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Metropolis is a true cinematic epic. Everything about Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent classic is massive, from its scale and budget to its continuing influence on the sci-fi genre as a whole. But for the past 80 years, it’s also been a rather incomplete film, lacking over half-an-hour of footage that was trimmed from the film and presumed lost forever. But in 2008 a 16mm print of the film containing roughly 25mins of additional footage was discovered in the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires, and this restored version is the closet yet to truly capturing the remarkable vision of the future Lang committed to the screen.

This 46in TV with full HD and frame sequential 3D playback costs just £1,500, not in excess of £2K like every other active 3D TV. In other words, it promises to be the set that brings 3D to the masses. Since it uses a standard CCFL backlight, it’s loads fatter than the wafer-thin delights of Samsung’s edge LED models. But it’s still fairly stylish for all that.

I confess that I have never really been excited by Marantz’s AV receivers. They were never ahead of the features game and always aired too much on the side of sonic caution for my liking. Safe, reliable, solid and about as exciting as endurance snail racing. When the SR7005 arrived I brewed a really fresh cup of Horlicks, put my slippers on and settled down for an evening of light entertainment.

The VMP74 is Viewsonic’s second so-called ‘full HD Network Media Player’, and as the name suggests, it offers full 1080p output for video. The device itself is a small, lightweight and glossy plastic box that fits discreetly into a TV stand. It’s pretty unassuming with just a power indicator LED on the top. Around the back you’ll find an HDMI port for rigging the streamer to your HDTV or projector. This is the only option for hi-def video, although a 3.5mm AV port enables you to use fuzzy, old school composite video (alongside stereo audio). There’s also an optical digital output. On the non-audio/visual front, there’s an Ethernet socket for networking duties (no wi-fi option here), plus USB and eSATA ports for connecting external hard disks and other USB storage devices.