Issue 27 by The Gadget Group

PRIZES WORTH $10,000+ including PANASONIC VIERA LCD TV

A U S T R A L I A’ S C O M P L E T E D I G I TA L L I F E S T Y L E C O M PA N I O N

ISSUE 27

$7.95

ESSENTIALS How to buy smart in the sales

HOLIDAY

GIFT GUIDE

Great gear for him, her and the kids

RECORD HDTV NOW

time machines that make it easy

DIGITAL SWITCHOVER BEGINS When you have to be ready, and what you need to do MUSIC EVERYWHERE YOU ARE Wireless systems that share the sound

Connect to a world of music from iTunes and the Internet Your iTunes library. Play your entire music library, like iTunes, that’s stored on a computer – not just what fits on your iPod.

Free Internet radio. Tune in to 25,000 Internet radio stations, shows and podcasts – free of charge and pre-loaded on Sonos.

Music services. Stream millions of songs and stations direct from the Internet to the rooms of your choice — no computer required. Just pick a room, find a song and touch play.

FAST FOREWORD

ideo on demand is, like, so hot right now. In October, Foxtel expanded its on-demand offering, including more HD movies and programming, and in the following month Playstation, Xbox and Tivo either announced or commenced new services. Telstra, too, released details of its T-Box, a PVR-like component that partners with the company’s BigPond Movies portal and which is likely to go onsale by mid-2010. Consider too the content wealth of iTunes available to your TV via Apple TV, and video on demand services (VOD) are now presenting an interesting alternative to the video rental store. So let’s take a closer look at what’s on offer. Firstly, access to all but two services is free after the initial cost of purchase. Roughly, Apple TV costs $300, Xbox 360 costs $400, the PS3 $500 and Tivo $600–700, depending on the hard drive size. Foxtel and Xbox require you pay subscription fees; you must be a part of the Xbox Live service to download movies and the cost is $80 annually. The Foxtel service starts at $72 a month and goes up to $135 per month, depending on the package you take. The cost of VOD content varies, from free to around six bucks for pay-per-view. Apple TV allows you to purchase movies and TV shows, at prices roughly equivalent to what you’d pay at a retail store, so between $25-35 a movie.

“If you’re already paying around $60 a month for internet access, VOD sure is a great way to get more value from the ultility – but beware...” All but Foxtel require a broadband connection to your home. If you’re already paying around $60 a month for internet access, VOD sure is a great way to get more value from the ultility – but beware. Downloaded content can blow out your data quota, and the extra usage above your cap can cost you mucho dinero. You need to be aware of what each download is contributing to your usage – usually between 1-2GB a movie – and not exceed it, or get onboard with an ISP that offers unmetered downloads from the VOD service you choose.

Tivo, Xbox and PS3 offer unmetered deals with some ISPs, but Telstra, which provides broadband to the largest number of households in Australia, is not one of them. The company has said it will offer unmetered downloads on T-Box, and it’s a fair bet this won’t be extended to any competing VOD service. There are no hidden-cost risks to accessing VOD programming from Foxtel, of course – it’s all included in the pay-per-view fee. Cost is one thing, but there’s also the important matter of content choice and user experience. With Tivo’s CASPA and Blockbuster movie service, content needs to download before you can watch, which means programming delivery isn’t exactly ‘instant’, as you’d expect from a video on demand service. Apple TV, Foxtel, Playstation and Xbox 360 stream content, which is much faster and generally makes for a better experience. All but Tivo provide HD along with SD programming, albeit in less quantities. HD programming is earmarked for Tivo in 2010. As long-established services, it’s unsurprising that Apple and Foxtel provide the most compelling content choice. The others are yet to prove their appeal, especially as Playstation’s offering is currently limited to the iView ’catch-up TV’ channel on the ABC website. In the US, however, Playstation and Xbox 360 have partnered with the online rental store, NetFlix, to provide movies directly from the Net to the TV, and this may offer a heads-up as to how their services may be extended in the future. Certainly, the games consoles enjoy an advantage over other VOD players, being already installed into a large number of Australian homes. But they can’t afford to dawdle in setting up a broader, more compelling content offering. Backed by Channel 7, Tivo will be aggressively attracting buyers, and possibly even extending penetration of its CASPA entertainment portal into Net-connected TVs. T-Box too has the potential to be a strong player, having the BigPond Movies portal and, more importantly, the benefit of Telstra’s vast broadband customer base. You can be sure video on demand will be a space to watch in 2010. Cheers

Anika Hillery, Editor Cover image:

The image on Managing Director Valens Quinn valens@gadgetgroup.com.au the front cover Publisher Peter Blasina peter@gadgetguy.com.au is from the motion picture Editorial Director Anika Hillery anika@gadgetgroup.com.au Elektra which Art Director Bill Chan bill@gadgetgroup.com.au is distributed by Fox Movies Advertising Director Athan Papoulias athanp@gadgetgroup.com.au Advertising Manager Nathan Yerbury nathan@gadgetgroup.com.au Australian Home Entertainment is published bimonthly by The Gadget Group Pty Ltd, 120 Cathedral Street, Woolloomooloo, New South Wales, Australia 2011. Australian Home Entertainment is available for licensing overseas. Director Tony Read tony@gadgetgroup.com.au For further information, please contact The Gadget Group on +61 2 9356 7400 or email info@gadgetgroup.com.au Editorial Contributors Anthony Fordham, Nic Tatham, All care is taken in the compiling of this magazine,the editors and proprietors assume no responsibility for the effects arising therein. Thomas Bartlett, Max Everingham, Nathan Taylor, Colin Hinton Correspondence,manuscripts and photographs are welcome,and books, equipment and materials may be submitted for review.Although care is taken,the Printing The Quality Group editors and publisher will not accept responsibility for loss or damage to material submitted.The magazine is not aligned with any company or group within the Australian electronics industry.Its editorial policy is completely independent.Views expressed are not necessarily those of the editor or the publisher. Distributed by Gordon & Gotch www.gordongotch.com.au All rights reserved and reproduction without permission is strictly forbidden. Price on cover is recommended retail price only. ISSN 1327-0338 Copyright 2009

2 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

So easy, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s laughable. The whole family will get a kick out of the simplicity that is Nevo. With this intuitive house companion, you can control not only your home entertainment system, but almost any IR device you want. Dim the lights, close the curtains, sprinkle the lawn or check whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s at the door. The NevoS70 and NevoQ50 can be easily personalised for every individual in the home, are infinitely upgradeable and offer a range of accessories making the possibilities truly limitless. Get the most out of your world.....Get Nevo. Member

1800 251 367 | (02) 9452 8600 | www.ambertech.com.au Australian distributor Amber Technology Ltd.

CONTENTS DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

FOR ALL THE LATEST NEWS AND REVIEWS ON GADGETS AND TECHNOLOGY, VISIT US AT

PANASONIC VIERA TH-P54S10A WORTH $3399

PAGE 25

B&O BLUETOOTH EARSETS, LAVAZZA COFFEE MACHINES AND MORE PAGE 27

4 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

WE ALSO RUN LOADS OF COMPETITIONS, SO REGISTER ONLINE FOR YOUR CHANCE TO WIN FANTASTIC PRIZES. GET THE LATEST NEWS AND REVIEWS ON YOUR iPHONE WITH THE GADGETUY.COM.AU APP RECEIVE EXCLUSIVE SNEAK PEAKS, SPECIAL OFFERS AND RANDOM FREE GIFTS ON YOUR MOBILE SMS ‘JOIN’ TO 0437 GG INFO (444 636) JOIN US ON

FEATURES The big turn-off

Holiday gift rap

Analog TV will soon be unavailable to some Australian households, and by the end of 2013 we must all convert to digital if we want to watch TV at all. Learn when it’s your turn to make the switch, what you have to do, and what’s in it for you. We’ve scoured the home entertainment world for holiday season gifts for you and your family - him, her and sproglets big and small.

REGULARS

Random play

Home entertainment news and product highlights.

You wish

Digital shack: Sound in the air

Gear log

Ear, eyes & thumbs

Time warp

The world’s largest and most expensive plasma television, Bang & Olufsen’s Beovision 3-104

When you want to share the music stored on your computer with the rest of the house, get unwired for sound with wireless multi-room audio systems. A showcase of standout electronica.

Watch, listen, play. Max Everingham’s roundup of the best movies, music and games. A retrospective of milestone entertainment products and technologies. This issue: rear projection television.

COLUMNS Guy talk

Tech corner

Channel Seven’s GadgetGuy, Peter Blasina, reports today’s technology trends. Is the touchscreen the next big thing in home entertainment? Anthony Fordham puts the case for the affirmative.

BOX FRESH REVIEWED THIS ISSUE

HOW TO BUY

Beyonwiz DP-P2

Buying basics – HDTV

Panasonic DMR-XW350

Doing time

Strong SRT 5492

Tivo DVR 766B

Topfield Masterpiece TRF-2400

Western Digital MyDVR Expander

Samsung UA46B8000

Pure Sensia

Panasonic Viera TH-P58V10A

Sonos ZonePlayer S5

Looking to land a new or replacement flat panel TV in the holiday sales? Get to know the key tech specs of LCD and plasma and you’ll be sure to bag a bargain.

Combine a big hard drive with an HD tuner and you have yourself a set-top box that can record and archive HDTV. Anthony Fordham and Thomas Bartlett explore the myriad talents of today’s PVRs and compare five of the current best sellers.

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 5

RANDOM PLAY

Wall art Designed to hang on the wall like a work of art, Bang & Olufsen’s BeoVision 10 is a full high definition 40 inch LED edge-lit television with 200Hz technology for smoothing the appearance of fast-moving onscreen action. The LEDs are assisted in spreading light evenly across the screen by what B&O calls an optical light guide, and the set features B&O’s signature electronic curtain, whereby a black screen ‘closes’ over the image from either side of the screen at switch-off, like a pair of drapes. Sound is provided by a bottom-mounted active stereo speaker system, which although integrated into the main frame of the set, occupies its own enclosure. The bass system, however, is ported to the rear, for better low-end performance, and the entire speaker unit is covered by acoustically transparent cloth which, available in black, white, silver, dark, grey blue and orange, can be clicked on and off with magnets for whenever you want to change the décor of your wall. The panel itself mounts on a wall (a tabletop stand is also available) and is hinged to the left- or right-hand side, allowing you to pull it out to an angle of 45 degrees to best suit your viewing position. Cables from equipment connected the set are concealed within the rear framework, for a clutter-free appearance from the front, and connections for five outboard loudspeakers are provided, should you want to add a surround sound system. It costs $12,000, plus $610 for the wall bracket. DISTRIBUTOR

Bang & Olufsen WEB www.bang-olufsen.com.au

6 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

Swiss 2.1 Swiss outfit, Geneva, has applied the Embracing Sound DSP technology employed in its chunky iPod docks to a home theatre system. Looking more like a piece of furniture than the 2.1 audio system it is, the Geneva HT integrates a CD player, iPod dock and seven speakers, including a 12 inch subwoofer, plus 700 watts of digital amplification. An array DISTRIBUTOR

of ports is provided for reproducing the soundtrack from a connected flat panel TV, games console, DVD or Blu-ray player, and video outputs are provided for exporting album art, photos and video to a connected television. Available in high-gloss black or white, the Geneva HT costs $5999

Audio Dynamics PHONE 03 9882 0372 WEB www.genevalab.com.au

Mighty mini English speaker experts, Bowers and Wilkins, have assembled a new Mini Theatre package it says offers “incredible quality and value”. The MT-25 system partners five curvy M-1 satellites with the ASW 608 subwoofer, with the former benefiting from the company’s signature tube-loaded tweeters, which were developed originally for DISTRIBUTOR

its Nautilus speakers. The bass channel in the surround setup is provided by the ASW 608, a 200 watt Class D design that, according to Bowers and Wilkins, “integrates beautifully with the M-1 satellites, creating a coherent, seamless soundscape”. The MT-25 system costs $2594.

Convoy International WEB www.e-hifi.com.au

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 7

Extend your coverage like never before. INTRODUCING: THE FIRST GENUINE LONG RANGE & MAXIMUM COVERAGE REPEATER SERIES CORDLESS PHONES

Uniden’s Uniden’s XDECT XDECT R R Series Series Digital Digital Cordless Cordless Phones Phones offer offer Long Long Range Range and and Outstanding Outstanding Coverage Coverage by by utilising utilising a: a: •• Repeater Repeater Station Station built built into into each each additional additional handset handset charging charging base, base, allowing allowing you you to to extend extend the the range range and and coverage coverage from from the the main main base base by by daisy daisy chaining chaining the the signal signal to to each each additional additional repeater repeater station. station. •• Diversity Diversity Antenna Antenna System System for for Optimal Optimal Reception Reception and and Clarity Clarity –– by by mitigating mitigating multi-path multi-path errors. errors. •• High High Gain Gain Antenna Antenna for for greater greater range range and and to to eliminate eliminate drop drop areas areas in in your your home. home.

BONUS WARRANTY TO 2012 30 Day Money Back Guarantee if you are not 100% satisfied with the quality of the phone. Available on any Uniden XDECT Series phone purchased before 31st December 2009. Warranty valid until 31st January 2012. For full details visit www.uniden.com.au

Maximum Range Scenario

The Repeater Stations (XDECT R005) can communicate with each other. Up to 4 times the talking range occurs when 3 x Repeater Stations are positioned in a straight

line and daisy chained away from the Main Base. Each handset is able to walk and talk within the total orange area shown.

Visit Uniden at www.uniden.com.au for full range details or call 1300 366 895 today.

RANDOM PLAY

The hip hub Today’s AV receivers do far more than decode surround sound and amplify it to multiple speakers. Yamaha’s $2499 RX-V2065, for example, can access the internet through its Ethernet port to stream internet radio or WAV, WMA, FLAC, AAC, MP3 or WMA music stored on your PC. It can also access music libraries via USB and Bluetooth, and with the optional dock, play back your iPod’s playlist. The receiver handles high definition video (1080p) and HD audio courtesy of its five HDMI inputs, which includes one on the front for connecting portable devices or gaming consoles. Two simultaneous HDMI outputs allow DISTRIBUTOR

you to feed 1080p video to two screens at once, and three independent zones can each enjoy their own music sources at the same time. Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, Dolby Digital Plus and DTS-HD High Resolution Audio are supported, with output rated at 7 x 130 watts. For stereo music listening, the Compressed Music Enhancer helps make the most of MP3 files, while the Pure Direct mode enhances hi-fi reproduction though bypassing all but the most basic audio circuitry – even shutting down all video – to provide the most pure audio signal.

Yamaha Music WEB www.yamaha.com.au

HD combo As the world’s first LED backlight LCD TV with integrated BD Live Blu-ray player, the all-in-one design of the Aquos LC-40LB700X eliminates the need for several sets of cables, with DVD, Blu-ray, CD and TV sources all controlled by a single remote handset. A full HD set, the TV uses Sharp’s new X-Gen panel with advanced pixel control for excellent contrast and black levels. The LED backlighting delivers power consumption of 139 watts – low enough to earn the set a maximum six star energy rating – and motion smoothness is improved by Sharp’s 100Hz Fine Motion Advanced Technology. Response time is stated as 4 milliseconds, and sound is enhanced by SRS TruSurroundHD and Bass Enhancer. The LC-40LB700X sells for $3299. DISTRIBUTOR

Sharp Australia PHONE 1300 135 530 www.sharp.net.au

10 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

The best things in life are free! For a limited time when you purchase one of the following Tannoy surround sound speaker packages you will receive a free* Tannoy Subwoofer.

FREE

TS 801 SUBWOOFER 8” 200 Watts RMS

Purchase a Mercury Custom speaker package consisting of, 2 ﬂoor standing speakers, 2 surround speakers and a dedicated centre channel speaker; and receive a free TS 801 Subwoofer. (Colour option: Dark Oak / Apple)

FREE

TS 1001 10” 300 Watts RMS

Purchase package consisting of, 2 DC4T ﬂoor standing speakers, urchase a Revolution Re evolution speaker evolution spea 2 in-wall CMS501DCPI surround speakers and a dedicated DC4LCR centre channel speaker; and receive a free TS 1001 Subwoofer. (Colour option: Light Oak / Espresso)

FREE

Purchase speaker package consisting of, 2 DC6T ﬂoor standing e a Revolution Si Signature spe speakers, 2 in-wall CMS601DCPI surround speakers and a dedicated DC6LCR centre channel speaker; and receive a free TS 1201 Subwoofer. (Colour option: Light Oak / Espresso)

TS 1201 12” 500 Watts RMS

Audition a Tannoy system today! NSW

QLD

VIC

Cairns | Targa Hi Fi | 07 4041 0422 Manunda | Cairns Hi Fi | 07 4053 5722

TAS Hobart | Quantum Audio Video Lifestyle | 03 6231 0088

For more information please contact:

Syntec International Free Call 1800 648 628 email sales@syntec.com.au *Terms and Conditions apply, valid till 31st January 2010, and only at participating dealers.

RANDOM PLAY

Viewing sans frontiers The ‘borderless’ design employed on some of LG’s existing range of TVs now gets a showing in its premium range, namely the SL80 full HD LCD and SL90 full HD LED backlight LCD models. Conventional LCD TVs recess the panel slightly within a thick plastic frame, but LG’s borderless models use Injection Compression Molding to create a single-layer design that sets the panel flush with the narrow bezel surrounding it. “The result is a uniform, uninterrupted surface from edge-to-edge, with no visible borders,” says LG. DISTRIBUTOR

Just 2.9cm thick at its thinnest point, the SL90 features 100Hz TruMotion for blur-free motion, a dynamic contrast ratio of 3,000,000:1, a five-anda-half star energy rating and LG’s Invisible Speaker technology which locates the drivers at the bottom of the set. The SL80 sports TruMotion 200Hz, a 1,500,00:1 dynamic contrast ratio and a 2 millsecond response rate. Common to both is integrated Bluetooth and DivX support, as well as a USB port for playing media from hard drives or thumb drives. The SL90 is available in 47 and 42 inch sizes (47SL90QD, $3799; 42SL90QD, $3099), and the SL80 in 37, 42, 47 and 55 inch sizes, with pricing from $1799 to $4499.

LG Electronics PHONE 1300 LG CARE (1300 542 273) WEB www.lge.com.au/borderless

Radio, with more TEAC’s first DAB+ digital radio, the SR-2DAB, includes a dock for iPod and iPhone, FM reception with up to 30 presets, and a dual alarm function that allows you to wake up to radio or your iPod’s playlist. A large LCD with dimmer control provides a clear read-out of text – news headlines, weather and station details – transmitted alongside digital broadcasts, and there’s an onboard preset equaliser system to tailor sound to your style of music. Its wood-look cabinet with leather-like finish encloses stereo speakers and a bass reflect port for boosting low frequency performance. The SR-2DAB costs $499 and comes with a 12 month warranty. DISTRIBUTOR

TEAC Australia PHONE 1300 769 824 WEB www.teac.com.au

12 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

Sound new focus A year after closing its unprofitable plasma business, Pioneer Electronics has refocused firmly on audio, announcing a range of new AV receivers, speaker systems, iPod docks and 5.1 home theatre/Blu-ray packages. Supporting its new position as ‘The Pioneer of Sound’, the company’s Studio 3 pack comprises the VSX-LX52 AV receiver, BDP-320 Blu-ray player and a 3 Series speaker system for $4999. The Studio 7 package (pictured above) comprises the SCL-LX72 AV receiver, BDPLX52 Blu-ray player and 7 Series loudspeakers for $9999. The Studio 8 comprises the SC-LX82 AV receiver, BDPLX52 Blu-ray player and 8 Series speakers for $15,999. The Studio 3 package is available in December 2009, with the Studio 7 and 8 scheduled for sale in January 2010. The components in each of the packages are available for individual sale, with the exception of the BDP-320. Pioneer says that it would sell for $799 if sold as a standalone product, which places it between the company’s entry level $599 BDP-120 and flagship $999 BDP-LX52.

DISTRIBUTOR

Pioneer is providing an additional two years cover on the standard warranty for each component in the packages. Pioneer’s iPod docks include the $899 NAS 3 and the $1099 NAS 5 (pictured below) with FM radio, display, downfiring subwoofer, composite and component outputs and optional Bluetooth for wireless streaming from Bluetooth devices.

