Even as the mainstream weighs up the pros and cons of plasma and LCD TVs, the world's biggest consumer electronics companies have already embarked on a new era of display tech that promises to make flatscreens even thinner - and, for a while at least, much more expensive.

Organic light-emitting diode technology, or OLED for short, is not actually that new. First shown in 1999, industry watchers have long been waiting for OLED to graduate from small-screen curiosity to big-screen alternative to LCD and plasma.  read more »

Blu-ray discs are smarter than your average DVD. The hi-def format features a host of functionality capable of unprecedented levels of user interaction and sophistication.
The problem is that little of this talent has been effectively used to date, and much of it comes tethered to a sliding scale of bemusing player Profiles, which determine just how rich (or poor) your user experience can be...

Basic Blu-ray, known to techheads as Profile 1.0, offers fluid menus that can be accessed while the movie plays; unlike DVD, you don’t need to stop the film to get to the special features. And naturally sound and vision are considerably better than DVD. Profile 1.0 players are no longer allowed by the BDA. A Profile 1.1-compliant player can access Picture-in-Picture features which may be on a Blu-ray disc, such as smaller video windows with secondary audio.

Typically this is overlaid on the film, and used to bring you clips of the stars and creative teams talking about the movie or a sequence, interspersed with behind-the-scenes footage, blue-screen FX work and so on (good examples of this include Resident Evil: Extinction and the US release of the SF thriller Sunshine).

BD-Live, aka Profile 2.0, is (according to the Blu-ray Association) the final embellishment.  read more »

Over the past twelve months, the market for AV receivers has been turned on its head. A once
esoteric Japanese brand called Onkyo stormed the scene with a range of aggressively-featured and competitively-priced AVRs, completely wrong-footing big-name rivals such as Denon, Yamaha and Sony.

While its competition spluttered in disbelief, Onkyo confidently took the performance high-ground. Almost overnight, the age-old ‘What AV receiver shall I buy?’ conundrum turned into ‘What Onkyo AV receiver shall I buy?’

The breakthrough AVR for the brand was the TX-SR605. Timing may have played a large part in the 605’s extraordinary success – it was the first receiver to offer HDMI v1.3 with decoding for DTS-HD MA and Dolby TrueHD audio codecs, as well as the Audyssey 2EQ automatic calibration suite for easy setup – but the clincher was a £400 price tag that astonished Onkyo’s competition and delighted enthusiasts.

The model proved to be a poster boy for related receivers, each layering on desirable features, from THX Ultra2 post-processing to network streaming. The only question which remained unanswered was: can the brand maintain momentum into 2008? To answer that, HCC travelled to Onkyo’s Japanese R&D base in Osaka, for a preview of things to come and a confab with the boffins behind the brand.  read more »

Garbed in a white clean-suit, looking for all the world like a paranoid baker, I prepare to tour Pioneer’s Yamanashi plasma factory. I’m assured by Joe Tsuchida, the genial General manager of Pioneer’s publicity dept, that I’m the first journalist to be given access to the facility. ‘Even Japanese technology journalists haven’t been here,’ he says. ‘You’re only here because of a special invitation from Sato-san.’ I feel suitably honoured.

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It’s being called the most significant new development in UK broadcasting since the launch of Freeview, but can Freesat really become the dominant platform for high-performance HD television? You bet, claims Richard Lindsay-Davies, the commercial Development Director for Freesat UK.

For the uninitiated, Freesat UK is a not-for-profit joint-venture equally funded by the BBC and ITV. Designed to pick-up where Freeview leaves off, it arrives this Summer festooned with the promise of free-to-view high-definition TV and soon-to-debut advanced online interactivity.  read more »

Christopher Boyes is one of the most successful sound designers and mixers at work in America today. If you love movies, you’ll almost certainly have some of his work in your collection. Based at Skywalker Sound in Northern California, Boyes has worked on a host of blockbuster Hollywood movies in the 20 years since he graduated from San Francisco State University with a BA in cinema. He’s won four Academy Awards and worked with James Cameron (Titanic), Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings, King Kong), and Clint Eastwood (Million Dollar Baby). No one knows more about the world of cinema sound than Chris Boyes...

HCC: Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake pushed the envelope of sound design. What was it like to be sound re-recording mixer on it?  read more »

The war between HD DVD and Blu-ray might have ended with astonishing speed, but mainstream acceptance for the BD format remains elusive, and questions remain about the impact that it might ultimately have.

Of course, HCC readers are the most easily catered for. A growing range of movies with pristine picture quality and lossless audio is all the encouragement an AV enthusiast needs to sign up. For those not so tech-obsessed, other factors come into play – the price of Blu-hardware and software, and, of course, recordability.  read more »

What images do you conjure up when you hear the phrase ‘3D’? If it’s a popcorn-chomping audience from the 1950s watching The Revenge of the Creature while wearing silly spectacles, prepare to think again. Old-fashioned 3D techniques are a thing of the past, and new digital TV and theatrical formats mean that 3D could be could be the shape of the future of TV. Actually, 3DTV isn’t really futuristic at all – it’s here now. Leading Korean brand Samsung has already put a 3D-capable 50in plasma telly into the UK market.

The PS50A476P1DXXU (we really think 3D tellies should have a better title!) at first glance looks not unlike any other big flatscreen plasma. And its basic specification reads like most other TVs on the high-street: it has a 1366 x 768 resolution, a claimed 30,000:1 contrast ratio, 100Hz mode for super-smooth images, the brand’s proprietary DNIe+ picture processing with added FilterBright circuitry, a Sports viewing mode and three HDMI connectors to plumb your regular kit into. Yet it also offers one trick no other screen can match: it’s a pukka 3DTV. And amazingly it will only cost around £1,300 when it goes on sale this summer.  read more »

It’s the biggest decision facing TV buyers today. Which flatpanel TV technology to choose: plasma or LCD? One is ubiqutous and cheap, they other more critically lauded. Both have their pros and cons, but which one will suit you best?  read more »

Knowing what’s right and what’s wrong in the home entertainment world can be tricky. Team HCC helps you tell fact from fiction...

“Sony’s PS3 is the best Blu-ray player you can buy”
There’s no doubt that the PlayStation 3 is versatile. It’s compliant with Blu-ray Profile 1.1, and an upcoming firmware patch will allow it to support Profile 2.0, aka BD Live, for online interactivity. It feeds 1080p video and multichannel audio (Dolby Digital and Dolby True HD) via HDMI v1.3, and takes Java-heavy discs in its fast-loading stride. And for as little as £280 it’s not going to break the bank. However, it’s wrong to think that the PS3 is the UK’s best-performing BD player.  read more »