HD PC: Cheaper Than High-Def TV
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A new device that costs a couple hundred bucks can turn the home office into a high-definition media center. It's a start anyway, and far less expensive than coughing up for a television setup.
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New adapter will allow you to stream content from your PC to your TV or stereo.
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By BENJAMIN J. ROMANO, THE SEATTLE TIMES  It's getting harder to tell the difference between a television and a computer.  You might have read something like that in the mid-1990s, but never before have both platforms shared so many capabilities.
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Ahead: larger HDTV sets, better color, more playback and recording choices.
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And Toshiba to bring 1080p to under â¬400 IFA 07 UK consumer electronics company - yes, we have a few - Venturer has pledged to bring HD DVD to the mass market with a slimline player set to retail for under Â£200 and â¬300.â¦
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A new specification will add features to Blu-ray disc players proves that people really just subscribe to consumer electronics rather than buying them. Accept that and you can defend profligate spending on the latest TV or being a penny-pincher.
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Review Quality telly for your laptop?
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High-definition television can show the sweat beading on an athlete's brow, but the cost of all the necessary electronic equipment can get a shopper's own pulse racing.
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(InfoWorld) - Even if you bought a TV in the last several months you may already feel like it's out of date. Your shiny new flat-screen arrives, you hook it up to the antenna and the first thing you see is a commercial for a bigger, better model. It might even have a cheaper price. It's the way things seem to work these days in the world of TVs. Things aren't likely to change any time soon. The latest buzz is around "100Hz" or "120Hz" technology, which relates to how often the image on the screen is refreshed or redrawn. The technology is already appearing in TVs, and if you haven't seen promotional stickers for it yet you probably will soon. Most TV sets today refresh the picture either 50 times per second (50Hz) or 60 times per second (60Hz) depending where in the world you live (different regions use different color formatting.) That rate is fine for most images, but when it comes to fast moving shows like sports events the images can appear blurry on an LCD (liquid crystal display) TV. Doubling the rate at which images are displayed, to 100 or 120 frames per second, makes for a better, more high-definition picture. The need to improve LCD TVs has been especially acute because their chief competitor, PDP (plasma display panel) TVs, don't have the same blurring problem. Compounding the issue is that screen sizes are getting bigger, so any imperfections are more noticeable, said Mina Naito, a spokeswoman for Sony. PDP makers have trumpeted their advantage for some time, but things may be about to change. Compared to previous LCD panels, the new 100Hz and 120Hz models are "a big improvement," said Hisakazu Torii, a TV industry analyst with DisplaySearch in Tokyo. Prototype panels with the faster refresh rate began appearing last year. At the FPD International 2006 show in Yokohama in October, Samsung ElectronicsÂ demonstrated images and text scrolling across just such a panel, and they appeared to move more smoothly than on existing LCD TVs. Then at theÂ Consumer Electronics ShowÂ in Las Vegas in January, Sony announced a 120Hz model with the Samsung screen for the U.S. market. The 70-inch LCD TV is launched this month and carries the hefty price of $33,000. Samsung plans a 70-inch set, also based on the Samsung panel, which will go on sale in the first half of this year. Competitors including Victor Co. of Japan (JVC) and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. (Panasonic) are also promoting 120Hz sets in Japan. The latest company to join the party isÂ Sharp, which last week said it would put five sets in its Aquos range on sale in Japan from March. The price runs from Â¥500,000 for a 42-inch model to Â¥1 million for a 65-inch model.
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Toshiba will begin selling later this week the first laptop computer to feature a rewritable HD DVD optical disc drive, the company said on Monday.The PC will be in its Qosmio multimedia laptop range and is firmly aimed at users who want to enjoy high-definition video on their PCs. There are two digital HDTV tuners so that one station can be recorded while watching another and the laptop comes with 400G bytes of hard-disk drive recording space. The 17-inch widescreen display has a resolution of 1,920 pixels by 1,200 pixels so is suitable for watching HDTV in full resolution.The HD DVD-R/RW drive can be used to transfer recorded TV shows or content from a high-definition video camera to disc for archiving. The drive also supports the new HD Rec format that allows for recording HD content on conventional DVD discs. With the price of blank HD DVD media still relatively high, the ability to use cheap DVD media could be a welcome feature for users. However, the capacity of DVD discs is lower so only about 24 minutes of video can be stored on a single-layer DVD.The PC is based on a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo processor and there&#39;s a NVidia GeForce 8600 graphics processor. Other features include a harman/kardon 4-speaker sound system, 2G bytes of memory and 802.11 a/b/g wireless LAN.As to be expected from a multimedia PC with such a large screen, the Qosmio G40 is a heavy laptop. It weighs about 4.8 kilograms, so isn&#39;t the most portable machine in the world, but likely consumers will be people who live in small apartments and who want a PC, TV and video recorder all-in-one to save space.The machine will cost around &#165;400,000 (US$3,500) and it will go on sale in Japan only on Friday. Toshiba didn&#39;t announce overseas launch plans. Previous models of Qosmio PC have been put on sales overseas after the Japan launch.
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Dual-layer disc to smooth hi-def format adoption
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TiVo on Tuesday confirmed the speculation: it is launching a $299 version of its high-definition digital video recorder that includes much of the same feature set found in its $799 predecessor. The new set-top box, dubbed "TiVo HD," goes on sale in August.
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Pricey but nearly perfect, this high-def DVR boasts net-connected features and, of course, beautiful video.
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NEW YORK  - Peace may be at hand in the nearly three-year battle to provide HDTV owners with an affordable DVD player that can handle any movie that shows off high-def's vivid video and rich surround sound.
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Integrated video engine to offer DVD quality on a handheld
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DVD burner from Sony does just fine without a PC. Also: Virgin goes head-to-head with the iPod Mini.
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Consumers are racing to replace their aging televisions with high-definition TVs. Trouble is, many are still using devices and services that can't fill those HDTVs with enough visual information to make them look their best.