Pioneer Electronics WEB www.pioneer.com.au

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 13

RANDOM PLAY

Tower of tunes Standing more than a metre high, the ITB400 Tallboy iPod Dock is a clear cut above (ahem) the competition, according to TEAC. Inside its chassis are what TEAC describes as two full-range drivers, plus a subwoofer that receives a dedicated 30 watts of power from the system’s inbuilt amplifiers. This allows the ITB400 to provide 2.1 channel audio from a footprint far smaller than conventional systems. The music system accepts – and charges – all dockable iPods, provides an FM tuner with presets for storing your favourite radio stations, and offers an auixiliary input for connecting a DVD player, CD player or TV. A remote control allows navigation of all iPod functions and, with the help of bass and treble controls, can be employed to tailor sound to individual levels. The TEAC ITB400 has a 12 month warranty and costs $329.

DISTRIBUTOR TEAC Australia PHONE 1300 769 824 WEB www.teac.com.au

14 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

Slim pickings The two super-thin Viera plasma television ranges previewed by Panasonic in May 2009 have arrived, with the one-inch thick 54 inch Z1 ($7699) offering wireless 1080p transmission of audio and video signals between it and source components, plus a dynamic contrast radio of 2,000,000:1. The two inch thick V10 series comes in 50, 58 and 65 inch sizes, offers THX Certification and a stylish design made possible by the use of a singe sheet of glass. Both series feature the company’s NeoPDP technology, cornerstones of which are improved energy performance, uber-skinniness and 600Hz Sub-field Drive for enhanced image quality. To further spoil you for choice, there are 50 inch and 42 inch models from Panasonic’s G15 series. Costing $3299 and $2499 respectively, these integrate VieraCast functionality, allowing you to access to a wide range of on-demand online content from the TV. DISTRIBUTOR

Panasonic Australia WEB www.panasonic.com.au

Legs 11 ‘Tis the season of giving, and Toshiba has a telly for everyone with it’s new 11-strong LCD offering. There are three ranges – the ZV600A, XV600A, RV600A – plus a TV/DVD combo range, with sets here available in 19, 22 and 26 inches sizes for $849, $949 and $1049. When it comes to full-sized models, the flagship ZV600 full HD (above) provides ClearScan 200Hz technology for producing a smoother picture, Audyssey EQ to help tailor sound to your viewing room, Dolby Volume for consistent volume across all programs and channels, and SD card and USB inputs for playing JPEG, MP3 and DivX files on your TV. Common to the three full-size ranges is ‘AutoView’ for image quality control, and ‘Resolution +’ for displaying standard definition images at near high definition quality. The ZV600 comes in 42, 47 and 55 inch sizes for $3299, $3959 and $5169 respectively. Pricing for televisions in the other two ranges starts at $2199 for the 42 inch 42RV600A. DISTRIBUTOR

Toshiba Pty Ltd WEB www.toshibaav.com.au

Philips first-timer The first DAB+ digital receiver from Philips, the AE5230 features a classic desktop design, FM reception, QuickScan for locating DAB+ stations, a bright and easy to read backlit LCD, and stereo headphone input. The absence of internet radio, iPod dock and music streaming functions means the AE5230 is an affordable entry into digital radio according to Philips, costing just $180. DISTRIBUTOR

Philips Electronics WEB www.philips.com.au

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 15

GUYTALK

It’s all in the numbers of bits

hose hoping to enjoy super-fast internet access care of the Australian Government’s National Broadband Network (NBN) may have a little while yet to wait. The $43 billion system, offering up to 100Mbps, is scheduled to be phased into 90 percent of Australian homes over a period of eight years. But a taste of what it might offer is being launched in Tasmania, and as Robbee Minicola, the CEO of Hybrid TV says, it “is not about faster web browsing, or quicker emails. It is about high resolution video content delivered… onto the television”. Hybrid TV is the company behind Tivo in Australia, so it is all about high definition video. As it happens, Tasmania is the perfect place for the trial because chunks of it are serviced by the TasCOLT network, which has optical fibre to the home, and thus a potential for very high speed. Called the ‘Hybrid SmartStreet Project’ it aims to act as a testbed for the delivery of high value video content, including TV programming and recent release movies. Participants are those already connected by optical fibre to the network, and the service will be provided to them via Tivo personal video recorders.

When you’ve spent thousands on a sound system, do you really want to limit its performance right at the very front end by using MP3 music? To date, internet-delivered video has had major limitations and it all comes down to how thick the pipe is between your home and the source of the video. That is, how many megabits per second of data can flow. A typical broadband connection these days in Australia, usually some variation of DSL, has a rate of between 0.25 and 8Mbps, with most being towards the lower end. In practical terms, sustained throughput is usually lower than the nominal rate, especially at the higher end of this range. If we take 1Mbps as some kind of average, what does that provide? Let’s compare it with SDTV. Most digital TV stations run at between 4 and 6Mbps for SDTV. That’s pretty much the range for DVD as well. Standard definition TV looks dreadful at 1Mbps.

16 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

That’s why YouTube videos are so small on your computer screen. On the high quality 52 inch LCD in your lounge room… well, it simply isn’t worth it. Of course, SDTV and DVD both use the MPEG2 compression system, and things have moved on since then with the likes of VC1 and MPEG4 offering higher quality for lower bitrates. But not that much. So for decent quality SDTV, a reliable throughput of 4 or 5Mbps is needed. And HD? In Australia, HDTV in 1080i format runs at about 12Mbps in that older MPEG2 format. This is a practical minimum for reasonable HD quality. By contrast, Blu-ray titles are rarely encoded with an average of less than 15Mbps, and the average is typically around 22Mbps. We have seen titles averaging as high as 37Mbps! Incredibly, some deny that bitrate matters. In the UK, the BBC HD Service recently reduced its bitrate from 16Mbps to just under ten. Its head actually insisted that any perceived differences were simply the preconceptions of those who claimed that the picture quality had diminished (see link below). Back in the real world, getting TV quality video over the internet, even in standard definition format, requires a lengthy download time. Depending on the length of the programming, you may get to play it back an hour or several after you start the download. The new CASPA video on demand service, also delivered via the Tivo, is an example of this. For HDTV, the same goes except that the time taken for the download is even longer. A truly high speed internet connection will allow actual video on demand, of the kind where you choose a program, select your payment option, and are watching the show within a couple of minutes. As some lucky householders in Tasmania are now discovering. Within the next few years, the rest of us may have the chance to join them in their wider choice of high quality programming. n Link to BBC idiocy: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ bbcinternet/2009/11/points_of_view_and_hd_picture.html

The GadgetGuy™, Peter Blasina, is the technology reporter for Channel Seven’s Sunrise program, appears regularly on other network programs and is broadcast weekly on various national radio stations. Peter has a commercial agreement with HybridTV.

Toshiba HD: Pure Intensity

Regza ZV Series LCD TV

Explosive impact, Toshiba style

For more details jump in to www.regza.com.au

TECH CORNER

The touchy, feely future

ne of the things we have to do here at Home Entertainment is predict what’s going to be the ‘big’ tech feature of the year ahead. Well here’s my pick: touchscreen. By this time next year, touchscreen will be

everywhere. It’s already on your phone, your video camera, your universal remote, and it’s just come to your digital radio (viz. the Pure Sensia). Next stop: your regular TV remote, your increasingly irrelevant landline phone, the main display of your notebook or netbook PC and maybe even your oven. Touchscreen is just a much more engaging way to operate technology. A gentle stroke of a few discreetly animated icons. Enough of this pushing and prodding and clicking and turning. The best thing about touch displays is that they can adapt to the task at hand, without having to somehow ‘re-map’ the same buttons to different actions. And when the controls are nothing more than a rectangular touch-sensitive space, they can also be used to display useful information, and to communicate better with the user. You may have read that there are two competing technologies when it comes to touchscreen. Let’s take a quick look. The cheaper option is to use a ‘resistive’ touchscreen. This consists of two electrically conducting layers embedded in the display so they’re almost touching. When you push on the display with your fingertip, the layers touch, a circuit is completed, and the software looks at where the touch occurred and responds accordingly. The disadvantage of resistive touch is that if you don’t press hard enough, the touch won’t register. It’s also not possible to do ‘multitouch’, or recognise multiple fingertips or complex gestures. For that, you need ‘capacitive’ touch. This technology charges the surface of the display with a weak electrical field. Since your body conducts electricity, touching the surface changes the electrical field – this can be registered with software.

“YOUR REMOTE COULD OFFER A LIST OF ANIMATED THUMBNAILS FOR YOUR CONTENT. DIFFERENT GESTURES COULD PLAY, PAUSE AND RESTART VIDEO.” 18 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

Capacitive touch has two main advantages: first, because you don’t need to physically move the display, it will respond to much lighter touches. This feels more natural and responsive to use. Secondly, capacitive touch supports ‘multi-touch’. More than just fingertip control, you can use different gestures (swipe with two fingers, pinch to zoom etc) and control your device in a much wider range of ways. This is the ultimate promise of touch control, of course. Instead of having to select common actions from a menu or press a particular button on a keyboard, you just move your fingertip in a certain way. We’ve already seen the iPhone use this in a number of neat ways. On Apple’s phone, you can scroll through lists by tapping and dragging. Flick aggressively, and the list spools past really quickly, a little like giving a wheel a spin. Flick gently, and the list moves slower. It’s a much more elegant way to control a device than having separate icons for ‘quick scroll’ or needing a dedicated ‘page down’ key. In this age of digital video recorders, multiple digital TV stations and reams of digital content on inexpensive flash drives, you can see how touch control might benefit your AV stack. A universal remote dedicated to touch control would allow you to navigate the increasingly large amount of content that can appear on your TV from your various devices. And since a touch display can, well, display regular graphics too, your remote could offer a list of animated thumbnails for your content. Different gestures could play, pause and restart video. Even more promising, dragging a finger back and forth across the remote could ‘jog’ video back or forward in super-slow-motion. You could control very precisely exactly how many frames to go back and forth – great for second-guessing referees at major sports events. When standard definition content comes on screen, you could pinch out to upsample to HD. Or your electronic program guide could appear on the remote itself: no more having to obscure your current program just to see what’s up next. Recording would be simple: tap the program on the guide to schedule recording. Naturally, your remote will be connected to the internet via Wi-Fi, so the guide will be a full 14-day schedule. And the remote could even hijack your TV’s picture-in-picture capability to display a second channel on its own screen while you watch the big picture. Favourite show running overtime? Glance down to see if your next program has started. Great for the ABC with its constant news updates... All that, and we’ve only really talked about touchscreen in the context of your TV’s remote. Imagine an oven that takes you through a recipe step-by-step. Touch to continue. But please: remember to wash your hands first. Or a multi-zone air-conditioning system, where you tap different rooms on a schematic of your exact house. And don’t think touchscreen entertainment systems will be limited to high-end luxury cars for much longer either... Yes indeed, 2010 will be the year of the touch display. Now if only Apple would hurry up and confirm that tablet... Anthony Fordham

THE BIG TURN-OFF

Analog TV is being turned-off around Australia from January 2010, but what does this mean and what do you have to do? Thomas Bartlett reports.

20 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

n 2008 the analog TV system in Australia was switched off. Just kidding! And so, apparently, was the Australian government, which had previously set 2008 as the year when Australian TV would go fully digital. Not surprisingly, as the day grew close, the prospect of irritating a few million voters became distinctly unappealing, and so the date was deferred. But now we can say with a great deal of confidence that progressively, from early next year until 2013, the free-to air analog TV system in Australian will indeed be switched off. Why? And what will it all mean? And what will you have to do? Read on, while we sort it all out.

Why are we having the Great Digital Switchover? All this is happening to deliver benefits to everyone. There may be a tiny amount of pain for some in order to yield those benefits, and we’ll get to that in a moment. The benefits for the broadcasters, and for the government, and for you and us, include the greater efficiency of digital broadcasting over analog. The bandwidth — ‘space’ in the radio frequency spectrum — used by each analog TV station is 7MHz. But with modern digital formats you can stuff about four TV signals into that same space. And each of those four signals is actually of higher quality than analog TV. Analog TV is of lower resolution than even standard definition digital TV. The latter is 720 pixels across by 576 tall (720 x 576), whereas analog TV is typically around 500 pixels across. The one digital ‘channel’ can be used in flexible ways, such as by transmitting a couple of standard definition services, plus a high definition one. HD bumps up the resolution to 1920 x 1080 pixels, allowing superb picture quality on the very best TVs and other display devices. So digital TV potentially – and in actuality as we will see shortly – allows for more TV programming into your home. Both you and the broadcaster benefit from that. Analog TV is also limited to a 4:3 aspect ratio, while almost all new material is being produced in widescreen formats.

Year

First Half

Second Half

2010

Mildura/Sunraysia

Broken Hill NSW, Mt Gambier/ SE South Australia, Riverland SA, Spencer Gulf SA

2011

Gippsland Vic, Goulburn Valley/ Upper Murray Vic, North Central Victoria, South West Victoria

Capricornia Qld, Darling Downs Qld, Far North Qld, North Qld, Qld Central Coast & Whitsundays, Wide Bay Qld

2012

ACT & NSW Southern Tablelands, NSW Central Tablelands & Central Western Slopes, Griffith/Mia NSW, Illawarra & South Coast NSW, NSW South West Slopes & Eastern Riverina

Hunter NSW, NSW Northern Rivers, NSW North West Slopes & Plains, Richmond/Tweed NSW

2013

Brisbane Qld, Perth WA, Tasmania

Adelaide SA, Darwin NT, Melbourne Vic, Sydney NSW, Regional & Remote WA, Remote Central & Eastern Australia (Alice Springs, Mount Isa)

Digital TV’s 16:9 aspect ratio suits this much better. In fact, at the moment programming is bit of a pain for the free-to air (or Freeview) TV stations because many programs have to be simulcast in two different formats – 4:3 via analog and 16:9 via digital. So getting rid of analog is something the broadcasters find welcome.

Getting rid of analog TV It was never intended that digital TV would be in addition to analog TV. Right from the start it was expected to be a replacement. A replacement, to be sure, with higher quality and more diversity, but still a replacement. After all, the main point was to allow more programming without using up more of the radio frequency spectrum. Late last year the government judged that the time was right to finally pull the plug on analog TV. Or, to be more precise, to start pulling the plug. Rather than adopting a crash-through-or-crash tactic, it has sensibly decided to phase in the changeover through an extensive period of time, commencing next year and

SD simulcast of analog ABC

SD simulcast of analog SBS

SD simulcast of analog 7

SD simulcast of analog 9

SD simulcast of analog 10

HD simulcast of ABC1

HD simulcast of SBS1

HD simulcast with up to 15 hours unique programming

24/7 HD sports channel with unique programming

SDTV with unique and catch-up viewing

SDTV unique programming

Possible SD channel

SDTV Kids channel by end 09

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 21

THE BIG TURN-OFF finishing in 2013. It’s first putting its toe in the water in the Mildura region of Victoria during the first half of 2010, and will be finishing with the capital cities and the more remote parts of Australia in 2013. As of the middle of this year, government figures show that in a little over half of Australian homes the ‘main’ TV is now digital. That implies a lot of homes not ready for the switch. But the same survey revealed that 83% of households are happy enough to switch over, although three quarters propose waiting until it becomes necessary for their area. Thanks to the phased implementation, rushes on limited supplies of digital set-top boxes and digital TVs should be minimised. So, if you’re one of those three-quarters who are going to wait until the last moment, the table on page 21 shows the period to watch out for. The precise switch-off date for each period has yet to be set, but it is likely to be towards, or at the end of, the half-year, with plenty of local warning.

“IT REMAINS TO BE SEEN, HOWEVER, HOW MUCH HELP WILL BE FORTHCOMING TO THE MOST REMOTE AND DIFFICULT RECEPTION AREAS.”

What you need for switchover - The options

If you have an older style television … Add a digital set-top box to receive digital TV, or HD set-top box to receive all available digital channels.

If you have an LCD or plasma, but it’s standard definition only… Add a HD set-top box to receive all digital channels.

If you want the latest, all-in-one digital fix ... Choose an LCD or plasma with built-in HD tuners.

What you get from digital switchover We’ve hinted above at some of the goodies that digital TV provides, but just to lay it out plainly, compared to analog TV, digital gives you: 1. Even with standard definition, picture quality is near-to or better than DVD quality; 2. High definition on some stations – not Blu-ray quality, but impressive none-the-less; 3. High quality digital sound on all stations, with Dolby Digital surround sound on some programs; 4 Electronic program guide (EPG) for easy channel searching – up to eight days ahead on some platforms; 5 Convenient recording from EPG with low cost, intelligent PVRs; 6. More channels means more programming choice. Yes, more channels. Fifteen, in fact. The basic channel range from analog is duplicated, plus all of the networks offer extra stations (or will soon, in the case of some regional areas). Network Ten’s ‘One HD’ gives sports from around the world, mostly in full high definition. Nine’s ‘Go!’ brings back a huge range of older sitcoms from our childhood, plus new programming that hasn’t quite made it to the main stations. ‘ABC 2’ has kiddie stuff in the daytime, unusual documentaries in the evenings, and themed classic movies on Saturday nights. ABC3, a dedicated kids channel, should be broadcasting by the time you read this, SBS2 features time-shifted programming from the main channel, and the Seven network’s 7TWO channel provides unique programming, including first-run TV series’, re-runs and lifestyle shows.

22 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

The choice isn’t as wide as with Pay TV, but the last couple of years have seen a revolutionary expansion of offerings from the Freeview channels. Oh, and there are no subscription fees involved.

LEADING THE WAY IN 360º 3D NAVIGATION

NEW 360º 3D CITY MAPS & LANDMARKS

5” WIDESCREEN FLAT PANEL LCD

Navigating with Uniden is so easy with Advanced Lane Guidance and the Latest 3D Mapping.

Experience driving from A to B with Uniden’s 360° 3D City Maps, 360° 3D Landmarks and 360º 3D Terrain software, to make navigating so much more realistic. Plus enjoy:

TXT

• Advanced lane guidance and signpost information

LATEST MAPPING

• Speed and red light camera warnings

TEXT TO SPEECH

• Over speed alert

Discover a new dimension for in-car navigation. Visit Uniden on www.uniden.com.au for full range details or call 1300 366 895 today.

THE BIG TURN-OFF

The Digital Switchover labelling scheme uses stickers to describe the capabilities of various products so that people can better choose the right equipment. The labels, however, are not displayed on all equipment instore, so be careful to check with retail staff before making a purchase.

But what does this cost you?

A HD set-top box will allow you watch all the extra HD channels, but remember you won’t be seeing them in HD unless your TV is high definition.

Of course, to enjoy this wealth of choice and quality – and once the analog switch-off deadline has been reached in your area, to enjoy any TV at all – you may need to take steps. The most obvious, if you haven’t already acquired the equipment, will be the need to purchase a digital TV tuner in one form or another. We’ll go into that shortly. Another potential cost might be actual loss of TV reception entirely in some regional areas. Analog TV isn’t very high in quality, and it isn’t very robust, but it can nonetheless deliver some service, with ghosting and drop-outs and loss of colour

and noisy audio, out to occasionally incredible ranges. Digital TV works brilliantly in most cases. But if the signal drops below a certain threshold, beyond the ability of the error correction protocols built into the system to repair, then you will not get any TV at all. The Federal Government’s Digital Switchover Taskforce says that it will provide assistance, including some financial assistance, to help in tricky cases. It remains to be seen, however, how much help will be forthcoming to the most remote and difficult reception areas. One final cost will be for some people with picture-in-picture TVs. Some of these allow both the digital and analog tuners to be employed to provide access to two TV stations at once. No analog means no twin-tuner PIP.

Getting ready If you’re planning to purchase a new TV anyway, then getting ready for digital TV is easy-as. The great majority of flat panel TVs today have digital TV tuners built-in. In fact, we recently set up a wonderful Panasonic plasma TV that had been programmed to take into account the impending changes. During its out-of-the-box automatic setup procedures, it asked us whether we wanted it to scan for ‘All Channels’, or ‘Digital TV Channels only’. Within three years, we suspect it will be pretty hard to purchase a TV with an analog TV tuner, even if you want one. But what if you have a TV that doesn’t need replacing? It may not be the main TV in your house, but you still wouldn’t want to throw it away. What can you do? Just buy a set-top box. Otherwise known as a digital TV receiver, if your TV has an AV input then it will be able to

“...GOVERNMENT FIGURES SHOW THAT IN A LITTLE OVER HALF OF AUSTRALIAN HOMES THE ‘MAIN’ TV IS NOW DIGITAL... THAT IMPLIES A LOT OF HOMES NOT READY FOR THE SWITCH”

24 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

COMPETITION

WIN Panasonic 54inch Full HD VIErA Plasma TV worth $3399 You’ll be in the sweet seat when you install Panasonic’s 54 inch (137cm) high definition plasma TV in your lounge room these holidays. To be

in with a chance to win this great home theatre centrepiece, simply answer the question below online at www.gadgetguy.com.au

A new VIsual ERA

Panasonic VIErA VIErA TH-P54S10A $3399

• 12th generation full HD progressive plasma panel for outstanding picture quality • Built-in HD tuner for better free-to-air TV viewing • 550Hz Sub Field Drive for improved motion image clarity • 2,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio for deep, rich blacks • 3 x HDMI inputs for best HD connectivity • VIErA Image Viewer with SD card slot for JPEG photo and AVCHD video playback • VIErA Link for single remote operation of compatible Blu-ray players and surround sound systems • 2.5 star energy rating

HOW TO ENTER

Enter only online at www.gadgetguy.com.au by answering the question below. Check out our other competitions while you’re visiting. Entry is totally free!

