May, 2009 | HD TV PROFESSOR

Month: May 2009

LED TVs: What Are They Really?

May 29, 2009 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

I'll blame Samsung. Not their engineers who develop some great technology, and not their manufacturing people who execute those designs to create top quality products, but I expect that it's the marketing folks who came up with this one. There's a lot of buzz about "LED TVs", which appears to be a term that Samsung started using first. And it apparently has confused and misled a huge number of people,...

New HDMI Spec on the Way

May 28, 2009 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

HDMI has become the first choice in making the connection between HDTVs and other components in a home entertainment system; the installed base includes more than a billion connections. The single cable carries video and audio, which helps eliminate the rat's nest of wires that often accompanies electronic equipment. The high speed digital connection provides "perfect" accuracy, as opposed to the analog component connections that can lose bits of data...

JVC Launches LCD TV Monitor

May 27, 2009 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

An interesting announcement was posted yesterday. JVC has released a new 42" 1080p LCD TV, except that it's not really a TV; it's a monitor. What's the difference, you ask? The difference is that a TV has a tuner that can receive a broadcast signal and extract the sound and images from it, but a monitor has no tuner. And the new JVC Xiview LT-42WX70 has no tuner. What the...

Time Warner Drops HDNet

May 26, 2009 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

Time Warner announced recently that the company will drop HDNet from its cable services. Apparently, it was unable to come to terms with Mark Cuban for his HDNet and HDNet Movie channels. A a result, the two will be dropped from the Time Warner line-up next Sunday, May 31. Cuban launced HDNet in September 2001 to promote HD content, well before the major networks were making the investment to create...

Happy Memorial Day!

May 25, 2009 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

If you're in the United States, I hope that you are getting to enjoy this Memorial Day long weekend. Maybe you'll get to watch some sports or enjoy a movie on an HDTV screen. Or maybe there will be a backyard barbecue or other celebration of the start of summer. No matter how you spend the day, I hope it's a good one. I'm taking the day off, but I...

Windows Media Center Gets Netflix

May 23, 2009 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

Do you have a subscription to Netflix? Do you have a computer with Windows Media Center? Then it is now easier than ever to take advantage of the streaming online movies that are available free to subscribers. This gives you access to the more than 12,000 movies and videos that you can also access with the "Watch Instantly" streaming feature that uses a browser and Windows Media Player to deliver...

Samsung TVs to Tweet!

May 21, 2009 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

Okay, file this item in the "There are only two kinds of people in the world" folder. Either you will think that this is a great idea, or a terrible one. Last year, I reported on Samsung's plans to provide Yahoo! widgets on their Series 6 and 7 LCD TVs to provide feeds of information from the Internet, such as headlines, weather, stock data, and sports scores. I think it's...

Dots Enough Already?

May 20, 2009 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

Okay; first we had standard definition TV which we will imprecisely assume has 640 by 480 pixels in the image (because that's close enough for our purposes here). Then HDTV came along with 720p (1,280 by 720 pixels) and 1080i/1080p (1,920 by 1,080 pixels) resolutions. Movie theaters need even higher resolution, and so the standard for digital cinema was "2K" resolution -- 2,048 by 1,080 -- but is rapidly moving...

LCD TV Sales Up… and Down

May 19, 2009 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

DisplaySearch has released their information on worldwide LCD TV shipments (from manufacturers, as opposed to the sales by retailers) for the first quarter of 2009, and the trend is familiar. The number of units shipped -- 26.7 million -- was up 27% compared with the first quarter of 2008, but the revenues actually declined 1% for the same periods. In other words, what the increased consumer demand added with one...

DTV-Day Minus 25…

May 18, 2009 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

Nielsen has announced that about 3.3 million U.S. households remain totally unprepared for the end of analog television broadcasts on June 12. If you're a glass-half-full type, this means that about half the households that were totally unprepared in January are now at least partially prepared. On the other hand, if you're a glass-half-empty type, then this is as if everyone in the entire Seattle/Tacoma/Bellevue metropolitan area is still unprepared....