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Posts Tagged ‘tv’

One of these things is not like the other

Media streamers like the Western Digital WD TV Live and Netgear NeoTV make just a little less sense than they did a couple of years ago. In those days, they were the perfect alternative to stuffing a home theater PC into your entertainment center. These days, you can get nearly all the same functionality from a new Blu-ray player or a Smart TV.

On the other hand, the latest incarnations of these two products cost less than a new Blu-ray player, and they’re several orders of magnitude cheaper than a new … [Read More...]

Cut yourself a li’l slab o’ Honeycomb

A slew of hardware makers that didn’t start out as online bookstores—including Acer, Samsung, and Toshiba—debuted 7-inch Android Honeycomb tablets just in time for Amazon’s Kindle Fire to steal their thunder. The apparent goal: to discover if anyone is actually interested in 7-inch tablets. Acer’s Iconia Tab A100 serves as our guinea pig for this form factor.

Like most Honeycomb tablets to date, the Iconia A100 is based on Nvidia’s 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 processor, coupled with GeForce graphics and 1GB RAM. The multitouch LCD retains the 16:9 aspect ratio that other Android … [Read More...]

A barely there home-theater PC

PCs make great Blu-ray players, but Acer’s Revo RL100-UR20P is the first Blu-ray-equipped PC we’ve seen that’s thinner and smaller than most purpose-built Blu-ray players. If it played high-definition audio discs such as SACD and DVD-Audio, it would be one of the most powerful Blu-ray players on the market, but this machine isn’t that ambitious.

It is, on the other hand, considerably less expensive than very high-end Blu-ray players that are capable of playing those high-definition audio formats. The Oppo BDP-95, for example, sells for $999 and is almost never discounted.

Acer’s Revo RL100-UR20P is … [Read More...]

Belkin’s N750 DB offers a better-than-average feature set, but the router’s performance is a mixed bag. At most of our test stations, it delivered very good performance from its 5GHz radio but mediocre throughput from its 2.4GHz radio. Belkin arrives at the N750 model number by adding the 300Mb/s theoretical throughput on its 2.4GHz radio to the 450Mb/s theoretical throughput of its 5GHz radio. This is nonsense, of course, because you can’t bond the two together to achieve throughput that even approaches 750Mb/s.

The features include dual USB 2.0 ports to enable network sharing of both a printer and attached … [Read More...]

Get Gaming on an HTPC

I don’t want to watch cable TV. I don’t want to use a controller. I just want to watch 3D Blu-rays and frag people with a mouse and keyboard, all on a box that fits on my entertainment center. Is that too much to ask?

We’ve built our fair share of home theater PCs in the past, with all sorts of different use cases in mind. Our August 2010 HTPC was a stunner built for 3D, with passively cooled GPU, CPU, and PSU, as well as a four-channel CableCard tuner and Blu-ray 3D support. In … [Read More...]

Extra dimensions don’t come cheap. If you’ve dreamed of a Sam Worthington-shaped avatar running through your living room, you know that 3-D projectors — the few that are available — have price tags in the $3,000-and-up range. (You also know that Avatar has yet to see a public 3-D Blu-ray release, but that’s another story.)

Optoma’s HD33 brings 1080p 3-D home for a 2-D price. At $1,500, it costs less than many 3-D-ready TVs, which, incidentally, can’t produce images as large as 300 inches. That’s 25 feet, in case you’re math-challenged. Eat it, local Cineplex!

Actually, don’t shred your concession-stand … [Read More...]

It’s not pretty, but it’s gaming ready

Cybernet has been building all-in-one touch-screen PCs for hospital and medical use for years. Given the ambitious specs of the company’s new iOne-H5—a 2.93GHz Core i7-870, 8GB of memory, and ATI’s Mobility Radeon HD 5730 GPU—we found ourselves wondering if this long-term expertise would translate into an awesome consumer system.

The truth is that performance is pretty much the only hope Cybernet has of winning over would-be buyers. In a category that emphasizes glossy plastic curves and minimalist bezels, the iOne stands in such stark contrast to systems like HP’s TouchSmart 610 and … [Read More...]