ANSWER ONLINE AT WWW.GADGETGUY.COM.AU In 25 words or less, tell us which movie or TV show you’d most like to watch on the VIErA TH-P54S10A, and why.

ENTRIES CLOSE 2 MARCH 2010

Details on how to enter, as well as competition terms and conditions can be found at www.gadgetguy.com.au by clicking the Competition graphic on the right-hand side of the home page. The competition is open to all permanent residents of Australia and there is no limit to the number of entries a single person can make. You must be an active subscriber to the GadgetGuy Grapevine newsletter to enter, with instructions on how to join found on the GadgetGuy website. Prize value is in Australian dollars and is the recommended retail value as provided by the supplier and is correct at the time of printing.

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 25

THE BIG TURN-OFF

How to make the most of Digital Switchover

High defintion LCD or plasma with built-in TV tuners.

continue to do the job with the addition of one of these. A basic standard definition set-top box can be bought for as little at $50 If you receive a good quality analog picture from your current aerial, then you should not have reception problems with digital TV. But what about HDTV? Of course, an old glass tube TV will not display high definition TV. But with the addition of a HDTV set-top box – which cost from $100 – it will display the HDTV programming, except that you will see it at SDTV resolution. But if you’re presently satisfied with that picture, then that ought to be satisfactory. We strongly recommend that you choose a HDTV set-top box. SDTV ones aren’t so common now, but a few may be around. Since the programming on HDTV stations is quite different to SDTV, without such a box you will be missing out on some of the material available.

Making it better An inexpensive HDTV receiver is what you need to cope with the analog switch-off. But you need not stop there. We recommend that you take advantage of what digital TV has to offer. That includes the higher picture quality, and the better sound, and the ease of recording. Higher picture quality means a better, and perhaps bigger, TV. Amazingly high quality is available in full high definition from TVs of 100cm or larger for less than a couple of grand. These will make even regular SDTV shows look better, and HDTV quite brilliant.

26 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

High definition PVR for recording days of your favourite digital shows.

Surround sound speaker system to get the most from digital broadcasts (as well as DVD and Blu-ray discs). A sound system will enhance the experience too. TV speakers are okay for analog TV and for watching the evening news, but with some of the excellent sound mixes routinely provided with modern TV shows, adding a reasonable quality surround sound system will bring you very close to a full theatre experience. Finally, there is convenience. The major part of this is to move TV shows from their broadcast time to when you want to watch them. For that you need a PVR – a Personal Video Recorder. Once again, a high definition version is essential. Elsewhere in this issue we sample a few of the options available here, and we recommend you check them out. But we can guarantee one thing here: there is a recorder that will suit your needs. n

COMPETITION

SUMMER HOLIDAY COMPETITION $6900+ worth of prizes to WIN PRIZE PACK 1

8 x Lavazza coffee machine combos - $495 each Great tasting, fuss-free and always-fresh coffee from Lavazzaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s A Modo Mio Premium coffee machine ($399), plus 8 boxes of A Modo Mio capsules valued at $95.60

PRIZE PACK 4

PRIZE PACK 3

Playstation 3 Slim Console Pack $999 With the Playstation 3 Slim, games are just the beginning of your high definition entertainment. Our prize pack includes:

PRIZE PACK 2

One of 16 terrific prizes could be yours when you enter our Summer Holiday Competition. And remember, while

you can win only once, you can increase your chances by entering as many times as you want!

Playstation 3 Slim $600 Play TV $149 Dual Shock 3 controller $99.99 HDMI cable (3 metres) $50 FIFA 10 on PS3 $99.99 Unchartered 2 drink bottle

Prizes pack courtesy of The Gamesmen www.gamesmen.com.au

Prizes courtesy of Lavazza www.lavazza.com.au

3 x Bang & Olufsen Earset2 - $550 each Hands-free talk with any Bluetooth phone, from the European leaders of technology design.

Prizes courtesy of Bang & Olufsen www.bang-olufsen.com

4 x Power Monkey Classic Chargers â&#x20AC;&#x201C; $80 each Keep your mobile phone, iPod, PDA and other digital devices powered for longer with the PowerMonkey classic. Prizes courtesy of Power Traveller www.powertraveller.com.au

Entering is easy. In 12 words or less tell us what you love most about your favourite tech device.

SMS YOUR ANSWER TO 0437 GGINFO (444 636) Check out our other competitions at www.gadgetguy.com.au. Entry is totally free!

ENTRIES CLOSE 20 FEBRUARY 2010

Details on how to enter, as well as competition terms and conditions can be found at www.gadgetguy.com.au by clicking the Competition graphic on the right-hand side of the home page. The competition is open to all permanent residents of Australia and there is no limit to the number of entries a single person can make. Prize value is in Australian dollars and is the recommended retail value as provided by the supplier and is correct at the time of printing.

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 27

OBJECTS OF DESIRE

BEOVISION 4-103 O fficially the world’s largest and most expensive television, Bang & Olufsen’s $181,500 BeoVision 4-103 spans an eye-stretching 103 inches. In modern measure, that’s more than two metres of diagonal, or if you’re having troubling visualising that, just picture something with the surface area of a Queen-sized bed taking up residence in your living quarters. A display this big comes with colossal heft, and the BeoVision 4-103 weighs in at half a tonne, including base plate and plinth. The brushed aluminium frame alone weighs 60kg, and in addition to its natural metal finish, is offered in

28 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

black, dark grey, red and blue. When ‘parked’, the TV stands just a few centimetres off the floor – which the Danish-based stylemeisters reckon make it appear less obtrusive – but at switch-on the screen silently raises, turns and tilts slightly upwards to your preset viewing ideal. Enabling this is a pair of electrical motors, or actuators, and two gas springs that, like the system used in hatchback cars, eases the load on the lift mechanism. The action appears, over all, very smooth and muscular, and with the set’s electronic curtains introducing the start of onscreen action, kinda sexy too.

BeoVision 4-103 Plasma TV

$181,500 Bang & Olufsen

www.bang-olufsen.com

Simultaneously with the rise and rise of the 103’s vast glass canvas is the lowering of a single BeoLab 10 centre channel. Triangular shaped, this two-way speaker employs the company’s trademark Acoustic Lens Technology for dispersing sound equally around the listening space, with integrated Adaptive Sound Technology calibrating performance for best results, regardless of your location in the room. Good as this is, the BeoLab 10 reproduces but a mono channel of sound, so you might want to add external stereo or surround speakers, such as the $45,000-odd worth of BeoLab 5 pictured here. Also, a half-tonne screen going yo-yo in the living room may be something of a hazard, so as a safety measure the BeoVision 4-103 builds in special sensors that monitor the weight of the screen. Any change and these ‘tension meters’

halt the descent of the screen and retract it 20mm, thus preventing the crushing of intervening objects… such as Ming vases and pets. Image-wise, the full HD BeoVision 4-103 has HD tuning on board and is driven by the BeoSystem 3 video engine. Positioned at the rear of the screen, this box of goodness contains B&O’s suite of VisionClear video enhancement technologies, a surround sound decoder and connections for up to ten powered speakers and two subwoofers – from the company’s catalogue, of course. Moreover, following every 125 hours of viewing, a neat internal camera descends from the top of the screen to measure colour performance and recalibrate the TV back to its original perfection. What B&O’s mammoth idiot box doesn’t have is great eco cred, consuming a massive 1167 watts in operation – around three times that of today’s average 50 inch plasma TV. (Buyers could offset any enviro guilt, however, with the purchase of a hyrbid Lexus.)

“AT SWITCH-ON THE SCREEN SILENTLY RAISES, TURNS AND TILTS SLIGHTLY UPWARDS TO YOUR PRESET VIEWING IDEAL” Bang & Olufsen makes each BeoVision 4-103 to order and will ship 3-4 months after receipt of your down payment. Cost excludes installation, and those contemplating ownership of the statement TV should first investigate the access options to their living room (think cranes, wide doorways and windows – not lifts or stairwells) and check the load bearing capacity of their floor. If these don’t meet the requirements of B&O’s installer, you just might never own a 4-103… even if you can afford one.

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 29

Neo Contrast The new Neo Plasma range incorporates an improved panel production process and the new Real Black Drive system. This pre-discharge control system combines with Neo Plasma technology to achieve next-generation black reproduction with a cinema-like 2,000,000+:1 Dynamic contrast ratio.

Neo Colour Neo Plasma offers the equivalent of a full 6,144 steps of gradation assuring smooth, rich image expression. This superb gradation performance means that even the most delicate shades of colour are accurately conveyed. Neo Technology is available on the new Panasonic Z1, V10, G10 and G15 Plasma Series.

Panasonic’s Neo Plasma is the next generation of TV. Neo combines breakthrough revisions in three critical areas – materials and processes, discharge gas and cell design, circuit and drive technology. The result is twice the luminous efficiency of previous displays, thinner design, lower power consumption and a whole new world of image quality.

Neo Speed 600Hz Sub-field drive Neo Plasma delivers Full HD motion and still images with 1080 lines of resolution. For even greater clarity Panasonic’s unique imageanalysis technology optimises frames to display fast-action scenes in Full HD resolution.

The New Panasonic Neo Plasma Series

*At thinnest point.

Yet its beauty is far more than skin deep with a collection of outstanding features like wireless convenience that make the VIErA Z1 possibly the most desirable Full HD flat screen ever. WirelessHD™ transmits Full HD 1080p pictures and sound – without wires or signal loss. A revolution in both technical and design terms, the Z1 with WirelessHD™ gives you many more location and installation possibilities within your home.

Neo Plasma technology has delivered our most refined Plasma TV yet. Ultra slim (25mm*) and elegant with its specially designed detachable speakers, you’ll love the Z1 at first sight.

panasonic.com.au

Neo Plasma is television at the next level.

Like the rest of the VIErA TV range, the Z1 can also playback High Definition photos and video from its SD card slot.

The New Z1, the Ultimate Neo Plasma

Has there ever been a better time to splurge on quality gadgets? Perhaps, but the opening weeks of 2010 will still be prime shopping time. The Australian dollar remains high against the Greenback. January is all about sales. So hit up the web, hit up your favourite retailer, and check your

mail for catalogues. Actually, forget that last bit: we’ve scoured the tech world for holiday season gifts for you and your family - dad, mum and the kids. Sure, you might not be able to afford everything listed here, but that’s what’s so great about AV gear: there’s something for everyone!

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 31

HOLIDAY GIFT RAP FOR HIM

PANASONIC DMR-BE850 BLU-RAY RECORDER & DVR If the back of your AV rack is starting to resemble the thickets of thorny bushes that surrounded Sleeping Beauty’s castle, then you need to start consolidating your boxes. Away with the dedicated HDTV tuner, the PVR, the Blu-ray or DVD player. Replace the lot of ‘em with this all-in-one beauty. HDTV reception and recording to its 500GB internal drive, plus backups of your

SENNHEISER HD 800

Say the man of the house is one of those fellows who insists that audio be reproduced to the very highest of standards. He’s so serious about sound, he’s about to drop $50,000 on a two-channel system for his old vinyls. Stay his hand: you can get a similar experience from a set of really, really good headphones. Yes, the HD 800s cost $2400. But you’ll pay up to 10 times as much for a pair of speakers that deliver comparable sound. Pair these cans with a quality headphone amp, and you’ll avoid a second mortgage and – bonus – won’t have to listen to his Frank Zappa collection. PRICE $2399 CONTACT www.syntec.com.au

favourite shows to Blu-ray or DVD. And naturally you connect it to your receiver via a single, slim HDMI cable. Does it have the most complicated remote in the history of electronics? Yes. But it’s the very essence of “does everything”. PRICE: $1979 CONTACT: www.panasonic.com.au

KEF MUON

What price elegance? What price true art? What price an enormous set of speakers made from six millimetre, super-formed aluminium and limited to just 100 pairs? KEF’s Muon aims to combine technology and art, creating speakers that look good on the bridge of your interglactic starship. At these prices, asking about power handling and performance is pretty gauche, but each speaker has eight separate drivers, including 4 x 250mm bass drivers, a 250mm lower-midrange, a 165mm midrange unit with a 25mm high frequency tweeter, and then to just round out the bottom end, another two 250mm rear-facing bass drivers. So much bass. So much aluminium. So much money! PRICE: more than $200,000 CONTACT: www.kef.com

32 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

REVO BLOK

The discerning home office executive requires an iPod dock of unparalleled design and sophistication. Or something. Anyway, the BLOK is a simple, elegant and above all wooden bit of kit, accented with machined aluminium. Quality stuff. Output is 40 watts thanks to two 4.5 inch drivers and a class D amp. It supports all the dockable iPods, and works unofficially with the iPhone. The rotary volume control also doubles as the iPod’s scroll wheel. Also included, a very design-focused hockey-puck remote with its own scroll wheel and other iPod controls. Available in both American walnut and black oak. PRICE: $399 CONTACT: www.bushaustralia.com.au

EPSON EH-TW5000 PROJECTOR There are times when no TV is quite big enough. And for those times, you need a projector that gives comparable contrast ratios and supports all that fiddly frame rate stuff you need for Blu-ray. Enter Epson. The EH-TW500 is an LCD-hearted beast and unlike so many other LCD projectors, it’s really really good at blacks. That makes it an ideal companion to your Panasonic Blu-ray unit (see opposite), made even better by support for 1080p24. Connections include the all-important HDMI, and there’s horizontal and vertical lens shift for precise positioning of the (gigantic) image, be it on your projection screen or the side of a recently constructed skyscraper in your neighbourhood. PRICE: $5299 CONTACT: www.epson.com.au

DYNAUDIO PUCCINI How do you know this is one of the best in-car audio systems in the entire world? It’s the factory standard that comes with the $2m Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport. A car audio system so advanced, it can deliver world-beating sound through just four speakers even as the amplifier is accelerated to 100kph in something under three seconds. Seriously though – you can get more modest Dynaudio products for both your car and home cinema, but the key message here is ‘authentic fidelity’, or speakers based on high-end home theatre designs. PRICE: $2 million (includes Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport) CONTACT: www.dynaudio.com

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 33

HOLIDAY GIFT RAP FOR HER

PURE EVOKE MIO DAB RADIO

Rather grandly, Pure boasts that this little cutie will still look as good in 2050. A bold claim perhaps, but the leather carry handle, Bakelite-stylings and range of cheerful colours certainly back up the hyperbole. The Mio ditches the network connectivity you find on the Evoke Flow in favour of a more diminutive footprint. It also includes Pure’s bespoke ChargePAK E1 battery for true mobile listening – it’s good for up to 24 hours. If other DAB+ receivers are overcomplicated and weirdlooking, the Mio is a simple, stylish alternate route to static-free radio. PRICE: $429 CONTACT: www.pure.com/au

IPOD TOUCH (THIRD GENERATION) The Touch is fast become a rival handheld gaming platform to the likes of Nintendo’s DSi and Sony’s laggard PSPGo. Okay, it’s all about casual games, and all the same functionality exists on the iPhone 3GS, but what if you already have a sweet phone? With a 64GB model now available, the Touch is at last a viable option for your entire music collection – no more swapping albums in and out. And touchscreens still don’t come any better than this. PRICE: $549 (64GB) CONTACT: www.apple.com.au

SONY BRAVIA KDL-52EX1

One of the problems with having a really big TV in the house is that accusing black rectangle of nothingness you have to live with every time it’s switched off. Which, for a healthy lifestyle, should be often. Sony solves this problem by styling the ultra-thin EX Series like a minimalist picture frame – with wide white bezel and thin silver frame – and then backs this aesthetic with digital picture frame functionality. Hit a button on the remote, and the TV will cycle through stored photos. PRICE: $4999 CONTACT: www.sony.com.au

34 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

HARMONY 1100I UNIVERSAL REMOTE

There’s nothing that ruins the ambience of a lounge room more than a coffee table overflowing with ugly AV remotes. TV, receiver, DVD player, Blu-ray... the list goes on. Combine all those hideous plastic sticks into one slim and powerful touchscreen tablet of universal control! It knows how to operate more than 5000 devices, and it groups operations into ’activities’ - just tap ‘Watch a Movie’ and the remote will power up each device and switch inputs accordingly. Clever, very clever. PRICE: $899.95 CONTACT: www.logitech.com

B&W ZEPPELIN MINI

There are, at last count, 900 million iPod docks on the market. But none of them combine discreet looks with impressive sound like the Zeppelin Mini. Okay, it doesn’t look much like a zeppelin and it’s also not that small. But it embodies the philosphy of the original Zeppelin, and

that’s what’s important. Minimalist design, maximum audio. Also, the dock rotates so you can use your iPhone or iPod Touch in landscape mode. PRICE: $600 CONTACT: www.e-hifi.com.au

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 35

HOLIDAY GIFT RAP FOR THE KIDS

ULTIMATE EARS METROFI 220VI Kids deal with crappy earphones by turning them up. They still sound horrible, and the audio damages their hearing. These quality earbuds sound better at low volumes, and the silicon earpiece blocks ambient sound, so less gain is needed and precious growing ears may be spared. They actually use a completely different kind of speaker technology – tapping on a little box rather than vibrating a membrane, which results in surprising detail from such a small (and cheap) earbud. The MetroFis are optimised for, shall we say, young person music, but UltimateEars has a whole range of different earbuds for different genres. PRICE: $89.99 CONTACT: www.logitech.com

NINTENDO DSI

If you can’t hear your kids bugging you for one of these to help kill those long holiday car trips, either they already own one or you’ve gone deaf. It’s the little handheld that does it all – camera-based games, wireless text chat, voice recognition – you name it, the DSi does it. Teach you to cook? Why yes, yes it does. And the games library is huge. From classics like Mario to portable versions of the latest blockbusters. Thanks to modest hardware on the inside, a battery charge lasts more than ten hours of solid gaming. Forget installing a DVD system in the back of your car. Just buy a couple of these. PRICE: $299 CONTACT: www.nintendo.com.au

WD TV LIVE

Face it – your kids know how to get digital video and audio from all sorts of places, and they need a simple and relatively cheap way to play those many and various files on your TV. Consider this: it’s smaller than your average book, but plays pretty much any video or audio file you can throw at it. There’s no internal storage, which keeps the price down and means you can just connect your external hard drive for instant playback – no copying across! And the network functionality enables a YouTube app and connectivity via wireless with your PC or home media server. (Ask the kids to configure it.) PRICE: $199 CONTACT: www.westerndigital.com.au

36 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

GELASKINS

In a world where everyone is expected to fit in, it’s great for the young ‘uns to be able to customise their generic gadgets. Gelaskins are essentially printed covers for a range of devices, which both pretty-up and protect that precious phone, MP3 player, etc.

From your iPhone to your Nintendo DSi, to your notebook PC, there’s a skin for pretty much everything! PRICE: $20 CONTACT: www.gelaskins.com

EDIFIER LUNA 5 IPOD DOCK

Everyone loves an iPod dock, and here’s one that’s hilarious enough for even the kids to love. It’s not actually bowlingball shaped – it’s more like a giant black M&M. There are five speakers secreted in here – two tweeters, two midrange drivers and a subwoofer. The best thing about the Luna 5 though is the small footprint. You can shove it on top of a bedside table or in an awkward space on a big bookshelf. Don’t worry about the kids being able to operate it – they’re already much better at running their iPods than you. PRICE: $499 CONTACT: www.edifier.com

TOSHIBA DV615Y LCD TV/DVD COMBO

Traditionally, when children run amok you can restore some kind of calm by plonking them down in front of their favourite DVD. This isn’t really convenient when you have company in ‘the good room’, but a whole separate TV, DVD player etc just takes up so much space. What about a combo unit, like this one from Toshiba? It’s a snazzy 26 inch LCD with a DVD player built into the back of it. It doesn’t do full 1080p HD, but then as a DVD player, it doesn’t need too – 720p will still look aces. Save space and reverse the effects of that red cordial! PRICE: $849 CONTACT: www.mytoshiba.com.au

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 37

HOW TO BUY 40 When you want to get into home entertainment but need to learn more, our How to Buy section is the perfect starting point. Our expert advice and buying tips will help put you in the know before you venture onto the shop floor.

