Accessories

Around twenty years ago an essential component of any high-end home cinema was a scaler, with companies such as Faroudja and Snell & Wilcox striving to deliver the very best picture from the humble old DVD. Twenty years later all equipment seems to have some form of scaler built in. So why the need for a high-priced outboard model, such as Lumagen's Radiance Pro 4242?

The QNAP TS-453mini is not your typical SOHO NAS. For starters, it doesn’t look grimly utilitarian. Instead we have a glossy black vertical design with a cute magnetic top cover. It sports an HDMI output, inviting you to plumb it into an AV system like any other source. It also overflows with media serving options. If you’re after powerful Network Attached Storage that your connected TV will look up to, it’s a compelling proposition.

If you've been put off buying a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device, the HS-251 from QNAP might change your mind. It's capable of the stuff a typical modern NAS can do  – acting as a repository for all of your files (among them movies, TV programmes and music) that can be accessed by every networked gadget in your home – but it goes further. The appearance suggests this; the HS-251 looks more like AV equipment than something you'll tuck away out of sight.

Promising an easy way to transmit Full HD video signals around your house using existing mains power lines, Marmitek's HDTV Anywhere consists of a rather dull-looking transmitter and receiver, each of which have an HDMI output. The transmitter has two HDMI inputs.

One For All's Smart Zapper is yet another gizmo released to work in conjunction with its Nevo app (some readers will remember the Nevo name from its pro-grade universal remote days). It's a small, battery-powered IR blaster with eight re-assignable physical control buttons, which connects to your smartphone or tablet using the Bluetooth Smart standard (compatibility is not universal and generally requires the latest versions of Android or iOS). It's controlled by the free-to-download app. So you get a touchscreen universal remote (and don't have to deal with multiple apps), plus a cutesy regular handset to boot.

Faster than an Apple TV and thinner than a Roku, Amazon’s Fire TV streaming player is a little box with big appeal. It’s so good in fact, that it might make Prime Instant Video subscribers out of all of us.

With commercial 4K content still conspicuous by its absence, a solution for UHD TV owners is to make their own. Photographers have long been capturing images in excess of eight megapixels, but the Panasonic GH4 is the first Micro Four Thirds system camera to offer 4K shooting modes.