Remember when “Netflix” and “Streaming video” were virtually synonyms? Yeah, those were the days. Then, in the course of three disastrous months, Netflix jacked prices by 60 percent, announced it was splitting off the DVD business, and then announced that, no, actually, it was going to keep DVDs in house after all. The wacky moves sent investors fleeing like rats and confused customers looking for alternatives – alternatives like Amazon Prime Instant Video. The service offers unlimited streaming and Amazon has signed several new content deals since Prime Instant Video’s launch in March. But is it a Netflix killer? Let’s … [Read More...]

A leaked user guide has outed Comcast’s upcoming AnyPlay service, which will let customers stream live TV to assorted mobile devices. On initial offering will be iPad support, but other tablets are expected to be added as well. The service will rely on in-home Wi-Fi, and users will have to get a special Motorola cable box from the cable provider.

Comcast plans to make most channels available to the user for streaming, but some content will be missing. For instance, on-demand and pay-per-view content won’t be available through the AnyPlay service. Comcast’s document did not make mention of any additional … [Read More...]

Inventing excuses after losing, dying, or in general just playing like crap is a time-honored tradition among gamers. We’ve heard them all — teammates who don’t pull their own weight, cheaters, tons of lag, screen glare, and worst of all, faulty or unresponsive controllers.

So here’s the bad news: Razer’s Onza TE will make covering up your ineptitude with hardware-based justifications even less tenable. But don’t panic. The good news is you might not have to make as many.

At just $10 more than Microsoft’s standard-issue wired controllers (and the same price as the wireless versions), the Onza TE is … [Read More...]

From its humble beginnings as the Netflix box to its current status as one of the pre-eminent media streamers, Roku has come a long way in just two years. And while the new Roku 2 XS doesn’t really move things forward much, it does just enough to retain that title.

If you’re keeping track, the XS usurps the XDS as the new king of the new series, with the XD and HD following in its path. I’ll just go ahead and say it at the outset: Ff you already own a previous gen, 1080p-capable Roku, this is probably not the … [Read More...]

A real Velcro PC at last

Perhaps you’ve heard about our concept for the Velcro PC: a computer so small, light, and unobtrusive that you could literally affix it to the back of your HDTV.

That concept might have finally arrived in Giada’s i50 PC. Similar to the original Giada Ion-100, the i50 is a serious step up over the original box.

The most noticeable upgrade is in the brains department: The original Ion-100 sported an Nvidia Ion 2 chip coupled with a 1.3GHz Atom 330; this new model features a 1.2GHz Core i5-430UM processor. It’s not wickedly fast, mind … [Read More...]

It’s clear that HP sees the value in this category. The PC maker’s new TouchSmart is sleek, polished, and is the first all-in-one we’ve ever seen to feature a subwoofer-out jack. HP makes a subtle but valid point here: The truth about these systems is that, regardless of where we set them up—kitchen, living room, garage—we find ourselves frequently using them as music stations, so why not aim for higher audio fidelity? Conveniently, HP has also integrated Monster’s (and Dr. Dre’s) Beats environment, allowing the TouchSmart 610 to pump out impressive enough sound to make people do a double-take.

HP’s … [Read More...]

Is it possible to convert a standard home office into a surround sound home theater with minimal fuss?

I have an average-size spare bedroom that mostly functions as a home office and gaming room, and has been used primarily by me. Given the cramped quarters of San Francisco apartments, I set out to make the room less me-centric and more family-friendly by transforming this home office into a home office theater. The goal was to create a room suitable for three things: normal PC computing, big-screen surround sound movie viewing with no reconfiguration needed, and big-screen gaming. Ancillary goals were … [Read More...]

Beautiful 3D laptop with mediocre graphics performance

What you do alone in your man cave is your business. If you want to put on a pair of 3D glasses and practice the Na’vi language, more power to you. Sony’s F Series Vaio 3D can make that dream a reality in style, but it lacks the graphics power to deliver first-class stereoscopic 3D gaming.

If you’re not piloting the Mars Rover or doing endoscopic telesurgery, you probably want stereoscopic 3D technology for two main purposes: watching movies and playing games. Now that 3D TVs are becoming widespread, there are lots of … [Read More...]