HOW TO BUY Buying basics - HDTV 40 Whether it’s LCD or plasma, these are the things you must know when shopping for a new flat panel TV this holiday sales season.

Doing time

Want to record digital TV? What about HDTV? Hard-drive personal video recorders are extremely powerful, with convenient features you’ll wonder how you lived without.

BOX FRESH

Western Digital MyDVR Expander Samsung UA46B8000 Pure Sensia Panasonic Viera TH-P58V10A Sonos ZonePlayer S5 Beyonwiz DP-P2 Panasonic DMR-XW350 Strong SRT 5492 Tivo DVR 766B Topfield Masterpiece TRF-2400

DIGITAL SHACK Sound in the air

54 56 58 60 62 49 50 51 52 53

When you want to share the music stored on your computer with the rest of the house, get unwired for sound with wireless multi-room audio systems.

OUR RATINGS

The Home Entertainment star rating systemindicates how any given product compares to other products in the same category and price range. A $1000 product that earns a five star rating, for example, is not directly comparable to a $10 000 product from the same category – the ratings are specific only to the product category and price range of the product under review. Products are rated for feature set, performance, price and ease of use. Where stated, an ‘Overall’ rating is an average of these criteria. Poor

Fair

Good Excellent Reference

Performance Features Ease of use Value for money

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 39

HOT TO BUY

40 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

SURROUND SOUND SPEAKERS

If you’re buying a TV this sales season, there are some details – beyond price – you should know to help choose the best one for your needs.

uperbly detailed, large widescreen pictures and crisp digital surround sound – that’s the promise now driving people into stores for high definition LCD and plasma TVs at a rate unmatched since the September 2008 Beijing Olympics buying frenzy. Sales will spike in the coming holiday period too, as more of us replace the square old boob tube in the lounge room, upgrade the standard definition panel we bought some years ago or start replacing the secondary tellies doing duty in bedrooms and rumpus rooms. Like any technology, each plasma or LCD television differentiates itself via set of specifications. Understanding those specs helps you make the best choice for your setup. Broadly speaking, no combination of specs is ‘bad’, it’s just not necessarily right for you. Identify what you want: big, big screen? Compact? Something that stands all on its own? Something that connects to a stack of audio gear? Even the type of entertainment you most enjoy will have an affect: movies? Sport? TV drama? Keep these things in mind as you explore the following aspects of your new television.

Resolution As mentioned, this is what makes the display ‘HD’. Since the current display technologies use a grid of picture elements (or pixels), resolution is defined as the dimensions of that grid: horizontal x vertical. Fortunately, widescreen TVs use a standard 16:9 aspect ratio, so you can ignore the horizontal dimension. It’s the vertical dimension that’s important. If you only remember one number from this whole story, this is it: 1080. A display with 1080 lines vertically is a full high definition display, and will support all types of content from broadcast TV, DVD, Bluray and games discs, both HD and standard definition (or SD). For those who are interested, this resolution has 1920 lines horizontally, but you don’t need to check this in store – if the TV has 1080 vertical, it has 1920 horizontal. There is a second ‘HD’ resolution: 720. It’s a sort of middle resolution, an improvement over standard def (which is 576) but obviously not as detailed as full 1080 HD.

More than a numbers game Thanks to the way we used to talk about older technology, these resolutions are written as 1080p and 720p. The ‘p’ stands for ‘progressive’ – we’ll explain this on the following pages.

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 41

HOT TO BUY Why 1080 TVs are best

2,073,600 pixels

Full HD TV

HDTV picture a perfect match for screen. No loss of detail.

720 576

1366 768

1080

1920

1,049,088 pixels

HDTV

HDTV picture downscaled to fit screen. Almost 50% of HD picture detail lost.

It’s important to recognise that resolution alone does not define the quality of the image. Each display (be that a flat panel TV or projector) has a large circuit board, the mainboard, which has various microchips on it that manipulate the video signal. A higher quality mainboard has more image processing capability, and will provide better image quality. This is why two TVs with the same dimensions and the same resolution can be have prices tags with greater than $1000 difference.

Look for the labels All these numbers can get a bit confusing, so the industry has created several HD certification stickers. There’s the HD Tick, ‘Full HD’ and – probably the most common – a sticker that simply says ‘1080’. Some equipment also displays stickers from government’s Digital Switchover labelling scheme, the relevant one here being ‘Digital TV Ready: High Definition’. If the TV you have your eye on has one of these stickers, you know it supports HD. It’s unlikely, but you might come across a TV with the ‘HD Capable’ Digital Switchover label. This means the TV has no HD television tuner built-in, so you need to add a high definition set-top box or PVR in order to receive high definition broadcasts.

Progressive vs interlaced One of the more confusing aspects of HD is that there are three HD resolutions: 720p, 1080i and 1080p. Wait, 1080i? What’s that about? The ‘i’ in this case stands for ‘interlaced’. Interlacing is a technique that a gives an image the appearance of having a higher resolution, while reducing processing load on the source – such as DVD player or video camera. Interlacing presents every horizontal line that makes up the video image alternately, so the actual amount of image in the onscreen picture at any time is about half! The alternating lines, however, are presented so quickly – around 50 times a second – that the human eye automatically fills in the gaps, giving the appearance of a solid image. Your eyes can’t be completely fooled though: interlaced images are less crisp, less solid, less real than progressive (where each line is presented in sequence, so the whole image is presented at once). Today, most sources give a progressive signal. DVD players have ‘progressive scan’ – it’s only 576p, but it’s an improvement. Blu-ray offers 1080 lines progressive. You will find 1080i in some games consoles, and all TV broadcasts in Australia are at a maximum of 1080i. It’s better than 720p, but you will notice difference when you switch from

42 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

414,720 pixels

SDTV

HDTV picture downscaled to fit screen. 80% of HD picture detail lost.

watching an HD TV channel to a Blu-ray disc: progressive is best. Later, we’ll discuss how your equipment can ‘upsample’ or ‘scale’ a lower resolution signal to full 1080p HD.

1080p/24 processing One more thing worth touching on: Blu-ray movies are filmed at 24 frames per second. But most TVs run at a default of 50 or 60 frames per second. A good quality HD display will have a setting called 1080p/24. This means the display will show an image at 1080p resolution, but will change the ‘refresh rate’ from 50 or 60 down to 24 frames per second. This ensures that movement – especially wide panning shots – on your high definition Blu-ray disc looks as the filmmakers intended. It’s an important feature and one you should look for in any prospective purchase.

Contrast ratio This is the display’s ability to show a difference between black and white. Black is black and white is white, right? Not quite: because of the way different technologies display black, it’s difficult to show a really, really proper black. As in, a complete absence of light.

LCD televisions using LED backlighting display better black levels, are more energy efficient and slimmer than models using fluorescent tube lighting. Samsung LED7000 pictured www.samsung.com.au

Light is the key here. Plasma displays produce colour by creating their own light, but an LCD television doesn’t create light itself. Instead it controls the amount of light that comes through to a panel of coloured LCD pixels from a number of fluorescent tubes positioned behind the panel. How much light comes through when the display is showing black determines the contrast ratio. Early models didn’t do a great job of blocking the light from the back of the panel, so could only really manage a sort of charcoal grey. This was bad because it impacted on detail in very contrasty scenes.

LED backlighting Thanks to the introduction of LED backlighting in LCD televisions, contrast ratios have improved dramatically. Some displays even boast of an ‘infinite’ contrast ratio, which essentially makes any measurement regarding contrast redundant. Like traditional fluorescent tubes, the LED backlights are most commonly positioned behind the LCD pixel grid. Some manufacturers, however, use an edge-lit system, where the LEDs are located around the periphery of the panel. This allows the panel to be made super slim – up to only 3mm thick – but these televisions can suffer from uneven backlighting, with brightness dropping off towards the centre of the screen. Be sure to be alert to this during your auditions.

Refresh rate One of the peculiarities of the way video technology works is that sources such as a DVD player, games console or hard drive recorder don’t send a solid, constant image to your display. They actually send a whole series of images, many times a second. The frequency of this is called the refresh rate, and it’s standardised to either 50 or 60 times a second, a measure you’ll remember from science class as ‘hertz’. While the 50Hz frequency used by our PAL television system is quite a fast refresh rate, when LCD televisions show very fast moving action – especially sports – you can spot a slight jerkiness in movement. Many LCD models now offer an image enhancement technology called 100Hz. This interpolates

RGB and white LED Most LEDs are white, but some LCD panels employ RGB LED backlighting. RGB stands for Red, Green and Blue: the same colours as the grid of pixels uses to make its colour image. By having coloured backlighting, circuitry in the display can essentially boost colour, giving a picture that has better detail and is more vivid. If the scene is very blue, for instance, red and green light has to be restricted, and this can impact on contrast. So RGB LED backlighting not only improves colour, it also improves contrast ratio! RGB LED technology is found on higher-end displays, and attracts a price premium. Can you live without it? Yes, but you will miss out on the ultimate in picture quality!

With 100Hz, an extra line of picture detail is added between each original line to create smooth blur-free motion, which is essential for fast-moving action scenes. 200Hz further improves this by adding two extra lines between each original frame. Sony KDL-46A5500 pictured www.sony.com.au

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 43

HOT TO BUY

new picture information from the original picture information being shown every second, and combines them to fool your eye into thinking the action is smoother. The very newest TVs even offer 200Hz image smoothing, for an extremely silky experience!

And 600Hz? The latest plasma models promote something called 600Hz subfield processing, which is quite different from the 100 and 200Hz technology used in LCD televisions. While the latter creates new picture information and inserts it into the original picture information to create a smoother-looking image, 600Hz essentially presents the original picture information more frequently every second, to present a more solid-looking image.

Response time LCD TVs also have a specification called the response time. It’s the ability for the grid of pixels to change quickly from one colour to another: vital when displaying a moving image! Too slow, and

the pixels lag, causing the image to ‘blur’ and ‘smear’. The current standard is a response time of 6 milliseconds or less. This is quick enough to make it almost impossible for the human eye to see the pixel actually change colour: it’s as if it turns instantly from red to blue, for instance, with no blurring of the image.

Scaling We mentioned above that it’s possible to take a low resolution image and turn it into a high resolution image using scaling. First up, all displays essentially automatically scale every image. There’s a physical grid of 1920 x 1080 pixels: if you give it a 720 x 576 image (the traditional ‘square’ TV picture), it won’t show a tiny image in the middle of a black display, it will automatically stretch the image to fill the whole TV. But this is done in a relatively unsophisticated way (and on most TVs you can disable this stretching, having the picture only fill the screen vertically, or sit in the middle). A stretched image looks grainy.

HDTV: The numbers that count

GOOD: 720p - 1366 x 768 (progressive)

1080i

BETTER: 1080i - 1920 x 1080 (interlaced)

44 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

1920 1080

720p

1920 1080

576

720

1080p

BEST: 1080p - 1920 x 1080 (progressive)

Some of the latest flat panel TVs can receive HD video wirelessly from a HD television tuner or Blu-ray player located more than 10 metres away. Panasonic THP54Z1A pictured www.panasonic.com.au

Energy labels demonstrate how efficient a television is, with more stars indicating less power use. Toshiba ZV600 pictured www.tosbibaav.com.au

Energy rating

Your source, or your AV receiver can use a signal processing chip to actually add in more image information, based on analysis of a standard definition image. The result is a better looking picture: it’s not as good as if the content had been shot in 1080p HD, but it’s better than simple stretching. Each manufacturer has its own scaling technology and it goes by different names, but you can look in the specs list for terms like ‘upscaling’.

Viewing angle A side-effect of the pixel grid technology common to plasma and LCD televisions is that the light is emitted from the display in a restricted cone. Fortunately, displays are now designed that this cone is almost 180 degrees wide: 178 degrees is a common maximum angle. This means you can sit almost at right angles to your TV and still see an image. Note though that both colour and contrast are diminished the further away you move from dead-centre. A wide viewing angle means you can sit quite a bit to the side of your display before you notice any drop-off in image quality.

Size Is bigger always better? When it comes to HD, the answer is mostly yes! To truly appreciate the extra detail offered by 1080p, you need a display 107cm (42 inches) or bigger. Full HD doesn’t have to be restricted to the main entertainment space, however, as there are now 81cm (32 inch) LCD televisions that offer full 1080p. Need something to fit a truly tight space? Smaller displays have smaller pixels, and on very small TVs (22 inches, for instance) a 720p image can look just as crisp as a 1080p picture! There are even PC monitors that use a TV-stand and show 1920 x 1080 resolution, so you can watch movies in the study or a bedroom.

From 2010, it will be mandatory for televisions to display an energy star rating – the more stars on the label, the less power the TV uses and the less money it will supposedly cost you to run. Flat panel makers are integrating a range of power saving features to earn their sets as many stars as they can. These range from basic auto-off functions – where the TV switches off after a period of receiving not signal – to limiting the amount of power a TV draws when in standby (ie. switched off), to reducing brightness via selectable viewing modes (or automatically according to ambient light conditions), to completely adjustable backlights As a general guide, LCD televisions will typically be more energy efficient than equivalent-sized plasma panels, with LED LCD models typically scoring highest in the energy efficiency stakes.

Networking Many of today’s premium flat panel TVs can connect to other equipment over a home network using the DLNA standard (Digital Lifestyle Networking Alliance). This allows you to, say, beam photos and home videos from a DLNA computer to your TV screen, or stream music from a DLNA phone to your TV’s speakers. You can even watch YouTube or view albums from an online photo sharing site such as Picasa, simply by selecting an icon (or widget) from the TV’s screen. In most instances, all this can be achieved without running wires between rooms or devices too, although some brands still require an Ethernet cable for transmitting video from a PC to the television. If all this networked multimedia sharing seems too hi-tech, TV sets with USB ports and SD slots may be more your speed. Just insert a thumb drive or memory card to enjoy all photo, video and movie files the television supports.

Without wires Today’s TVs are pretty snaz, but how about the future? Displays will continue to get cheaper per centimetre, and they’ll also become thinner. What’s more, DLNA is just the beginning of the banishment of wires. Already, some televisions are making use of emerging wireless standards for transmitting HD video. Within the next five years, you’ll simply plug a TV into a power socket, arrange all your sources within range, and the TV will automatically find your Blu-ray player, games console, or whatever. No more tangled wires behind the cabinet! We can’t wait! n

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 45

HOW TO BUY

DOING High definition on TV is so fleeting isn’t it? It comes into your home via the antenna, through the TV, and then it’s gone. Unless of course, you have a high definition recording device. By Anthony Fordham.

ersonal video recorders (PVRs) have been on the market for a few years now, becoming increasingly useful as hard drives have become both bigger and cheaper. Combine a big hard drive with an HD tuner and you have yourself a set-top box that can record and archive HDTV. PVRs are extremely powerful and flexible devices, allowing you to not only record TV for later, but in fact also pause live TV to take a phone call or rewind to catch that awesome goal all over

46 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

again. Once you’ve caught up on the action, you just fast forward back to real-time. Some PVRs record constantly in a one- to six-hour block, called the buffer, which you can browse at will. This means you don’t even need to remember to set the recorder – as long as the PVR is tuned to your favourite channel and your show was on in during the buffer period, it’s already on the PVR for viewing! Because they record TV, PVRs have onboard TV tuners. Yes,

PROUDLY SPONSORED BY

MINI TEST

TIME tuners in plural. A good unit will have two dedicated HD tuners. This allows you to record on one channel while watching another. The best PVRs even allow you to record to two channels simultaneously while watching something stored on the hard drive, or pause and rewind live TV on one channel while you record on another. It’s the ultimate high-tech way to banish arguments about what to watch… except for the argument about who gets to watch live and who has to watch a recording!

CAPACITY

How many hours of programming your PVR can record

is determined by the size of the hard drive, and because high definition video is capacity hungry we recommend you go for the largest amount of storage your budget allows. Look for PVRs that allow you to boost capacity by swapping out the internal drive for a larger one, or by providing an internal bay and external USB and/or SATA ports for installing and connecting additional drives. With an extra terabyte of capacity, you can record an extra 200 hours of high definition television. You can transfer recordings from these external drives to a computer for archiving and then out to a portable player, such as an iPod, but this generally

Reviewed on the following pages • Topfield • Tivo • Beyonwiz • Panasonic • Strong

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 47

HOW TO BUY

requires a good deal of digital nouse and some jiggery pokery. PVRs that include a DVD drive make this easier, but because DVD is a standard definition format, any HD content will be exported to DVD at a scaled-down resolution, even if you’ve recorded it to hard drive at full 1080i. Panasonic has a PVR that includes a Blu-ray drive, and this will let you transfer recordings from the HDD in full HD. But you will need recordable Blu-ray discs to do so, and these are more than $30.

LOOK FOR

• Twin HD tuners • Large capacity hard drive • Expandable storage capacity • Easy to use EPG • Networking features

PROS & CONS Huge recording capacity, and in HD quality Easy to program, search and locate recordings via the EPG Pause and rewind live TV Can’t easily copy recordings out to other devices or to lend to friends and family Fans needed to keep hard drive cool and these can be noisy Hard drives eventually fail

48 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

PROUDLY SPONSORED BY

While the prime function of a PVR is time shifting – and most people will be motivated to buy for this alone – many models add value by integrating networking features. These allow photos, movies and music stored on the home PC to be enjoyed in the living room and, or deliver YouTube and photo-sharing websites direct to the big screen. One model in our review sample even offers an Internet-based video on demand service which, paired with a storehouse of recordings, helps ensure there’s always something to watch, even when there’s nothing on TV.

The Electronic Program Guide (EPG) The Electronic Program Guide, or EPG, makes recording easier than ever. Forget setting clocks and figuring out if a movie runs 90, 100 or 110 minutes. The EPG typically provides programming for the forthcoming seven days, displaying each show as a ‘block’ of time in a table-like format on the screen. Select the block with the PVR’s remote, hit record, and the timer will set automatically to record that show on that channel – you don’t even need to set the channel before toddling off to bed. Most PVRs will even start recording from standby mode, so as long as they are plugged into the wall and the wall switch is on, they’ll work! Beware though: the EPG is very strict with its start and finish times. If Dancing with the Stars runs ten minutes long, you’ll get the last ten minutes of Dancing and miss the last ten minutes of your movie. You can edit an EPGselected recording though – we recommend adding an extra 20 minutes to the end, just to be super-safe!

