the S-Master Amp powering 5 x 70W speakers and a pair of subwoofers rated at 120W. It uses pseudo [fake] surround technology - Sony S-Force PRO Front Surround – to produce the rear effects and there are six sound fields to choose from: Standard, Cinema, News, Sports, Music and Night Mode.

It also comes with a handy pair of HDMI inputs and can take up to four devices (TV, DVD recorder, PS3 etc).

However, this is more than just a shell for audio/video components because it also features its own touch-panel control that uses the new Bravia Theatre Sync technology. When used with Bravia TVs and new Sony DVD players, one button will turn everything thing on, and off. Anything requiring less remotes is a good thing.

Due out in May, it will cost around £700.-Martin Lynch

home cinema HDTV TV HD

Clutter. Anyone with a healthy gadget obsession will have lots of it. In the modern living room, it’s usually in evidence through a mass of wires and cabling snaking around the floor and walls and more remote controls than the fingers to use them. Sony thinks that by hiding the home cinema in the TV stand, it will make life easier and less cluttered. It could have a point.

This is the Bravia Home Theatre RHT-G800, a TV stand that cleverly houses a home cinema speaker set-up. The stand is home to the S-Master Amp powering 5 x 70W speakers and a pair of subwoofers rated at 120W. It uses pseudo [fake] surround technology - Sony S-Force PRO Front Surround – to produce the rear effects and there are six sound fields to choose from: Standard, Cinema, News, Sports, Music and Night Mode.

It also comes with a handy pair of HDMI inputs and can take up to four devices (TV, DVD recorder, PS3 etc).

However, this is more than just a shell for audio/video components because it also features its own touch-panel control that uses the new Bravia Theatre Sync technology. When used with Bravia TVs and new Sony DVD players, one button will turn everything thing on, and off. Anything requiring less remotes is a good thing.

Due out in May, it will cost around £700.-Martin Lynch

home cinema HDTV TV HD

Clutter. Anyone with a healthy gadget obsession will have lots of it. In the modern living room, it’s usually in evidence through a mass of wires and cabling snaking around the floor and walls and more remote controls than the fingers to use them. Sony thinks that by hiding the home cinema in the TV stand, it will make life easier and less cluttered. It could have a point.

This is the Bravia Home Theatre RHT-G800, a TV stand that cleverly houses a home cinema speaker set-up. The stand is home to the S-Master Amp powering 5 x 70W speakers and a pair of subwoofers rated at 120W. It uses pseudo [fake] surround technology - Sony S-Force PRO Front Surround – to produce the rear effects and there are six sound fields to choose from: Standard, Cinema, News, Sports, Music and Night Mode.

It also comes with a handy pair of HDMI inputs and can take up to four devices (TV, DVD recorder, PS3 etc).

However, this is more than just a shell for audio/video components because it also features its own touch-panel control that uses the new Bravia Theatre Sync technology. When used with Bravia TVs and new Sony DVD players, one button will turn everything thing on, and off. Anything requiring less remotes is a good thing.

Due out in May, it will cost around £700.-Martin Lynch

home cinema HDTV TV HD

Cabling is not the most exciting product segment. That said, anyone who has witnessed the audio/visual difference between content viewed or heard through cheap cables versus pricier cables will tell you, it’s damned important.

Now that HD content is in the online wild and on some shelves you might want to look into some decent HDMI cables. You may have noticed that they are not cheap, and sorry to disappoint, but the latest Xen range from IXOs is not going to change that.

Of course, you will find cheaper cables out there, but these ones are geared towards those that believe you get what you pay for. The Xen XHT658 is the new flagship HDMI cable from the cabling specialist, offering full-HD 1080p. Even better they come in lengths ranging from 1m to 11m. The connectors are silver plated to maximise signal quality and minimise losses, there’s triple shielding against interference, a cast metal HDMI plug to do away with electromagnetic interference and they’ve been HDMI certified by Silicon Image testing labs.

Prices start at a gob-smacking £109 for the 1m cable and run upwards really fast through 2m, 3m, 5m and 7m until you get to £268 for the 11m option. How much do you love your movies?-Martin Lynch

HDMI HDTV home cinema cables