Digital World Insider: Big-Screen TVs and What to Watch on Them

May 1st, 2007

Maybe “wars” is too strong a term, but it’s hard not to get that feeling of competitiveness when big-screen makers are trying so hard to outdo each other with screen size. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Samsung unveiled its 102-inch plasma screen, only to be upstaged by Panasonic’s 103-incher. Meanwhile, LCD boosters had to lick their wounds with Sony’s prototype 82-inch Bravia LCD, the biggest LCD ever.

And now comes the latest offensive: In early March LG.Philips LCD announced that it’s created a 100-inch LCD, blowing past Sony and coming up fast behind the plasma troops.
–Emru Townsend

V-Inc has dropped a new 42-inch plasma on us, and you can get it for $1800. The Vizio P42HDTV features 1024-by-768 resolution, a 10,000:1 contrast ratio, dual tuners (including an ATSC tuner for grabbing digital and high-def broadcasts off the air), and an HDMI connection.

If you’re looking to go a little larger, you’ll be interested to learn that V-Inc has dropped the price of its already released 50-inch plasma to $2300. So if you’re looking for a way to score a cheap plasma TV, you’ve got a couple of good options.

If you’re wondering why these TVs seem cheap, check out “Big Screens and Better Prices” to see what the best prices were last year.
–Cathy Lu

Time Warner Cable is trying to put together a channel that is nothing but reruns of the top 20 programs. Well, not really top 20–just the top 20 on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox. The New York Times reported that the monthly cost for the channel would be $10.

Frankly, I’m more than a little skeptical that this would be popular, but then I’m biased. Most of the shows I watch are outside of the top 20, and I’m a die-hard PVR user anyway. If I’m already recording the programs I want to watch, why would I need this channel?

This idea is still nowhere near as interesting as British Telecom’s plan to allow broadband users to access the previous week’s worth of television on demand. That, I’d pay for.
–Emru Townsend

PC World’s Eric Dahl wrote about some of Amazon’s future downloadable video plans, referring to a Bill Maher show and a try-before-you-buy movie plan. However, The New York Times reports on something a little more ambitious: Amazon is in talks with Paramount, Universal, and Warner Bros. to provide TV shows and movies for download and DVD burning.

I can’t pretend to know how this will play out in the end, but I’d hazard a guess that for efficiency’s sake, these movies won’t include the extras found on commercial DVDs, and will probably be compressed heavily–either at a lower bit rate, or using MPEG-4 or DivX instead of MPEG-2.
–Emru Townsend

Universal Pictures and online rental service Lovefilm will be offering downloadable movies in Britain as of April 10–starting with Peter Jackson’s King Kong–and customers will be able to keep the movies they download.

The deal is that you would get three formats with one purchase: two digital files (one for a computer, the other for a mobile device) and a DVD, sent by mail. The expected cost for new releases would be 20, about the same as the list price for a new DVD release in the UK. The intent is to eventually have all 6500 movies in the Universal catalog available for download, with new releases coming out in digital and disc form simultaneously.

Is your mind boggled yet? Mine is. But there seems to be a catch. The article says that security measures “will make it impossible to e-mail the film to somebody else.”
–Emru Townsend

Have you ordered your Toshiba HD-DVD player yet? If you want to take advantage of the technology, you’ll have to wait a few weeks for HD-DVD movies to come out.

According to Reuters and the Hollywood Reporter, Warner Home Video has announced that it has officially delayed the release dates of its first HD-DVD titles to April 18, and there will be only three titles available at launch: Million Dollar Baby,
The Phantom of the Opera, and The Last Samurai. Warner will then release another 17 titles in the following weeks, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
Batman Begins, and The Matrix. The delays are due to technical issues.

If these are my choices, it looks like I can hold off on upgrading from DVD for a while.
–Cathy Lu

BlackBerry Meets PowerPoint: The Impatica ShowMate is a tiny device (smaller than the BlackBerry, in fact) that connects the handheld to a projector, allowing you to display PowerPoint presentations directly from the BlackBerry.
–Emru Townsend

Samsung Unveils 8GB Phone/Camera/MP3 Player: Sony’s got its W950i, but now Samsung’s got its own droolable candy-bar phone. The SGH-i310 doesn’t have the W950i’s funky color scheme, but it more than makes up for it in features: It packs a 2-megapixel camera, video in/out, voice recognition, MP3/AAC/ACC+/ACC+(e)/WMA/WAV/OGG Vorbis playback and a MicroSD slot. Backing it all up is Windows Mobile 5.0 and an 8GB hard drive.
–Emru Townsend

Entry Filed under: Reviews