MINI TEST

“THE RECORDER AND PLAYBACK WORKED WITH COMPLETE RELIABILITY. SO DID THE PLAYBACK OF MEDIA FILES FROM MY COMPUTER”

BEYONWIZ DP-P2 T

he Beyonwiz PVRs have been around for several years now, with the DP-P2 being a second-generation version. It has the relatively unusual ability to record external analog video signals, fed into it via composite video or S-Video. Why? If you have pay TV but haven’t made the leap to an iQ, then you can use your Beyonwiz to do the recording from that box. That’s become a less common need these days, so let’s focus on the unit as a PVR. Well, PVR and media box. If you plug the Beyonwiz DP-P2 into your computer network then it will play most formats of video, photo and music. You don’t even need to have ‘client’ software running on the computer: just ‘share’ the folders containing the material. For TV work the unit has two high definition TV tuners and, now, a large 500GB hard disk drive. It has some conveniences that make life easier if you’re

relying on your recording. For example, you can have it automatically insert padding – more recording time – at the start and end of every recording. There is a good range of ‘repeat’ record features such as specific days of the week. The unit supports IceTV so for a modest cost you can have a bunch of traditional Tivo-like recording functions, with suggestions, programming remotely and looking out for specific program titles. Without IceTV, you will have to rely on keeping an eye on the unit’s EPG and manually select the things to record. The recorder and playback worked with complete reliability. So did the playback of media files from my computer. You can add more recording space via a standard USB hard drive. The picture quality with HDTV was excellent. That with SDTV was surprisingly poor, though. Whether set to 1080i or 576p output (if does not have 576i over HDMI), the result left distortion and movement around the tops and bottoms of hard edges of onscreen images, rather than cleanly drawn lines. That’s a pity, because this unit has everything else going for it. Thomas Bartlett

SPECIFICATIONS Price: $999 Warranty: One year Contact: Beyonwiz Pty Ltd ]1300 889 803 www.beyonwiz.com.au Features: Outputs: composite video, S-Video, component video, HDMI, analog stereo audio, optical digital audio, coaxial digital audio, aerial; Inputs: composite video, S-Video, analog stereo audio, aerial; Others: Ethernet, 2 x USB, compact flash, SD; Recording: 500GB HDD; Special functions: twin tuner, record external AV sources, stream audio, video, photos from network, transfer recordings to computer, WizTV function Dimensions (WHD, Weight): 390 x 60 x 295mm, 3.7kg

PROS AND CONS Reliable operation Large hard drive Versatile multimedia support Some web functions Poor picture quality with SDTV RATINGS PERFORMANCE

FEATURES

EASE OF USE

VALUE FOR MONEY

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 49

MINI TEST

“THE PICTURE QUALITY PRODUCED BY THIS UNIT WAS EXCELLENT. IT SUPPORTS FULL 1080P OUTPUT AND CLEARLY HAD TOP-NOTCH PICTURE SCALING CIRCUITRY”

PANASONIC DMR-XW350 W

hat we have here from Panasonic wouldn’t normally be thought of by most people as a PVR. After all, it’s a DVD recorder with a hard disk. But what’s the difference between the two if the DVD recorder has two HD digital tuners, and a 250GB hard disk drive? The difference is that some of the features that appear frequently in PVRs are missing. For example, this unit doesn’t automatically ‘cache’ whatever it is that you’re watching, thereby allowing you to rewind. However you can pause live TV, which starts up a kind of temporary recording. The unit takes several seconds to respond to this press on the ‘pause’ key, so it is rather clunky. However, that can be forgiven because of some features that are really quite unique. First, it is more than the usual DVD recorder because not only can it record SDTV, it can also record HDTV. That is maintained at full resolution on the hard disk, just like any PVR. But

you can copy it to a recordable DVD as well for longer term retention. Since DVDs aren’t compatible with high definition video, the unit down-converts it to standard definition. And it does a pretty decent job of it. The picture quality produced by this unit was excellent. It supports full 1080p output and clearly had top-notch picture scaling circuitry, delivering a clean and sharp picture. The unit has an Ethernet port for networking, but this does not to permit recordings to be copied to a computer, nor to allow multimedia playback from that source. What it actually does is allow the unit to connect to YouTube and Picasa, and play back videos and photos respectively. It also allows the Gracenote CD database built into the unit to be updated. This is used by the unit to identify artist, album name and so on when you insert a CD. You can copy the CD to the unit’s hard disk drive, turning it into a jukebox. Thomas Bartlett

50 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

SPECIFICATIONS Price: $1099 Warranty: One year Contact: Panasonic Australia 132 600 www.panasonic.com.au Features: Outputs: composite video, S-Video, component video, HDMI, analog stereo audio, optical digital audio, coaxial digital audio, aerial; Inputs: 1 x DV, 2 x composite video, 2 x S-Video, 2 x analog stereo audio, aerial; Others: Ethernet, USB, SD; Recording: 250GB HDD, DVD+/-R/ RW/RAM/DL; Special functions: twin tuner, plays DVDs, record DVDs, YouTube and Picasa access, CD naming with Gracenote database Dimensions (WHD, Weight): 430 x 55 x 330mm, 4.3kg

PROS AND CONS Superb picture quality Able to archive recordings (including downscaled HD) to DVD Interesting web features Quite clunky and slow in operation No auto time shift RATINGS PERFORMANCE

FEATURES

EASE OF USE

VALUE FOR MONEY

“IT IS ACTUALLY PROGRAMMED TO ALLOW THE RECORDING OF THREE PROGRAMS AT ONCE, TWO FROM THE SAME CHANNEL, AND STILL PLAY A PREVIOUSLY RECORDED ITEM BACK AT THE SAME TIME”

STRONGSRT 5492 T

he Strong SRT 5492 is the entry-level unit among this collection, yet it still has a massive 500GB hard disk drive for recording, two HD digital tuners and, of course, HDMI out. There’s no setting for a cache or buffer to always record whatever you’re watching so that you can rewind and re-watch something you’ve just seen. But like the Panasonic unit, you can hit the ‘pause’ key to start up a buffer. Unlike the Panasonic, it does this promptly, so it is quite a bit more usable. The video output quality on HDTV was excellent, but not all that good on SDTV when the output was set to 1080i. Sharp-edged diagonals seemed a little jaggie with this setting. However Strong has provided the ability of the unit to deliver basic 576i video over HDMI, so you can just hit video format key a couple of times and, in most cases, your TV will produce excellent picture quality from this signal.

The unit worked reliably in recording and playback. It is actually programmed to allow the recording of three programs at once, two from the same channel (eg. ABC and ABC2, while also recording SBS), and still play a previously recorded item back at the same time. There is no automatic padding facility to allow for programs that run over time, so you should edit the timers to ensure you capture the end of the program. The Ethernet port on the unit was of limited functionality at the time of writing. Apparently some file transfer capabilities to a computer are provided with third-party software, but it is not at this stage a convenient option for the general use. However a more important use of the Ethernet port is forthcoming, I am told, just a little too late to be examined for this review. In the next firmware Strong advises that it will be implementing support for IceTV, so you will (at a cost) be able to subscribe for Tivo-like recording intelligence. Thomas Bartlett

SPECIFICATIONS Price: $599 Warranty: One year Contact: Strong Technologies Pty Ltd (03) 87957990 www.strong-technologies.com Features: Outputs: composite video, S-Video, component video, HDMI, analog stereo audio, optical digital audio, 2 x aerial; Inputs: 2 x aerial; Others: Ethernet, 2 x USB, RS-232C; Recording: 500GB HDD; Special functions: twin tuner, play stream audio, photos from USB, games Dimensions (WHD, Weight): 335 x 59 x 247mm, 3.0kg

PROS AND CONS Excellent value for money Large capacity HDD Reliable performance IceTV support to come No auto time shift RATINGS PERFORMANCE

FEATURES

EASE OF USE

VALUE FOR MONEY

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 51

MINI TEST

TIVO DVR 766B C

onsidering the thought and care that has gone into the Tivo PVR, the price of $599 is remarkable. But do remember that you get a rather small hard disk drive. You can add on an external hard disk drive, but it has to be a Tivo one. Still at $249 for one terabyte, it’s not bad. Alternatively, Tivo offers a 360GB model. With the 160GB model you also get a wireless network adaptor and Tivo’s Home Networking Package. This allows you to transfer your TV recordings to a computer, and from there to a portable device, and also allows the Tivo to play back photos, videos and music from your computer. As for extra cost items, with your broadband computer connection Tivo can download fairly recent movies from Blockbuster, as well as TV shows, video clips and other content from Tivo’s CASPA video on-demand service. Some content is free, while movies are $5.95 and use a little over a gigabyte per runtime hour. With Tivo you get something for free that is at best an added cost option for the others. It is, in fact, the unique

selling point of this PVR: the Tivo user interface and intelligent recording assistance. Other PVRs may offer the IceTV EPG as an ongoing subscription service, but with your broadband connection you get Tivo’s own EPG for nix. And it is generally fuller than the free one. It will learn from your own recordings and make recordings of things you may like (unless you tell it not too). You can mark program titles and it will record them, whenever or on whatever station they appear. Or you can select actors’ names or keywords to trigger recordings. It is unlike any other unit in its operational approach. It will talk you through everything, and rather than approach it with preconceptions, just learn as it trains you while you are training it. And the nice thing is, whether on HDTV or SDTV, the unit offered excellent reliability and picture quality. You can even set it output ‘native’ resolution so if you have a particularly nice TV with high quality video processing, you can make use of its capabilities for even better performance. Thomas Bartlett

“WITH YOUR BROADBAND COMPUTER CONNECTION TIVO CAN DOWNLOAD FAIRLY RECENT MOVIES FROM BLOCKBUSTER” 52 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

SPECIFICATIONS Price: $599 Warranty: One year Contact: Hybrid Television Services (ANZ) P/L 1300 698 486 www.tivo.com.au Features: Outputs: composite video, S-Video, component video, HDMI, analog stereo audio, optical digital audio, aerial; Inputs: aerial; Others: Ethernet, 2 x USB, E-SATA for hard disk; Recording: 160GB HDD; Special functions: twin tuner, TiVo intelligent recording capabilities; Added cost options: stream audio, video, photos from network, transfer recordings to computer, download recent movies Dimensions (WHD, Weight): 421 x 71 x 332mm, 3.7kg

PROS AND CONS Excellent picture quality Extremely clever user interface Highly convenient features which will record programs that you may otherwise miss Small hard disk drive RATINGS PERFORMANCE

FEATURES

EASE OF USE

VALUE FOR MONEY

TOPFIELD MASTERPIECE TRF-2400 SPECIFICATIONS

very few years Topfield releases a ‘Masterpiece’ PVR which is basically a no-holds-barred device. The TRF-2400 is its current one, and as PVRs go it is indeed no-holds barred. Let me dispose quickly of its primary function. It has two HD tuners, a massive 500GB hard disk drive and plenty of recording options, including automatic padding for the tail end of recordings. When it comes to watching TV, the unit does a great job with HDTV, and is up there with the TiVo and nearly up there with the Panasonic for the quality of SDTV programs, even delivered at 1080i. If you have a particularly high quality TV, you can set the output resolution from the HDMI to ‘Native’, so that the unit outputs whatever the resolution of the particular signal is. To make life a little easier, this unit also comes with a universal remote control that you can program to control your TV, DVD player and even a number of AV receivers. The unit has USB sockets for playing back multimedia material, including AVI and DivX video (but, oddly, it would not support a standard MPEG2 video file), most music formats and JPEG photos. Or you can download these to the unit’s own hard

disk drive via its network connection. Indeed, you can log onto the unit either with an FTP program or as a web page from a computer on the network for transferring files – at quite high speed – in both directions. And that includes the recordings you have made on the unit. It also supports IceTV if you wish to subscribe, thereby permitting intelligent recording. The unit requires a network connection for all these features, but Topfield sells a wireless dongle for $69 that can free it from being hard wired. Also available on the network is access to YouTube videos, Flickr photos and ShoutCast Internet radio. There was a weather page, but this didn’t work at all well in my area, showing figures and forecasts that didn’t match what the weather bureau was saying. Thomas Bartlett

“IT ALSO SUPPORTS ICETV IF YOU WISH TO SUBSCRIBE ”

Price: $1099 Warranty: One year Contact: TOPPRO Pty Ltd 1300 766 440 www.itopfield.com.au Features: Outputs: composite video, S-Video, component video, HDMI, analog stereo audio, optical digital audio, coaxial digital audio, aerial; Inputs: composite video, component video, analogue stereo audio, aerial; Others: Ethernet, 2 x USB; Recording: 500GB HDD; Special functions: twin tuner, record external AV sources, transfer audio, video, photos from computer, transfer recordings to computer, remote programming, YouTube/ Flickr/ShoutCast access Dimensions (WHD, Weight): 380 x 60 x 265mm, 3.1kg

PROS AND CONS Excellent picture quality Excellent network flexibility Reliable performance Excellent extras such as YouTube No padding available for start of program so have to manually adjust RATINGS PERFORMANCE

FEATURES

EASE OF USE

VALUE FOR MONEY

Conclusion The first HD personal video recorders were incredibly expensive and, for the most part, pretty unreliable. Here we have five that come in a wide range of costs, from really quite affordable through to moderately expensive, and the good news is all of them worked with complete reliability throughout the test period. It is nice to know that your favourite TV show is at home on your recorder, rather than merely hoping that it might be! The only really problematic unit among them was the Beyonwiz, and that was because it offered quite low video quality on SDTV stations. So did the Strong, but it had a convenient workaround and is much lower in price.

If you aren’t used to using a PVR, the Tivo’s unique approach may be very helpful, even though it can sometimes be a little frustrating for someone who prefers to exercise great manual control over things. If you want to keep your TV recordings for the long term, the Panasonic may be the way to go, especially given the advanced editing it has, allowing neat trimming out of advertisements and the like. Or you can do the same with the Topfield or the Beyonwiz, via a computer. But the result is, in short, that there is a wonderful range of options in the move to digital TV.

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 53

BOX FRESH

WESTERN DIGITAL MYDVR EXPANDER T

ivo owners who constantly find themselves running out of space and having their programs deleted as a result will find the MyDVR Expander gives them plenty of breathing room once a lengthy install process is completed.

FEATURES The MyDVR Expander sits in the same enclosure you’ll find other Western Digital MyBook drives in. It’s pretty large and doesn’t particularly fit in with the style of the Tivo itself – or most living room AV equipment for that matter. It’s a minor

54 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

problem, but one that’s also made a little worse due to the cable provided with the drive, which is quite short. You can’t exactly hide the drive round the back of your AV cabinet if it won’t reach that far. The prime feature of the Expander drive is that it adds a significant quantity of storage to a Tivo media device, be that the 160GB or newly released 360GB version. The 1TB on offer supplements the existing drive within either unit, allowing users a lot more recording time, as well as time for Tivo to record its own program suggestions based on the profile it builds up of your viewing preferences. The 1TB addition to the existing

WESTERN DIGITAL MYDVR EXPANDER

“YOU CAN CHOOSE TO RECORD MANY MORE PROGRAMS, AND THEY’LL STAY RESIDENT ON YOUR TIVO FOR LONGER, AS IT WON’T NEED TO DELETE OLD CONTENT QUITE AS RAPIDLY” drive claims to accommodate up to 200 hours of high defintion recording and 400 hours of standard definition. Just because it’s an external drive, however, doesn’t mean the data within is portable in any sense. Tivo stores programs across its own internal drive and the MyDVR,

so if you do unplug the drive, the programs are ‘lost’ to Tivo. Likewise, the drive itself is PC-compatible in a technical sense, but the data isn’t, so you can’t shuffle data off it easily – for that, existing Tivo owners will need the $199 Home Networking Package. You get this free, however, with purchase of the 160GB or new ($699) 320GB unit.

PERFORMANCE Installing the MyDVR is an interesting balance of challenges. On the one hand, all you really have to do is plug it in, reboot your Tivo a couple of times and you’re done. The downside here is that this takes ages. In our tests each reboot ate up ten minutes alone, during which time the Tivo’s not recording programs for you. Once it was done, though, we had plenty of recording space to play with. There are two benefits to this. Obviously, you can choose to record many more programs, and they’ll stay resident on your Tivo for longer, as it won’t need to delete old content quite as rapidly. The other benefit is in the program suggestions list, as Tivo uses the extra space to record programs it thinks you might like. On our test system, we went from having half a dozen program suggestions pre-recorded to well over 200.

CONCLUSION At a $299 asking price, the MyDVR Expander drive is a costly drive, and there’s really no escaping that. It does work, and for utter couch potatoes it’s both easy and appealing to have even more of the boob tube on easy recall. Matt Robinson

SPECIFICATIONS Price: $299 Warranty: 12 months Contact: Western Digital 1800 429 861 www.westerndigital.com.au Capacity: 1TB Interface: SATA Dimensions: 172.2 x 143 x 56.7 cm Weight: 1.2kg

PROS AND CONS Additional storage space for Tivo Adds a lot of program suggestions Easy setup Slow setup Sata cable is short Data shared across drives RATINGS PERFORMANCE

FEATURES

EASE OF USE

VALUE FOR MONEY

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 55

BOX FRESH

SAMSUNG UA46B8000 LCD TV N

ext time you’re at a large consumer electronics retailer, find the higher quality Samsung TVs, walk around to their sides and have a close look. Or even a distant look, for there is nothing subtle about what you will see. These TVs are thin. Not a little thinner than the old ones, but one-third or less the thickness: a hair under 30mm. This is seriously impressive stuff. And it is with this feature, along with a host of high-end functions, that the Samsung UA46B8000 comes.

FEATURES Those features? LED backlighting for one. But I must be clear about this. When I wrote about a 950 series Samsung LED/ LCD TV last year, I raved about the way the grid of LEDs could be used to brighten and darken different parts of the screen. But that was a 108mm thick TV. This one uses LED

56 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

backlighting for a different purpose: to allow the panel to be very slim. It does not have the same ability to control different sections of the screen. Samsung has bumped up its ‘Motion Flow’ image-smoothing processing to 200 hertz. It has improved its USB multimedia performance by adding a second USB socket, one of which supports hard disk drives that don’t demand too much power, and by adding to the media formats supported so now it could play my test MPG, AVI and Divx files, including full high definition ones. You also have DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) support so the unit can play multimedia from computers on the network you have it plugged into. Or you can use Samsung’s wireless LAN adaptor ($99) with one of the USB sockets to achieve the same.

PERFORMANCE Before getting to the picture this TV produces, let me spare a few words for the user conveniences it offers. Obviously its main menu system is extremely rich, given the number of options and features provided. But there is a convenient ‘Tools’ menu that is somewhat context sensitive, generally including a list of ten or so things that are relevant to what’s on the screen.

SAMSUNG UA46B8000 LCD TV One thing that pops up on the list is an access point to any CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) devices connected via HDMI. In fact, if you’re watching TV you can switch to, say, Blu-ray by popping this up and selecting the device. That will switch the TV to the appropriate HDMI input and make it remotely turn on the Blu-ray player. Once that’s going you can use the play/ stop/fast forward controls on the TV’s remote. And since the TV’s remote works with radio waves rather than infrared, you don’t even need to point it. The TV will, however, still work with your universal remote control, since IR is used by the ‘pebble’ style simplified remote that also comes with the TV. But what about the picture and sound? The sound is about as good as you can expect from a super thin TV: good enough for watching the news. You really need an external system to get sound worthy of the picture. The picture was very good overall, especially after I’d switched off the ‘Motion Flow’ system. That did its job, keeping motion smooth — even incredibly sharp 1080p material from Blu-ray didn’t faze it. But like implementations of this technology by other brands, it gave a glossy look to the picture and showed a significant ‘heat haze’ around moving objects much of the time, which was quite distracting. The colour was excellent and the dynamic contrast processing quite good. But not as good as the 950 series mentioned above, since the TV had to

“THE COLOUR WAS EXCELLENT AND THE DYNAMIC CONTRAST PROCESSING QUITE GOOD” compromise across the whole of the screen, rather than optimise small areas. In addition, with a full black screen the black depths were rather mottled, as though the edge backlighting couldn’t be applied perfectly smoothly across the screen.

CONCLUSION So this TV is a step forward in aesthetics, thanks to its marvellously slim lines, but doesn’t quite match the older 950 series for ultimate performance. Nonetheless it was a pleasure to use, and if not quite A+, the picture was certainly a good A–. Thomas Bartlett

SPECIFICATION Category: LCD TV Price: $4999 Warranty: one year Contact: Samsung Electronics Australia 1300 369 600 www.samsung.com.au Image: LCD; 117cm (46 inch) diagonal; 16:9 native aspect, 1920 x 1080 pixels; brightness not stated; 3,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio; response time not stated; edge LED backlight Inputs: 1 x composite video, 0 x S-Video, 1 x component video (supporting progressive scan and HD), 1 x D-SUB15 RGB, 4 x HDMI, 3 x stereo audio, 2 x USB, 1 x Ethernet Outputs: 1 x optical digital audio Audio: stereo, 2 x 10 watts Features: Edge LED backlight, PIP, Teletext, analog and HD digital tuners, four HDMI inputs, Samsung LED Engine, Movie Plus 200Hz processing, 2 x USB for multimedia playback, DLNA certification for Ethernet for multimedia playback Supplied accessories: RF remote control; simplified ‘pebble’ remote control; manual; desktop stand Dimensions (WHD): 1131 x 688 x 30mm (without stand) Weight: 18.0kg (without stand)

PROS AND CONS Full high definition display Excellent picture quality Very slim panel Excellent video processing Not quite as good with blacks as previous (bulkier) LED model No S-Video input RATINGS PERFORMANCE

FEATURES

EASE OF USE

VALUE FOR MONEY

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 57

BOX FRESH

PURE SENSIA O

ne of the key features of DAB+ is the ability to broadcast text information along with the audio stream. But squinting to read this on a dinky little three-line display can be less than ideal. And with 39 digital channels currently on air in the Sydney region alone, scrolling through them all with traditional controls isn’t much fun either.

58 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

So why not give a DAB+ radio the kind of interface it deserves? A good-sized, capacitive touchscreen, which displays text with room to spare and allows you to scroll quickly through stations? Why not indeed – here’s Pure’s offering.

FEATURES As a straight DAB+ unit, the Sensia is most similar to Pure’s Evoke Flow radio. Fairly compact, exchanging super high-end audio quality for a small footprint and portability. Like the Evoke Flow, the Sensia also has a Wi-Fi adaptor inside, so it hooks on to your internet connection and plays music from either your PC, or Pure’s own The Lounge internet radio service. The big difference here of course is the 14.5cm (3.7 inch) touchscreen. It’s capacitive, like the iPhone, and it supports flicking and dragging gestures to scroll quickly through long lists of internet (or indeed DAB+) stations. Also unlike the Evoke Flow, the Sensia has two speakers, but lacks an auxiliary output, though there is a headphone port. Part of the promise of this unit is access to such things as Picasa and Facebook via custom apps for the Sensia, but even though our test unit was fresh from the factory and not an engineering sample, there were no apps available for download during the review period.

