February, 2011 | HD TV PROFESSOR

Month: February 2011

Progress on Thin Color Display

February 28, 2011 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

Last week, news of a display technology demonstration from Samsung Electronics was reported in Nature Photonics. This is a thin film technology based on "quantum dots", and was built on a flexible substrate. This approach is quite different from OLED technology; the nanoparticles emit light when excited by an electrical charge, and the color of the light is limited to a narrow range of the spectrum. By using particles of...

Roku Celebrates 1 Million Units

February 25, 2011 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

Roku is throwing a party to celebrate the sale of the one millionth Roku box at the end of last year. The company has launched its "1 Million Fans Giveaway" promotion for this popular network media player. You can enter the contest by uploading a picture that will become part of an online mosaic picture or posting a comment. You can participate either through Facebook or Twitter. 50 prizes will...

New Type of “Laser TV”

February 24, 2011 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

Mitsubishi has developed yet another twist on the flat panel television, according to a report in Tech-On. Instead of using LEDs as a solid-state light source for an LCD panel, the design uses a red laser along with a special, high-brightness, cyan LED. The combination of the two light sources create a mixed white light that reportedly has better color performance than the standard white LEDs or the combination of...

ivi.tv Goes Down in Flames, for Now

February 23, 2011 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

Well, you can't fault them for trying, I guess. Cable companies can pay a fee to the Copyright Office and then capture over-the-air television broadcast signals for distribution over their cable network. Upstart ivi.tv plunked down its cash, and then started distributing the live broadcasts from the New York and Los Angeles markets (among others), and retransmitted them over its network. The problem is that their network was the entire...

More 3D Channels

February 22, 2011 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

Comcast has announced that it's launching Xfinity 3D, a new 24/7 channel that will have nothing but stereoscopic 3D content. According to the press release, the channel will carry "concerts from top-tier artists, sporting events, more than a dozen movies and original 3D programming." (Fans of the serial comma might notice that its use here would eliminate any confusion about whether the "dozen" applies to the original programming or not.)...

Best Buy in Your Smartphone

February 21, 2011 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

Has this ever happened to you? You're in some store, looking at a beautiful new HDTV or other sparkly shiny electronics gear, and the price looks pretty attractive. But you can't quite bring yourself to pull the trigger, because you haven't comparison shopped the item yet. What if you could get it cheaper somewhere else? But that means that you have to leave this store, and drive all around comparing...

Tablet, Tablet, on the Wall…

February 18, 2011 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

Okay, I'll confess that I have not yet been caught up in the touch tablet frenzy. (I have never looked at my notebook computer and said to myself, "Dang! I wish that sucker didn't have a keyboard!") But I get it that people love their tablets and they are using them for all sorts of things. And here comes Sanus with a clever device for iPad owners: the iPad Mount...

Banned at the Border

February 17, 2011 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

HDMI Licensing is the organization charged with protecting the intellectual property pool for the High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) standard. This has become the first choice for digital high definition connections for home entertainment devices and accessories, and is supported by more than 1,000 companies who have licensed these patents. Not all manufacturers have bothered to pay for the rights to make HDMI products, however, and according to a press release...

Boxee Box Gets Netflix, Finally

February 16, 2011 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

From the Other Shoe Finally Drops Department, the Boxee Box now has Netflix. An announcement on the Boxee blog let the world know that the latest revision of the software has given users access to streaming content from Netflix. Now, to be fair, D-Link released the device last November. So it has just been a few months until this hitch got smoothed out. But Netflix had been promised as a...

Through a Glass, Brightly

February 15, 2011 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

I have seen the future, and I like it. Corning is responsible for most of the glass used in LCD flat panel HDTVs, among other things, and naturally the company can be expected to have a rather "glassy-eyed" view of things, if you'll pardon the expression. But I was not expecting anything like this. The company has put together a high-production video showing some of the ways that its glass...