David Katzmaier and I have gotten e-mails asking a seemingly odd question: how high can plasma TVs go? These e-mails, from videophiles living in high-altitude places such as Denver and Santa Fe, are concerned plasmas either won't work for them, or will have a loud buzzing.
Turns out, they're sort of right.… Read more
Yahoo has delivered a new home page design for news fanatics.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced the update on her company's blog today, saying the new design delivers a "more modern experience."
The focal point of the design is news. Users can head to the page and customize what's displayed based on their interests. If they prefer sports or entertainment information, for example, they can choose to see only news items related to those topics in the page's feed.
According to Mayer, the new home page's news feed has "infinite scroll, letting you … Read more
At CES in January, Sony announced several LCD TVs with "Triluminos," a new backlighting method that they promise offered "rich, authentic color, and excellent red and green reproduction." Digging deeper, it turns out Triluminos includes an optical component produced by QD Vision, Inc. called "Color IQ" which uses quantum dots to help create light.
OK, so what are quantum dots?… Read more
This is an update of a deal I posted last summer.
Juggling is meant for circus folk, not home-theater owners. Yet that's exactly what you're doing if you have more than one device and, ergo, more than one remote.
Regular Cheapskate readers know I'm a fan of Logitech's Harmony series of universal remotes. One of the better models, the 700, has a list price of $119.99 (or used to -- it's been discontinued). Ouch.
For a limited time, and while supplies last, TigerDirect via eBay has the refurbished Harmony 700 universal remote for $59.99 shipped.… Read more
Monoprice wants to disrupt the home theater industry. The company got its start selling cheap HDMI cables, and has recently expanded to full-fledged consumer electronics, with a bold mission of rolling out new products only when it can charge about half the price of traditional retailers.
The Monoprice 9774 ($249, plus shipping) 5.1 speaker set is the company's most audacious effort yet: a clone of the outstanding Energy Take Classic 5.1 ($394 street) speaker system for nearly $150 less. And "clone" is barely an exaggeration. The 9774 system performs and looks almost exactly like Energy'… Read more
Let's say you're at your father-in-law's house and he just got a new TV. You're stuck in a corner, having recommended the TV, and you're the only person who knows contrast from composite. What to do?
In an ideal world you'd have a setup disc on hand to set it up for him. Better yet, you'd have the number of a local calibrator instantly available and pop-in-law is willing to spring for a full calibration.
But that's not always possible. Here are a few tips that will help you get the picture settings on his TV close to ideal -- or at least closer than it was.… Read more
The Samsung Galaxy S3 (and Note 2) has a neat feature when docked to a Samsung multimedia dock; it can automatically display the desk home screen. The desk home screen is a useful display with a clock, calendar, local weather and multimedia shortcuts. It's a nice companion display when you're charging your S3 at your desk. However, you don't necessarily need a dock to use the desk home screen.
If you're using a third-party smartphone stand with a separate charger, you can still make use of the desk home screen.
To use the desk home screen, … Read more
Do movies look weird on your new TV? Does everything have a hyper-real, ultra-smooth motion to it? Are you sure something is happening with the TV's image you don't like, but you can't figure out what?
Chances are, what you're seeing is called the "Soap Opera Effect," as descriptive a moniker as we get in tech, in that this feature makes everything on your TV look like a cheap soap opera.
Here's what it is, what it does, and how to turn it off.… Read more
Being the person in charge of the Networking category, I've received many e-mails asking what my current personal router is, and how often I change it.
Even though I've worked with many routers -- in fact, I have reviewed most of the existing Wi-Fi routers on the U.S. market -- I don't change my home router very often. This is mostly because programing a router can be a tedious task, and I use a lot of different applications and services with many clients, all of which require different settings in the router's firmware.
That said, since the Wireless-N (802.11n) standard was introduced in 2007, I've used just about five Wi-Fi routers. Most of them them have served me very well over the years and I still have them all, except for one that was broken during a move.
The following is the list of those routers and how they've worked out for me.… Read more
The decision hardly constitutes make-or-break news for BlackBerry, but it comes only a week after the company introduced a … Read more
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