PURE SENSIA

PERFORMANCE Many touchscreens on devices like this or on home PCs often use ‘resistive’ technology, which is less response. This capacitive screen responds very well – almost, but not quite, up to the iPhone’s industry benchmark. Individual icons are quite small though, and jabbing at a device that sits on the kitchen counter is surprisingly more awkward than doing it to a phone you hold in your hand. Practice should see your miss-points diminish though. Audio quality is fairly average, since the small drivers are working across the whole frequency spectrum. A serious auxiliary output – ideally RCA – would have been very welcome here. But the same applies to all Pure’s products. As mentioned, we couldn’t try out any apps, as none were available at time of review. For us, the Sensia had exactly the same functionality as the Evoke Flow, though with the excellent display making selecting stations much easier. Oddly, the Sensia doesn’t play video. Pure promises photo slideshow functionality via Picasa once the app is released, and you can also browse content from your networked PC or iPhone. Though for iPhone connectivity, you need to buy an optional dock – even though the unit has a USB port, it’s specifically not the kind that an iPhone’s stock cable plugs into.

“THE 14.5CM (3.7 INCH) TOUCHSCREEN… SUPPORTS FLICKING AND DRAGGING GESTURES TO SCROLL QUICKLY THROUGH LONG LISTS OF INTERNET (OR INDEED DAB+) STATIONS” CONCLUSION This is a great-looking unit with some very promising functionality. But we’re left with the sneaking sensation that audio quality has been sacrificed for the sake of the touchscreen. Don’t get us wrong: touch control is great. But DAB+ – in these expensive early-adopter days – is all about audio quality. Once this unit does more than its touch-deprived siblings, it will become more compelling. For now though, we’ll save up for a Pure Avanti Flow. That’s a very serious DAB+ radio. Anthony Fordham

SPECIFICATIONS Category: Digital radio/media player Price: $749 Warranty: 24 months Contact: Pure Australasia 03 9722 2422 www.pure.com/au DAB+ & FM: Stereo, DAB+ (Band III), FM with RDS and RadioText Wireless: 802.11b/g, supports WEP and WPA/WPA2 encryption Frequency ranges: Band III 174-240 MHz, FM 87.5 - 108MHz Media streaming: WMA, AAC, MP3, MP2, Real Audio Speakers: 2x 15 watt 3 inch fullrange drivers Inputs: 3.5mm auxiliary, mini-B USB Outputs: 3.5mm headphone socket Interface: 14.5cm (5.7 inch) capacitive touchscreen, 640 x 480 pixels Dimensions: 166 x 280 x 180mm Weight: 1.9kg

PROS AND CONS Funky retro-future styling Good touchscreen Potential for upgrades Average audio quality No apps available yet iPod control requires a custom module RATINGS PERFORMANCE

FEATURES

EASE OF USE

VALUE FOR MONEY

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 59

BOX FRESH

PANASONIC VIERA TH-P58V10A I

t can be a bit difficult to compare plasma TVs with LCD TVs, simply because there are few sizes shared by both. For the moment, mainstream LCD TVs top out at 140cm (55 inches), and most of the leading models range from somewhat to very much more expensive than this massive 147cm (58 inches) plasma TV from Panasonic.

FEATURES Unlike some of the competition, the Panasonic Viera TH-P58V10A plasma doesn’t include networking (Panasonic seems to prefer putting that feature in its source devices). Nor does it have built-in recipes, or artworks to turn the TV into an active art gallery. What it does have in the way of advanced extras is an SD card reader that supports AVCHD video files (the format used

60 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

by Panasonic card-based video cameras) and JPEG photos. Everything else about this TV is focused on its primary functions as being, a) a TV, and b) a display device. So it comes with lots of inputs including four HDMI sockets and even two S-Video plugs, a connection standard being abandoned by some of the competition. The panel is another of Panasonic’s ‘NeoPDP’ models, which is improved in specification from last year’s model. Panasonic claims a 40,000:1 native contrast ratio for the panel, bumped up to 2,000,000:1 by dynamic processing. This processing revolves around the panel’s ‘600Hz Subfield drive’. The ‘600 Hz’ is the number of times per second that the pixels are switched on and off, allowing black and colour levels to be controlled more precisely by varying the length of

PANASONIC VIERA TH-P58V10A

time that they are displayed, in addition to their intensity. The TV is supplied with a desktop stand that you will have to assemble. This was an easy process, apart from the actual lifting of the TV’s near 50 kilograms onto it.

PERFORMANCE A few months ago I reviewed a 50 inch Panasonic model and couldn’t see any effect from having its ‘Intelligent Frame Creation’ option switched on. This TV was quite different. It did its job of creating interpolated frames so as to smooth motion. It also went under a different name – ‘24p Smooth Film’ – when I used the TV to display Blu-ray material. With both DVDs and Blu-ray it smoothed out onscreen movement very thoroughly, but came with side-effects: an unnatural sheen to the image as lowlevel noise was ironed out by the processing; and a heat haze effect around some of the moving objects on screen. After checking it out, I switched it off and left it off. While having it off meant that on some movie scenes with substandard cinematography there was motion judder, no visibility was lost. LCD TVs by contrast rely on such systems to ensure that good detail is visible during motion. The colour and brightness performance was excellent. With the ‘Normal’ picture setting, the default settings were very close to an ideal neutral. I brought down the ‘Brightness’ control by just one notch to give slightly deeper blacks and that made the picture very nearly perfect.

“I BROUGHT DOWN THE ‘BRIGHTNESS’ CONTROL BY JUST ONE NOTCH TO GIVE SLIGHTLY DEEPER BLACKS AND THAT MADE THE PICTURE VERY NEARLY PERFECT” The digital TV tuner worked just as it should, and gave particularly nice results with HDTV stations. SDTV also performed quite well, however the softer TV programs were mercilessly revealed as such by this TV. The one substandard aspect of performance was this TV’s deinterlacing of PAL DVDs. It produced various irritating artefacts, so it would be best used with a good progressive scan DVD player.

CONCLUSION That point aside, the Panasonic Viera TH-P58V10A Plasma TV is the best way – for quality and value – to watch high quality home entertainment on a screen this size. Thomas Bartlett

SPECIFICATIONS Category: Plasma TV Price: $4599 Warranty: one year Contact: Panasonic Australia 132 600 www.panasonic.com.au Image: Plasma; 147cm (58 inch) diagonal; 16:9 native aspect, 1920 x 1080 pixels; brightness not stated; 40,000:1 native contrast ratio; 2,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio Inputs: 4 x composite video, 2 x S-Video, 2 x component video (supporting progressive scan and HD), 1 x D-SUB15 RGB, 4 x HDMI, 4 x stereo audio, 1 SD card reader (for photo display) Outputs: 1 x composite video, 1 x analog stereo audio, 1 x optical digital, 1 x headphone Audio: two speakers, each 160mm x 40mm, stereo, 2 x 10 watts @ 10% THD Features: NeoPDP panel, 600 Hz Sub-field Drive, HD digital TV tuner, analog TV tuner, EPG, photo display and AVCHD video playback from Secure Digital cards (including SDHC), 100,000 hour panel service life Supplied accessories: remote control; manual; desktop swivel stand Energy rating: 2 stars, 1455kWh/ year Dimensions (WHD): 1422 x 880 x 93mm (without stand) Weight: 49kg (without stand)

PROS AND CONS Brilliant value for money Full high definition picture Excellent colour Excellent HDTV tuner Excellent video processing Poor deinterlacing of 576i DVD material RATINGS PERFORMANCE

FEATURES

EASE OF USE

VALUE FOR MONEY

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 61

BOX FRESH

SONOS ZONEPLAYER S5 T

he Sonos ZonePlayer S5 is a multi-room digital music solution that can operate wirelessly – almost – and be operated remotely, thanks to several smart control options. Essentially a streaming device, the ZonePlayer S5 doesn’t ‘play’ music

62 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

itself, but rather retrieves it – plus podcasts and internet radio stations – from any device (PC, iPod or NAS drive, for instance) on your home broadband network – and broadcasts it via five inbuilt speakers. A basic Sonos setup requires a broadband connection, a router and a ZonePlayer S5 to connect to – and play – your digital music library. An Ethernet cable between the router and the S5 is all you need to get started in a single-zone setup, but if you want music in more rooms, you’ll need to connect a Zone Bridge ($179) to your router to enable wireless streaming to S5 ZonePlayers in each additional room. Sonos says the system will support up to 15 ZonePlayers, allowing you to play the same song in every room at the same time, or play different songs in different rooms simultaneously. (Sonos offers two other ZonePlayer models, but these don’t integrate speakers so are best if you already have speakers to pair them with.) To control music in each zone, there’s the Sonos Controller 200 ($699) and dock, or the supplied Sonos Desktop Controller software that you load onto your PC. If you already have an iPhone or iPod Touch, a free application download from iTunes

SONOS ZONEPLAYER S5 gives you all the same functionality of the Controller 200, and saves you a bundle.

SETTING UP Quick start-up instructions are staring right up at you as you open the box, nestled in an indentation in the polystyrene packaging. This is great thinking and a wonderful start. Lifting it from its box, the S5 ZonePlayer unit is a single, white block with good heft. It’s slightly plasticky to the touch, but overall feels reassuringly weighty and solid. There’s a nice handhold to the rear, making the unit eminently portable, but no control interface other than top-mounted volume buttons. Declaring its colours from the outset, number one instruction on the quick setup guide is to connect the ribbon Ethernet cable from your router to the main speaker unit. Then it’s over to the PC to install the Sonos Desktop Controller software. If you live in a palatial dwelling, make sure your PC and the ZonePlayer are reasonably close to each other, because the next step is to synch them together by pressing and releasing a couple of buttons within two minutes of being prompted. Should be fine unless you’re the Queen of England. The last step is to set up your software library. This is far from idiot proof; you’re going to need to be reasonably familiar with networking services on your computer, and how to turn folder and media ‘sharing’ on for the stuff you want to access via the ZonePlayer. If you’re not, however, don’t be put off, because the Sonos software will attempt to give guidance, using the wizard and their website.

FEATURES The Sonos S5 ZonePlayer system is built to retrieve your digital music from wherever your might have put it: from your iPhone, your desktop PC, Mac or laptop computer and, in fact, any other connected digital device you can think of. It’s compatible

“YOU CAN DOWNLOAD A CONTROLLER APP FOR AN IPHONE OR IPOD TOUCH FOR FREE AND GET ALL THE SAME CONTROLS WITHOUT HAVING TO SPRING FOR THE $699 DEDICATED SONOS CONTROLLER 200” with every imaginable popular sound format and will link with virtually any digital music device you own. You can also stream music services like Audible, Last.fm and Rhapsody, as well as social networking services like Twitter. Once you’ve chosen your libraries and services, play can be initiated via the Sonos Desktop Controller. You can choose which particular zone you’re influencing, adding a zone for each ZonePlayer you’ve bought, and whatever’s playing at that moment will be displayed visually, including cover art if you have it. On the technical front, the S5 is a five-driver speaker system, comprising two tweeters, two mid-range drivers

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 63

BOX FRESH

Sonos S5 Zone Player, iPod with Controller software and Sonos Controller 200. Picture also includes alternative Zone Players, which pair with speakers of your choice.

and a 3.5-inch subwoofer, each powered by a separate digital amp. Frequency response and power output specifications for the system are not provided.

PERFORMANCE Once the units are set up, performance is instant and impressive. It’s simple to select tunes from your own music library, create your own Sonos Playlists, or go to the Radio tab to hear someone else jabber on. Testing the radio performance, a double click on one of the listed stations in the desktop software results in an instantaneous switch on the ZonePlayer. Switching between stored music is similarly quick, with only a brief cursor swirl before the new track kicks in. Anything played gets put in a new ‘queue’ list and so is easily revisited later, or you can manually build up a queue of your own in advance and save that queue as a new playlist. In terms of operation, the ZonePlayer S5 is easily the best I’ve tested for some time. The interface is simple and intuitive and response is immediate but, better still, you can download a controller app for an iPhone or iPod Touch for free and get all the same controls without having to spring for the $699 dedicated Sonos Controller 200.

Sound quality is really good, but not amazing. It’s all a bit tinny in the mid range, although there’s very good bass; more so if you place the unit on the floor! The quality of your digital recordings is a factor, of course, but you can pump the volume to maximum without significant distortion and the sound admirably filled the large rooms we used.

CONCLUSION Setup is very straightforward and the sound quality is extremely good considering the size of the unit and the source material. It’s a shame the S5 ZonePlayer doesn’t have wireless connectivity to the router out of the box, instead of having to buy a ZoneBridge but, in operation, the S5 couldn’t be easier to use, and the free Apple application adds considerable icing to the cake. At $699 for the first ZonePlayer S5, another $699 for each additional player and $180 for a ZoneBridge relay unit, this is not a particularly cheap multi-room digital music system, sitting somewhere in the middle of the current crop, but if we had the money for three or more units, we’d be sold. Max Everingham

SPECIFICATIONS Category: Wireless music system Price: $699 (ZoneBridge, $179) Warranty: 12 months Contact: Playback Systems (03) 9874 0800 www.playback.com.au Speakers: 2x tweeters, 2x 3 inch midrange drivers, 1x 3.5 inch woofer Power: 5 x Class D amplifiers; output not stated Supported sound formats: MP3, iTunes Plus, WMA, AAC (MPEG4), Ogg Vorbis, Audible (format 4), Apple Lossless, FLAC (lossless), uncompressed WAV and AIFF Album art supported: JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF Playlists supported: iTunes, WinAmp, Windows Media Player, and MusicMatch (.m3u, .pls, .wpl) Inputs: Ethernet, audio line-in, AC mains power Features: built-in wireless capability, top-panel volume and mute controls, headphone connection, iPhone™ or iPod® touch control, auto-detecting 3.5mm audio line-in connection, Internet radio streaming (MP3, WMA); Operating systems (for stored files): Windows XP SP2 and higher; Mac OS X v10.4 and higher; NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices supporting CIFS Dimensions (HWD): 217 x 365 x 123 mm Weight: 4.15 kg

PROS AND CONS Fantastic remote operation options Works as promised Radio is very clear ZonePlayer itself not wireless to router RATINGS PERFORMANCE

FEATURES

EASE OF USE

VALUE FOR MONEY

64 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

CEDIA CEDIA INSTALLER DIRECTORY

WANT A CUSTOM INSTALL? Make sure you use a CEDIA CERTIFIED PROFESSIONAL and have peace of mind. CEDIA members specialize in the planning, design, supply, installation and concealment of automated electronic systems for the modern, intelligent home. They can install anything from multi-room audio and home cinema systems to complete home networks and sub-systems which intelligently control lighting, HVAC and even garden areas. For more information go to www.cedia.com.au

ACT Millennium Audio Visual Unit C, 66 Maryborough St. Fyshwick ACT 2609 02 6162 3330 www.mav.com.au Sound Advice Australia 21 Molonglo Mall Fyshwick ACT 2609 02 6280 8777 www.soundadvice.com.au

NSW Advanced Entertainment Systems Unit 14 12 Cecil Road Hornsby, NSW 2077 02 9477 3377 www.aesonline.com.au Andrew Parker Custom AV Installations 5 Honeysuckle Place Kellyville, NSW 2155 02 8824 7177 www.andrewparker.com.au Audio Connection 455 - 40Parramatta Road Leichhardt, NSW 2040 02 9518 3000 www.audioconnection.com.au Audio Connection (Caringbah) 381 Port Hacking Road Caringbah NSW 2229 02 9518 3000 www.audioconnection.com.au

Castle Integrated Media 372 B Military Road Cremorne NSW 2090 02 9953 8037 www.castleintegrated.com.au CHM Electronics 138 / 2 - 18 Buchanan Street Balmain NSW 2041 02 9566 2570 www.chmelectronics.com CONNEXIONS (NSW) Pty Ltd 19C Grace Ave Frenchs Forest, NSW 2086 02 9453 2766 connexions@cnxns.com.au Control Freq Suite 422, 29 Smith Street Parramatta NSW 2150 02 9632 5999 www.controlfreq.com.au Custom Home Electronics PO Box 564 Hamilton, NSW 2303 02 4940 0409 jefferson@customhomeelectronics.com.au David Leisk Electronics 25/1 Short Street Chatswood, NSW 2067 02 9882 3733 www.davidleisk.com.au E.C.S. Services Pty Ltd 22 Forestwood Cr West Pennant Hills, NSW 2125 02 9871 4061 www.ecss.com.au

Audio Connection (Drummoyne) 137 Victoria Road Drummoyne NSW 2047 02 9561 0788 www.audioconnection.com.au

EBM Systems PO Box 1865 Hornsby Westfield, NSW 1635 02 9029 9245 www.ebmsystems.com.au

Audio Solutions 1133 Botany Road, Mascot, NSW 2020 02 9317 3330 www.audiosolutions.net.au

Electronic Environments 1 Lansdowne Parade Oatley, NSW 2223 02 9585 1233 www.electronicenvironments.com.au

Audio Visual & Security Unlimited 5/686 New South Head Road Rose Bay, NSW 2029 02 9371 2052 www.audiovisualunlimited.com.au

Eris McCarthy Home Technology PO Box 8099 Tumbi Umbi, NSW 2261 02 4389 1990 www.erismccarthy.com.au

Audio Visual Lifestyle 86 Merewether Street Merewether NSW 2291 02 49 635304 avlifestyle@exemail.com.au

Harvey Norman Commercial Home Automation Systems 15 - 21 Atkinson Rd Taren Point, NSW 2229 02 9710 4321 www.hncommercial.com.au

Automated Innovation Unit 2, 51 Pacific Highway Bennetts Green NSW 2290 02 49 484812 www.automatedinnovation.com.au

Home Control & Audio PO Box 1324 Sutherland NSW 2232 02 9528 0071 www.homecontrolandaudio.com.au

AVD Australia Pty Ltd 55 Atchison Street St Leonards NSW 2065 02 9906 2424 www.avd.com.au

66 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | OCTOBER/NOVEMBER

Infra Red Entertainment & Automated Interiors Ste. 2, 11 Albany Street St Leonards, NSW 2065 02 9439 6444 www.infrared.com.au Insound Pty Ltd 108 West Street Crows Nest, NSW 2065 02 9954 9122 tex@insound.com.au Instinct Electrical PO Box 557 Dee Why, NSW 2099 02 9938 3188 www.instinctelectrical.com.au Intelligent Control Systems ‘ICS’ 13/3 Apollo Street Warriewood, NSW 2102 02 9999 0766 www.icsonline.net.au IntelliStream PO Box 4018 Kotara East,NSW 2305 02 4957 8820 www.intellistream.com.au JFK Audio Visual L3, 18/81-91 Military Road Neutral Bay NSW 2089 0414 434 535 www.jfk.com.au Jory Home Systems Pty Ltd 6 Morrisey Way Rouse Hill, NSW 2155 02 9836 5132 www.joryelectric.com Len Wallis Audio 64 Burns Bay Road Lane Cove, NSW 2066 02 9427 6755 www.lenwallisaudio.com Life Style Store Pty Ltd Unit 8 - The Junction, 2 Windsor Road Parramatta, NSW 2150 02 9683 7222 www.lifestylestore.com.au LovemyTV PO Box 3320 Sutherland, NSW 2234 0439 888 113 www.lovemytv.com.au Matrix Audio Visual Services 22 Palm Street St Ives, NSW 2075 02 9440 0282 bradley@matrixaudiovisual.com.au McLeans Smarter Home Entertainment Cnr Minto & The Entrance Roads Long Jetty, NSW 2261 02 4333 3545 www.mcleans.info Neutral Bay Hi Fi 89 Spofforth Street Mosman, NSW 2088 02 9908 1285 nbhifi@bigpond.net.au New Fidelity Pty Ltd 392 Darling Street Balmain, NSW 2041 02 9818 2333 www.newfidelity.com.au Nova Comm Pty Ltd 8 / 280 New Line Road Dural, NSW 2158 02 9651 6430 www.novacomm.com.au Onetouch PO Box 3002 Balgownie, NSW 2519 0437 649634 mick@onetouch.net.au OPOC Solutions Pty Ltd 1 Campbell Avenue Normanhurst NSW 2076 02 9489 0906 www.opoc.com.au

