Back in the early 1990s, I helped a friend carry a new rear-projection television up three flights of stairs to a small one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. Although its screen was only 50 inches, that bulky box was about the size and weight of a classic Volkswagen Bug. My back was so tweaked that I walked around hunched over, stinking of Ben-Gay, for a week.
Many people hide their A/V gear behind cabinet doors or put the system off in a closet somewhere. But how do you control everything when you can't point the remote at any of it? The oh-so-simple solution is to install an infrared (IR) repeating system, which carries signals from your remote to wherever your gear may live.
A couple of years ago, when the Dells and Gateways of the world were trying to build a flat-panel TV business by rebranding products purchased from other manufacturers, HP was quietly engineering its own HDTVs from the ground up. So far, so good.
You know the gag. You see someone walking down the street and about to step on a banana peel. Do you shout "STOP," or remain silent and then applaud as he does an awesome pirouette.
Parrots, hooks, peg legs, pieces of eight, the Spanish Main: Everybody loves pirates! Surely you know that September 19 is annual Talk Like a Pirate Day (I'm not making this up). Instead of your actual name, like "Kenneth" or "Colonel Sanders," wouldn't you prefer to be called "Cap'n Slappy"? Everybody loves pirates.
Epson has announced its new flagship home theater front projector, the PowerLite Pro Cinema 1080p. As the model name suggests this three-chip LCD is a full-on 1080p front projector, but the real news is that when the projector goes on sale in January 2007 the street price is $4,999. Plummeting street prices on three-chip 1080p projectors is a trend I think we can all get with!
Gifts for Gearheads - The S&V Hot 100 If you know a technophile with a craving for some cool stuff, you've come to the right place. Click the links below, and you'll be on your way to finding that special item for that special someone, courtesy of S&V contributor and gift-guider extraordinaire Pete Pachal.
As I’ve talked about before, console games have to be written for a specific resolution (unlike computer games). Nearly every Xbox 360 game, for example, is 720p. The console then converts that up or down depending on how you set up the console. Those with older TVs drop it to 480i, those with HD sets can choose 720p or 1080i (and occasionally 1080p).