Pacific Hi Fi 62 Macquarie Stree Liverpool NSW 2170 02 9600 6655 www.pacifichifi.com.au Smart Home Solutions Unit 21 56 O’Riordan Street Alexandria, NSW 2015 02 9304 4700 www.smarthomes.com.au Sturman Electronics Pty Ltd 443 Crown Street West Wollongong, NSW 2500 02 4226 6690 www.sturmans.com.au Sydney HiFi ASV PO Box 150 Mascot, NSW 2020 02 9578 0118 www.sydneyhifi.com.au Sydney Home Cinema Pty Ltd PO Box 6072 Narraweena NSW 2099 0413 397 256 www.sydneyhomecinema.com.au TJA Communications PO Box 300 Seven Hills, NSW 2147 02 9838 4622 www.tjacom.com.au The Directors Chair Sydney Tenant 6, Level 1, Rear 290 Botany Road Alexandria, NSW 2017 1300 652480 www.thedirectorschair.com.au The Silent Butler 57 Himalaya Crescent Seven Hills NSW 2147 0416 153 433 www.thesilentbutler.com.au Tomorrows 430 New South Head Road Double Bay NSW 2028 1300 880 840 www.tomorrows.com.au Zeale Group P.O. Box 1196 Albury NSW 2640 02 6041 1484 www.zealegroup.com.au

QLD Audio Dreams Australia 17 Lillypilly Place Mooloolaba, QLD 4557 07 5444 8122 www.audiodreams.com.au Auztech Industries Pty Ltd PO Box 4368 Logenholme DC, QLD 4129 07 3806 3133 www.auztech.com.au AVTEC 12 Buckle Court Sinnamon Park QLD 4073 07 3279 6353 www.avtec.com.au Custom Install PO Box 1250, Spring Hill, QLD 4004 07 3277 9823 www.custominstall.com.au Digital Brilliance PO Box 981 Buderim QLD 4556 07 5445 2180 www.digitalbrilliance.com.au Electronic Interiors Brisbane (Formerly Toombul Music) 2 / 180 Northgate Road Northgate, QLD 4013 07 3266 2533 www.einteriors.com.au Electronic Living 14 Smallwood Place Murarrie QLD 4012 1300 764 554 www.electronicliving.com.au

Fi Audio Video 3/3 Gibson Road Noosaville, QLD 4566 07 5455 6300 www.fiaudiovideo.com.au Harvey Norman Home Automation PO Box 5935 GCMC Bundall, QLD 4217 07 5584 3128 joe.blair@au.harveynorman.com HomeTech Systems Pty Ltd PO Box 979 Nerang QLD 4211 07 5502 0760 info@hometechsystems.com.au Home Theatrix - Bundall 56 Ashmore Road, Bundall, QLD 4127 07 5531 7244 www.hometheatrix.com.au Home Theatrix - Murarrie Unit 11 Nautilus Business Park 210 Queensport Rd Murarrie, QLD 4172 1 300 555 270 www.hometheatrix.com.au Look & Listen 6 Ascot Street Murarrie QLD 4172 1300 765 322 www.lookandlisten.com.au In Sight & Sound Pty Ltd 125 Shamley Heath Road Kureelpa, QLD 4560 07 5445 7799 www.in-sight.com.au Power Integration 9 Senden Crescent Manly West QLD 4179 1300 797 468 www.powerintegration.com.au Star Home Theatre 17 Trenton Street Kenmore, QLD 4069 07 3701 5288 www.starhometheatre.com.au Stereo Supplies Gold Coast Mail Centre PO Box 6817, Gold Coast QLD 9726 07 5531 7955 www.stereosupplies.com.au The Big Picture 14/96 Gardens Drive Willawong QLD 4110 1300 799 734 mskehan@thebigpictureav.com.au The Directors Chair Brisbane 3 / 49 Jijaws Street Sumner Park, QLD 4074 07 3376 7065 www.thedirectorschair.com.au Todds Sound & Vision 1 308 New Cleveland Road Tingalpa, QLD 4173 07 3907 7777 www.todds.com.au Videopro Level 1 1062 Ann Street Fortitude Valley, QLD 4006 07 3250 0000 www.videopro.com.au Visiontronics Unit 1/7 Endeavor Drive Kunda Park QLD 4556 1300 306 893 www.visiontronics.com.au Visual Focus 16 Clifford Street Toowoomba QLD 4350 617 4632 0402 www.visualfocus.com.au

Interior Sound and Vision PO Box 1093, Niddrie, VIC 3042 03 9336 7643 www.isvinfo.com.au

Northam Home Cinema 5 Oliver Street Northam, WA 6401 08 9622 5198 bevanautopro@westnet.com.au

Inteverge Pty Ltd PO Box 2501, Kew, VIC 3101 0409 178 076 www.inteverge.com

Surround Custom Unit 3, 83-85 Stirling Highway Nedlands, WA 6009 08 9389 7755 www.surroundsounds.com.au

TAS

Smart Systems Pty Ltd 0Church Street, Hawthorn, VIC 3122 03 9818 8006 www.smartsystems.com.au

Surround Sounds Unit 3, 83-85 Stirling Highway Nedlands, WA 6009 08 9389 6900 www.surroundsounds.com.au

Nation Technology Level 1, 2 Trotters Lane Prospect, TAS 7250 03 6343 0655 www.nationtechnology.com

Steve Bennett Hi Fi 174 Ryrie Street, Geelong, VIC 3220 03 5221 6011 www.sbhifi.com.au

Ultimation 488 Scarborough Beach Rd Osborne Park WA 6017 1 300 880 544 www.ultimation.com.au

Soundtech Integrated Systems 262 York Street Launceston TAS 7250 03 6331 9900 david@soundtech.net.au

Tasman AV Pty Ltd 6 Hood St, Collingwood, VIC 3066 03 9416 2255 www.tasmanav.com.au

Vince Ross Audio World 162 Stirling Highway Nedlands, WA 6009 08 9386 8144 www.vinceross.com.au

VIC

Advanced Lifestyle Solutions Pty Ltd PO Box 360, Niddrie, VIC 3042 03 8307 5618 www.advancedlifestylesolutions.com.au

AVARNTI 1/ 325 Harborne St Osborne Park, WA 6017 08 9443 1288 www.avarnti.com

ALETRO Ltd PO Box 9680 Newmarket, Auckland +64 9 307 1238 www.aletro.com

Audio Trends 10 Argent Place Ringwood Vic 3135 03 9874 8233 www.audiotrends.com.au

Digital Interiors 319 Hay Street Subiaco, WA 6008 0417 921 223 www.digitalinteriors.com.au

Automation Associates PO Box 109722 Newmarket - Auckland +64 9 377 3778 www.aa.net.nz

Cableman Pty Ltd Level 1/1227 Glen Huntly Road Glen Huntly, VIC 3163 03 9572 8900 www.cableman.com.au

Douglas Hi Fi Enterprises Pty Ltd 401 Murray Street Perth, WA 6000 08 9322 3466 www.douglashifi.com.au

Liquid Automation P.O. Box 300753 Albany Auckland 632 +64 9 444 2440 www.liquidautomation.co.nz

Carlton Audio Visual 164 - 172 Lygon St, Carlton, VIC 3053 03 9639 2737 www.carltonaudiovisual.com.au

ECA Systems Unit 2/13 Clark Street Dunsborough WA 6281 1300 858 897 www.ecasystems.com.au

Smartline 37 Cracroft Street, Waitara, Fitzroy New Plymouth 64 6 754 6771 www.homenet.net.nz

Custom Home Theatre PO Box 963 Berwick VIC 3806 03 9796 2617 www.customhometheatre.com.au

Electronic Interiors WA 125 Burswood Road Burswood, WA 6100 08 9472 4800 www.einteriors.com.au

Encel Stereo - Richmond 84 Bridge Road, Richmond, VIC 3121 03 9428 3761 www.encelstereo com.au

Essential Cabling 1 / 6 Chullora Bend Jandakot WA 6164 08 94141961 mcairns@arach.net.au

Frankston Hi Fi 450 Nepean Highway Frankston, VIC 3199 03 9781 1111 www.frankstonhifi.com.au

Frank Prowse Hi-Fi 6-14 Glyde Street Mosman Park, WA 6012 08 9384 1362 www.frankprowsehifi.com.au

Hidden Technology P.O. Box 1084 Altona Meadows 3028 03 8685 8544 www.hiddentechnology.com.au

Hillstone Communications PO Box 599 Kalamunda, WA 6926 08 9293 3621 hillstone@westnet.com.au

howdoi.com pty ltd 6a / 4 Rocklea Drive Port Melbourne, VIC 3207 03 9646 9116 www.howdoi.com.au

Home Cinema Systems 2 / 18 Port Kembla Drive Bibra Lake WA 6163 08 9434 5556 www.homecinemasystems.com.au

IBS Audio Visual Pty Ltd 43 Dalgety Street Oakleigh VIC 3166 03 9568 2800 www.ibsav.com.au

Intelligent Home Automated Solutions 25 Wittenoom Street East Perth, WA 6004 08 9325 7775 www.intelligenthome.com.au

Impact Electrics 3 England Street Bentleigh East, VIC 3165 03 9209 8140 impactelectrics@optusnet.com.au

Light Application Pty Ltd 78 Erindale Road Balcatta WA 6021 08 9240 6644 www.lightapplication.com.au

Integrated Technologies Australia PO Box 570, Kilsyth, VIC 3137 03 9761 8700 www.integratedtechnologiesaustralia.com.au

Lynx Integrated Systems Unit 5 / 74 Kent Way Malaga WA 6090 sales@lynxis.com.au

Harvey Norman Mile End PO Box 288 Torrensville, SA 5031 08 8150 8000 www.harveynorman.com.au Sound & Vision Studio 237 Greenhill Road Dulwich, SA 5065 08 8364 4000 www.sv-studio.com.au

Sound Advice First PO Box 12-145 Christchurch 8002 +64 3 379 9416 www.soundadvicefirst.com Soundline Audio Ltd Box 2650, Christchurch 8002 +64 3 379 5695 www.soundline.co.nz Soundline Audio Ltd Capital Gateway Centre, 56 Thorndon Quay Wellington +64 4 471 0542 www.soundline.co.nz The Listening Post 657 Victoria Street Hamilton +64 7 839 0135 www.listening.co.nz Strawberry Sound 90 Falsgrove Street Christchurch +64 3 379 8477 www.strawberrysound.co.nz Strawberry Sound 21 Bath Street Dunedin +64 3 477 7742 www.strawberrysound.co.nz

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 67

DIGITAL SHACK

68 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

SOUND IN THE AIR Today, there is no reason why the music in your home need to be shackled to a particular room. Thomas Bartlett explains how wireless multi-room audio systems make it easy to share the tunes around. It’s hard to enjoy your favourite song if it fades and then wells up, simply because you’re leaving the room containing your stereo, and then returning again. Why not have music throughout your home, and even out in the back patio? Why not have it controllable from several rooms so that no matter where you are, you can change tracks on the CD, stations on the radio or merely mute and pause when the telephone rings? A multi-room audio system allows you to achieve all this. It delivers the soundtrack from a single source – or multiple sources, such as a CD, DVD, radio – simultaneously to different rooms, or, conversely, plays the same synchronised audio source in every room. So how do you going about setting up such a music distribution system? What are the options? And how can you do it without having to have a new set of cables laid throughout your home! The answer is wireless audio. There are several broad terms for these kinds of systems. Mostly, they are called multi-room or client/ server music systems. Some are proprietary, with all the parts from the one supplier. Others can use elements from different manufacturers to unleash the musical contents of your computer – or a portable music player – throughout your home.

Some require you to do quite a bit of work and configuration. With others you simply open up cardboard boxes, plug things in, switch them on and press a couple of buttons. One way or the other, there is certainly something to meet your needs.

Wireless multi-room systems Music wherever you want to be No need for major renovations to lay cable Plenty of choices for the best system for your needs Some environments may limit range with wireless systems Should think ahead carefully to make sure it will fully work with your preferred portable player and the formats it supports Some systems can be rather expensive

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 69

DIGITAL SHACK

Elements of wireless music systems Server: The storehouse of all digital music files, such as: • A computer • A portable music player • A NAS drive • A server from a proprietary system, such as Sonos or Yamaha MusicCast Client: This receives the digital music from the server. Some clients then feed the music to an existing playback device (your stereo). Others have the sound system built in. Examples: • A wireless media adaptor (connects to AV receiver and sound system) • An integrated wireless network receiver/speaker, such as an internet or DAB+ digital radio • A network AV receiver • A network PVR, such as Tivo or Beyonwiz • A network games consoles, such as PS3 or Xbox • A client from a proprietary system, such as Sonos or Yamaha MusicCast

You are being served Whichever way you go, they will have some characteristics in common. The first is that they all have two main parts: at least one server and at least one client, although there are usually more of the latter. The server is the source. It is the device which holds your music, or acts as a conduit bringing it from elsewhere. It is the centre point, and makes the music available to the system. A client is a receiver of the music from the server. The client is where you are, which is why you have a number of them. It is usually the speakers and amplifier, in addition to the receiver, but not necessarily. Sometimes it can be a compact standalone receiver which is plugged into another sound system. Of course, normally the system will have one server, but can have multiple clients. Depending on the capacity of the system,

A digital amplifier in every client The advent of digital amplifiers has changed the game with distributed music systems. Way back when – say a couple of years ago – you’d have a central multichannel power amplifier (offering eight channels was a typical configuration) and then have speaker cable piping the music in mono or stereo to various rooms. The digital amplifier made it sensible to have the amplifier at the other end of the chain, where the speaker is. You see, digital amplifiers are highly efficient. Most of the power they use is turned into power to drive the loudspeaker, unlike the large percentage wasted as heat with traditional designs. Consequently, they don’t need to be designed with weighty heat sinks. So they can be – and are – built into the compact plastic boxes that also contain the client electronics.

you might have a client in every room of the house. Let’s just recap this briefly, and explain how the music flows. In the most straight forward system, the music is sitting on a server. That server will use a wireless signal to broadcast the music around your home. It will be received by one or more clients elsewhere in your home. The client will, typically, present information about the music on a screen and allow you to change selections. And, of course, the client will play your music. The client provides a communication link back to the server so that it will change tracks, albums, radio stations or whatever on your request. Sometimes you might have a separate wireless ‘controller’ – a handheld device like a remote control, often with an LCD screen – which acts as the controller. With these, the server provides information about the music so that you can select the songs to play and so on.

The computer as server We shall turn shortly to proprietary systems, but many people already have a huge investment in a server already sitting in their homes. If you have a computer, an iPod or other portable media player, there’s a good chance you already have thousands of music tracks just waiting to be fed to your audio system. Just think: no more switching CDs. Instead, you can just pick what you want from a list on the TV screen! Actually, the computer is doing a relatively simple job here: holding your music on its hard disk drive/s, and making it available over the network in a ‘DLNA’ (Digital Living Network Alliance) compatible way, ensuring that it will work with lots of other DLNA equipment. DLNA looks after formats to ensure that track lists and the music itself is compatible between the various devices. The networking function, whether wired or Wi-Fi, is merely the channel used. DLNA is so simple, it fact, that you can dispense with the computer. At least on a day-to-day basis. Instead, you can use DLNA-compliant ‘NAS’. That stands for Network Attached Storage.

Despite their diminutive dimensions, these can offer 40 or 50 watts of power, which can provide quite a blast. Since there is no way any more that you can have a sense of how powerful an amplifier is just by looking at it, you will either need to inspect the specifications or the unit, or be confident that the brand is reputable. The compatible sound Once upon a time MP3 was King. It provided generally adequate audio quality with compact files sizes. That was important if you were downloading a track over a 56kB/s modem, or filling up your MP3 player via a serial connection (think an hour to load an hour of music on the player!) But these days a typical media server or NAS box would be expected to have a terabyte – one thousand gigabytes – of space available. So there is no reason

70 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

why you can’t enjoy networked sound of full CD quality. And you won’t even have to use full CD capacity, if you choose your equipment wisely. Choose a system that supports one of the ‘lossless’ compression formats. The main three are Apple Lossless, Windows Lossless and FLAC. The last is non-proprietary. These compress the digital audio files by about 50 percent, but lose none of the original sound, unlike MP3 and similar. The choice from among the three is probably best determined by your portable player. The iPod supports only Apple Lossless, whereas non-Apple players tend to support Windows Lossless or FLAC, and sometimes both. Quality-wise, they are all the same. If you purchase equipment that supports them, then you will receive sound as good as it gets.

Basically a box containing one or more hard disk drives, NAS was originally intended just to be a data repository on a network. But some models have DLNA-server software, and these can supply music to the clients digitally without even having a computer switched on. Of course, you still need a computer to manage its contents.

A simple server with a computer Configuring home networks and getting the various parts of it to talk to each other used to be a nightmare. With wired networks it has been becoming steadily simpler, to the point where these days it is pretty much a case of just plugging everything into the network. When the network is running, all you need to do is plug in a client and run media server software on your computer. In the case of Windows, you probably already have the server software installed: Windows Media Player 11 or later provides this functionality. The most common client devices are games consoles, such as the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, but they now also include some home theatre receivers, and even TVs. One thing is becoming clear: network capability is moving into more and more consumer electronics, so next year will probably see even more regular devices being able to act as media clients. When you plug your client device into network, all you have to do is answer a pop-up on the computer granting permission for

Network AV receivers can tap into the music on your PC and play it through attached speakers.

the device to make use of the media server. That’s pretty much the same for wireless as well, except that you will have to enter the wireless security password (called the WEP Key on many networks) on the client. Find the right menu and the client will guide you through configuring its connection. After that your client is ready to play music. Find its music menu and select the server. Depending on the device, you will see something like ‘Windows Media Player’ or perhaps the ‘Name’ of the computer, or both. Select that and then menus for choosing artist, album and so forth will be presented. The media server provides not just the music, but the menu lists and song titles and such, so that you can access your

Sharing the sound SERVER Computer/HDD Wireless router

CLIENT

Wireless media adaptor

Network receiver

TiVo

Wireless media receiver

PS3

Xbox 360 Roberts internet radio

Stereo or home theatre system

Sonos S5 DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 71

DIGITAL SHACK

Computer serving

Proprietary serving

Low cost Many people already have computer loaded with audio

Easy installation Many audiophile options

Almost infinitely expandable in capacity Integration of equipment may require more work

Smoother user operation Often locked in to one supplier

Can be file compatibility issues Not necessarily audiophile quality

computer’s musical contents without having to go near it, just use the client’s own remote control and a TV screen. The client may not be a games machine or a particularly highend piece of audio kit, but simply one of an increasing number of reasonably priced network clients designed to deliver audio from your computer. Many of these also provide internet radio station capability.

Off the shelf In many ways the more elegant way is to go for one of the proprietary systems offered by a number of manufacturers. In a sense, they work in the same way as the computer systems we have outlined, but released from ‘standards’, these can provide marked advantages. Obviously, they deliver the sound over the air in digital format, just like the computer solutions. But they do not necessarily use

Many clients wirelessly access internet radios and the music contents of your PC.

72 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

Relatively expensive May have to start from scratch with media collection

computer network protocols. This can be an advantage. Computer networking is designed around the concept of getting all the data from one place to another with a high degree of integrity. If that means that the last part of the data arrives first, that’s fine. The receiving computer will put things together in the right order. But sound is something that must be presented in a series. Certainly integrity is vital, but timing is just as important. A song does not sound very good if it has to stop playing while a ‘packet’ of data is awaited, then assembled into the correct order. The technical details of how the data is supplied from server to clients is not important here, except to note that in most cases robustness has been a primary design consideration. In some cases, the system’s server has its own storage built in – a large hard disk drive. In other cases it draws upon music already contained in – yes! – an existing computer network.

JBL provides a system that connects to a regular analog source - not a computer wirelessly. Two speakers come as part of the system.

The server/client relationship is not always so clear with these systems. Some provide both functions in the same box. You basically buy one wireless controller, which displays the music titles and so on, and as many server/receiver/amplifier combinations as you want. One of these must be plugged into the computer network, and then when configured into it as outlined earlier, this provides music wireless to the other unit, or multiple other units. The important points to look for here are compatibility with any existing network and computing system that you may already have, support for the types of files that you like, and of course, audio quality.

systems, wireless communications aren’t always without problems. Fully wired systems offer peerless reliability and greater capacity. Generally, such installations will be offered as ‘turnkey’ solutions, complete with an extremely powerful remote control system and provision for whatever level of home automation you may like. n

The third path If all this is too daunting and you have a solid budget that can be deployed, then there are a number of options involving professional installation. In general, these will not be wireless at all, but fully wired systems. Installers prefer these because even with modern

KEF’s proprietary wireless system for connecting stereo speakers to a regular analog source wirelessly – you supply the speakers.

Altech Lansing’s system streams music wirelessly from a computer or iPod to up to 8 clients in different rooms.

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 73

GEAR LOG

AMAZON KINDLE

Paperback killer? Paper-based book production kills trees. Loads of ‘em. Which is why the Kindle – or e-books like it – are the future of reading. The Kindle, made by Amazon, can store about 15,000 e-books, including illustrations, and weighs less than 300 grams. It’s not much bigger than a regular paperback, but the screen size is reduced to 15cm diagonally by a button pad that provides a number of functions. These include page turning, bookmarking, the ability to resize text and have books read out to you. The e-ink screen is easy on the eyes and, surprisingly paper-like, and lacking the backlight of LCD screens, offers long battery life. You can order the Kindle only via the internet, from Amazon’s US site, which now ships to Australia. Australian publications are not currently included in the Kindle store, but there are more than 285,000 international titles available for download. PRICE $US279 COMPANY Amazon WEBSITE www.amazon.com/kindle

ADAMO BY DELL

Style, meet laptop Dell’s latest Adamo laptops are very design focused – thin, light, and with enough style appeal to attract the most connected technorati. The Adamo XPS is, according to Dell, the thinnest laptop in the world at just under 1cm thick, but is fully phat on the inside, with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 4GB of headroom in the form of DDR3 RAM. Available only online, it also runs the new Windows 7 operating system and sports a 128GB solid state drive, the fastest species of storage available today. PRICE $2499 including delivery COMPANY Dell Computers WEBSITE www.adamobydell.com

RICOH GXR DIGITAL CAMERA

Lens on, slide off The swappable lens and sensor cartridge system of the Ricoh GXR digital camera is a world-first, effectively transforming a compact camera into a DSLR-type shooter with quick, easyswap interchangeable lenses. The cartridge assembly simply slides onto the camera body much like a dock, and because it encloses the lens, sensor and digital signal processing, the sensor is never exposed to dust as it is during lens changes on conventional DSLRs. Two lens systems are available currently: a 12 megapixel CMOS sensor with GR Engine II for portrait and macro photography (A12), and a 10 megapixel CCD sensor with 3x wide angle zoom for landscapes and snap shooting (S10). PRICE GXR body + A12, $1599 (A12 camera unit, $999) GXR body + S10 $999 (S10 camera unit, $649) COMPANY Ricoh Australia PHONE 02 9938 3244 WEBSITE www.tasco.com.au

74 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

The GadgetGuy™ presents great gear and top tech for your digital life HTC HERO

Hero of the Androids The Hero is HTC’s new toucscreen smartphone and the company’s third attempt at a robust Android handset. It’s an extremely attractive and well-designed phone that lacks the iPhone’s plasticky feel; it’s got a lovely matte finish on the reverse side, and an anti-fingerprint coating on the screen. Google Maps are built-in and the GPS managed to pick up a location in less than 5 seconds during our testing. The trackball feels smooth and gives gentle response, which is a nice, subtle touch, and there’s a five megapixel camera built-in too. The applications included are great, featuring music and video players that accept a generously wide variety of formats, and of course, the Android Marketplace, featuring over 10,000 downloadable applications. PRICE $799 COMPANY HTC Australia WEBSITE www.htc.com/au

VIEWSONIC PC MINI 550

Nice box Viewsonic’s solution to bulky, desktop-hungy computer boxes, the PC Mini 550 may have less surface area than an A4 sheet of paper, but is fully equipped for work with Microsoft Windows 7 onboard, 4GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive, and an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz processor for quieter, more energy efficient operation than traditional desktop PCs. With Windows Media Center and an integrated Blu-ray/DVD drive, the 550 will also pair nicely to a flat screen TV and home entertainment setup, and the included remote control will allow you to drive everything from the comfort of the couch. PRICE $1499 COMPANY Viewsonic WEBSITE www.viewsonic.com.au

WESTERN DIGITAL MYBOOK ELITE

Innovative ink So much of our digital lives reside on hard drives, but which hard drive? Western Digital’s MyBook Elite range uses the same display technology as some e-book readers to ‘label’ the drive – and you can read it without the need to plug it in and power it up. Positioned on the ‘spine’ of the drive, the information displayed can be changed as you update file contents, plus there’s a handy capacity gauge to let you know how much storage remains. The included WD SmartWare software backs up selected files automatically, and for added peace of mind, you can even confirm backup on your computer screen as it occurs. PRICE 1TB, $200; 1.5TB, $250 COMPANY Western Digital WEBSITE www.westerndigital.com

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 75

EARS & EYES & THUMBS

Entertainment for wherever you are — from movie room to laptop to mobile phone, and from HDTV to podcasts, DVDs and downloads. Compiled by Max Everingham.

HIGH DEFINITION MOVIES

STAR TREK

STARRING CHRIS PINE, ZACHARY QUINTO, LEONARD NIMOY & ERIC BANA DIRECTED BY JJ ABRAMS RATED: M DISTRIBUTOR: PARAMOUNT SOUND: 5.1 DOLBY TRUEHD

Every Christmas holiday period needs an epic blockbuster-style action movie the whole family can watch, and they don’t come better than the prequelicious Star Trek from Paramount. Out now on Blu-ray and DVD, Director JJ Abrams reinvents the charmingly silly sci-fi series as a genuinely exciting, funny and quite frantic space adventure romp, with a pace that far exceeds anything from the original series, largely possible, at the admission of JJ Abrams himself, thanks to much higher available budgets and better technology. The Blu-ray version of the film has all the deleted scenes, commentaries and gag reel found on its DVD counterpart but goes big on extras for fans stumping up the cash. There’s a whole extra (third) disc in the Blu-ray box that gives owners a ‘digital copy’, for use on portable devices or their PC, as well as a free trial version of the Star Trek D-A-C game. That’s a good bonus by itself, but the Blu-ray extras

MARY & MAX

are presented differently, with ‘branching pods’ that turn out to be referring to the menu system but also a BD-Live feature called NASA News, allowing space cadets to access real-life NASA news if they have their Blu-ray player connected via Ethernet. Really keen troopers can also get 360 views of both ships – the USS Enterprise and Narada, the Romulan Mining Vessel – in the Starfleet Vessel Simulator. Unfortunately, it’s not much more than an impressive but static 3D model of the ships, with static text boxes that won’t teach anything new to Trekkies and won’t be interesting to anyone else. Fantastic movie, though.

STARRING TONI COLLETTE, PHILLIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN, BARRY HUMPHRIES & ERIC BANA DIRECTED BY ADAM ELLIOT RATED PG DISTRIBUTOR: ICON SOUND: DTS-HD MASTER AUDIO 5.1

Mary & Max may be a ‘claymation’ film, made with those plasticinelike models that need to be photographed, minutely repositioned and photographed again ad infinitum, but it’s a world away from the

76 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

cutesy foppishness of the ‘Wallace and Gromit’ series. Made in Australia and written and directed by Oscar-winner Aussie Adam Elliot, this is a mostly dour and relentlessly sad tale about an unlikely friendship that develops over a lifetime – or many lifetimes if your name is Henry – between Mary, a lonely Australian child at the time the relationship starts, and Max, an obese, atheist Jew living in New York. Unlikely but captivating, the correspondence between the two starts off as endearing but develops along particularly adult lines. Only just skirting abject despair without tipping over into the abyss before emerging back into the light, Mary & Max is heavy in pathos. Even so, the film is unexpectedly uplifting in a sense, given its portrayal of affection without strings attached, despite its dismal denouement. The only special features not shared with the DVD version are some webisodes, the ‘young Mary’ audition, a ‘making of’ feature and a couple of alternate endings. But they saved the best for last and these alternate endings are both entertaining and funny.

Paramount gift sets

Paramount has a great big Santa sack of movies and boxset series to tempt you these holidays, catering for mums and grandmas, teenagers, little kids, dads and your significant other. Our pick of the bunch (Star Trek) is covered opposite but you might want to have a look at some of the others, too. If the current craze for all things Vampire is your scene, check out the Dexter: The Complete First Season, or the second, to fulfil that blood lust. Ramp up the octane levels with the Extreme Action Heroes Boxset, including Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Watchmen and Transformers or, for slightly tamer action, go questing with Indiana Jones: The Complete Adventure Collection, comprising the Special Editions of each of the four classic movies. And if you haven’t yet plunged into the bright and glistening blue pool that is Blu-ray, but a PS3 or Blu-ray player is under the Christmas tree or on the January sales’ wish list, pick up Paramount’s ‘Blu-ray Starter Pack’, which is a box of handy garden utensils for... no, just joking, it’s a pack of Blu-ray movies comprising Iron Man, Transformers, Tropic Thunder, Shooter and Tomb Raider to kick off your new collection.

INDIANA JONES: THE COMPLETE ADVENTURE COLLECTION Featuring the Special Editions of all four Indiana Jones films! RRP $65.00 RATED: M

TERMINATOR SALVATION STARRING CHRISTIAN BALE, SAM WORTHINGTON & HELENA BONHAM CARTER DIRECTED BY McG RATED: MA15+ DISTRIBUTOR: SONY PICTURES SOUND: DTS-HD MASTER AUDIO 5.1

Directed by TV and music man McG (blame his parents for the nickname), The Terminator Blu-ray offering is suitably machinelike in its presentation and actually offers a really decent line-up of extras. There’s an innovative (but useless?) ‘Cine-chat’ feature, allowing owners to conduct real-time chats with their ‘buddies’ over the BD Live service, provided they’ve signed up for an account, as well as a kind of ‘full Monty’ play mode for the film, hosted by the director, that mixes in all the extras as the film plays – ‘walk-ons’, PIP, ‘making of’ segments and so forth. If you want to watch these separately, the best in our opinion is Moto-Terminator and Hydrobots, which both feature some incredibly cool gadgetry and are perfect eye fodder for any redblooded male. These segments also introduce the phrase ‘digital double’, as opposed to ‘body double’, referring to all-digital substitution in film; very neat! Finally, it’s great to see Arnie reincarnated in An Icon Returns, particularly given the woeful physical specimen his Senator lifestyle has reduced the man to.

FAMILY GUY: SOMETHING SOMETHING, SOMETHING DARK SIDE

STARRING SETH MACFARLANE, ALEX BORSTEIN, MILA KUNIS & SETH GREEN DIRECTED BY DOMINIC POLCINO RATED: MA15+ DISTRIBUTOR: 20TH CENTURY FOX SOUND: 5.1 DTS HD MASTER AUDIO

A ‘re-telling’ of The Empire Strikes Back, the disc release of Family Guy: Something Something, Something Dark Side (or FG:SSSDS) – it’s easier and marginally less annoying – follows up from the last Star Wars send-up from the makers of Family Guy, Blue Harvest. We can’t tell from the press release alone if there are more, or better, extras on the Blu-ray version of the movie because it reproduces the exact same list for both. Both versions come with an extra digital copy, commentary, a behind the scenes feature and so forth, although the Blu-ray extras mysteriously extend a further 30 minutes beyond those on the DVD. So I guess you can buy it and find out – it can be your Christmas surprise.

EXTREME ACTION HEROES BOXSET Includes Iron Man, Transformers, Incredible Hulk, Watchmen RRP $63.00 RATED: TBA

BLU-RAY STARTER PACK

Featuring Iron Man (2 disc), Transformers (2 disc), Tropic Thunder, Shooter and Tomb Raider RRP $200.00 RATED: MA15+

DEXTER: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON, AND DEXTER: THE COMPLETE SECOND SEASON (STEELBOOK) RRP $34.95 each RATED: Both M15+

Dendy iconic films return with a bargain bang!

Specialising in releasing cinema from all over the world, Dendy Films is partnering with distributor Icon Home Entertainment to bring the best of the smaller, quality productions back into our living rooms. Starting with 80 titles under eight sub-brand categories, the films range from the whimsical French ace Amelie to the groundbreaking Blair Witch Project, to productions closer to home like Once Were Warriors and Rabbit Proof Fence. The best part is that these titles are all on sale for a recommended price of $14.95, so you’re getting fantastic quality films at a fraction of the price they’d cost to get via back catalogue. The ‘hero’ titles will also come in Blu-ray versions, so check out www. iconfilm.com.au for more details.

Rated: various Distributor: Icon

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

We’ve covered Sony’s gaming offerings this Christmas elsewhere – if you have a PlayStation 3, do yourself a favour right now and pick up what we think is a contender for Game of the Year, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves – but the company’s movie division has some decent gift packs too. On the film front, we have Year One on DVD (for the really, really dumb bloke in your life; he’ll love it!) and, allowing them to return the favour, there’s Sony Pictures ‘one for the ladies’, in the delectable form of Katherine Heigl, in the DVD release of The Ugly Truth. Ladies, you can ogle Gerard Butler and gentlemen, well, you might want to use the time getting the BBQ ready for summer. You can also get Sony Pictures’ ‘marquee’ release over the holiday, Terminator Salvation, in a very special, limited edition ‘skull’ gift set. The movie and extras discs sit right in the skull holder, which is going to look amazing on your desk at work, scaring off the underlings and impressing the boss – see opposite for more info on the film itself.

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 77

EARS & EYES & THUMBS

GAMES

DIRT2

PLATFORM XBOX 360 GENRE RACING/SPORT RATED PG DISTRIBUTOR CODEMASTERS

The latest off-road racing game from Codies features incredible visuals, great handling (which is fun without being too ‘simulation’), and the presentation has enough slick to rival ooze-masters EA in the polish department. The game offers a superb cockpit view, affording great detail to enjoy – working mirrors, GPS, dials, etc – as well as lending meaning to customising your ride with dashboard and windshield toys. There is a lot of re-use of tracks – Codies mixes it up intelligently enough, so you run routes you’ve raced before only in part, or in reverse, or both, the next time around, but there’s not enough diversity. There seem to be a lot of open desert tracks and closed, ’arena-style’ circuits, but the biggest miss with Dirt 2 is the complete lack of weather, which never changes regardless of your location. Vehicles, too, are

DEMON’S SOULS

underwhelming – someone on the team sure likes the Subaru Impreza – but with the exception of the Colin McRae car, it’s hard to feel any affinity with the vehicles at all. And there’s no option to test drive them at all – if you haven’t bought them, they’re off limits – which is crazy. Amazing water effects can affect gameplay if you’re playing in the ‘cockpit’ view (and if you’re not, you’re a pussy!), rounding out an amazing, fun game.

PLATFORM PS3 GENRE ACTION/RPG RATED PG DISTRIBUTOR ATLAS

Garnering accolades among the ‘hardcore’ gaming press for its unforgiving – a geek euphemism for ‘bloody hard and frustrating’ – gameplay, Demon’s Souls is definitely a bit of a throwback in gaming terms. Completely bucking the new trend in videogames to go mainstream and seek out those elusive-but-potentially-lucrative casual gamers who spend half their working day on Facebook, Atlus has instead produced a game for experts who fondly remember when getting your ass handed to you by a bunch of pixels was really fun. If it ever was. An action role-playing game, Demon’s Souls is

a brooding foray into fantasy enemy territory that presents a huge challenge and plenty of surprises to players: you spend most of your time dead, for a start! Complete with genuinely innovative online features, where other real-life players can intrude into your game, Demon’s Souls is not for the faint of heart.

NEED FOR SPEED: SHIFT Need for Speed: Shift is a complete re-think and redesign for Electronic Arts. Now far more of a ‘serious’ racing simulation game than the (superb and sorely-missed) supercars-with-police-in-hotpursuit game it used to be, EA nevertheless nails an amazing sense of speed, which is what it’s all about. The team has redefined the ‘cockpit view’ and thereby drawn closer than any racing game before it to creating the feeling of the player really sitting in the driver’s seat. EA has caught up on that score with Codemasters but developer Slightly Mad Studios clearly spent more time on that, and presentation in general, rather than the handling, which is too serious for arcade racers and too slidey and glib for sim fans; the

78 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

PLATFORM XBOX360 GENRE RACING/SPORT RATED PG DISTRIBUTOR ATLAS

degree of drift is far too high, and you’ll find yourself sliding madly around almost every minor bend, let alone actual corner, wheels screeching in protest, whether you want to or not. Still, there’s a superbly judged line-up of vehicles and just the right degree of upgrading and tuning, with cars you genuinely care about pursuing and acquiring to motivate your progress.

A digital holiday ULTIMATE ALLIANCE 2 PLATFORM XBOX 360 GENRE ACTION RATED M DISTRIBUTOR ACTIVISION

The first game in this series was a reasonably enjoyable hack-andslash style game that involved a lot of ‘button-mashing’ (repeated and unskilled pressing of the buttons) to fight wave upon wave of similar enemies in a very linear progression, but mixed enjoyable superpowers into the equation, saving the game from being merely a tedious trudge through identikit levels. The sequel – taken from the original developer and given to another team to make – certainly improves on the uninspiring formula, but not by a great deal. The game features nicely detailed superheroes and their powers but, again, some seem to be a lot more enjoyable than others. Combat, unfortunately, still involves a fair degree of button mashing, but the main issue is that the characters are small onscreen, so it’s difficult to see what’s going on and sort out your guy from the seething melee mass in front of you. This hampers your ability to really use the entertaining abilities as effectively as you might like.

Here’s a quick roundup of the games we think will be big this summer and are worth a look: Lego Rock Band: Combining two of gaming’s most successful new franchises, Warner Br os is working with developers Traveller’s Tales and Harmonix to fuse the mass appeal of the Lego games with the incredibly popular ‘Rock Band’ series. This is likely to be well promoted and the increased accessibility of the game could have strong appeal for dads trying to bring their offspring into the air guitar fold. Available now on Xbox, Wii, DS and PS3. COD: Modern Warfare 2: The most hyped game this summer and with some very big boots to fill, the sequel to Activision’s brilliant Modern Warfare will be big, noisy and obnoxious and will be on every serious gamer’s wish list for Christmas, if they don’t pick it up before. The special edition even ships with working night vision goggles, but we say save your money and pick up the regular edition instead. Assassin’s Creed II: Promising to fill the gaps left by the first game, Ubisoft’s medieval action adventure game looks to be shaping up into one of the best games of the year and even features Michelangelo as your character’s 15th-century ‘Q’, providing you with all sorts of cool toys to help in your quest. FIFA 10: The superlative soccer series has reached new heights of excellence with this installment and, while it will have been on sale for a couple of months by the time you read this, we think it’ll still be top of many people’s reward list to play during the holidays. Authentic on-field play, superb presentation, improved ‘360’ dribbling and a great manager mode make this the best footy game on the market.

New Super Mario Bros Wii: A lot of Nintendo offerings have catered recently to the very casual gamer and unfit housewives. We think that this new Super Mario Bros game, with ‘drop in drop out’ four-player co-op multiplayer, will appeal to a wider audience, bringing more core gamers back to their machine for the holidays. Disney Sing It: If your kids are glued to the Disney Channel when you want to watch ESPN, you might want to pick up Disney Sing It: Pop Hits for Christmas. The video-based karaoke game comes on Wii or PS3 and features songs from such precocious Disney Channel vessels as Miley Cyrus, Jonas Brothers and Taylor Swift. Great for the little princess in your family. EyePet: Exclusive to Sony’s PlayStation 3, EyePet employs the PlayStation Eye Camera and motion detection to the care of a virtual pet (a bit of a cross between a monkey and a cat). The motion detection works well; your Eyepet can recognise a drawing you make on a real piece of paper and then copy it onscreen when you hold it up to the camera, plus it will also respond to sound, allowing for singing sessions with your new buddy. The technology is undeniably interesting and it’s a great drawcard for the kids. While writing this, my five year old just declared the game: “The bestest game I’ve ever played”. As a ‘fun-for-the-family’ title, EyePet is a winner – just don’t let the kids near it until you’ve finished Uncharted 2. Toy Story Mania: a collection of 10 shooting gallerytype mini games inspired by the 4D Toy Story Mania ride-and-laser-shooting attraction at Disneyland Resorts, this Wii-only game lets you shoot alongside, or against, up to three other players featuring Toy Story crew members such as Woody, Hamm, Little Bo Peep and Buzz. Strictly for the littlies.

Amazon’s e-book reader, which resembles an oversized third-generation iPod Nano, is now available for customers outside the US. This is really good news for Australians, who seem to pay more for their books than any other nationality, thanks largely to restrictions on parallel importation. The Productivitiy Commission reports that we pay 27 percent more, on average, than US consumers for the exact same book and in the UK, de-restriction of book distribution and sales means you can pick up a current bestseller in a regular supermarket for less than 10 bucks. So all hail the International Kindle! Aside from the convenience of being able to store 1500 books in one, slim unit that is as light as a regular paperback book, the great promise with the International Kindle is the access to over 280,000 books in electronic form. Right now, whether that number is accurate or not, however, the promise doesn’t entirely ring true, as Amazon negotiates copyright issues on a ‘per country’ basis and, surprise surprise, Australian negotiations are lagging behind. The upshot is that, if you’re a fan of the classics like Dickens and Austen, or love reading up-and-coming new authors, you’ll have no problem getting content – often free content at that. But if you read only the latest bestsellers, availability isn’t quite as impressive. That said, I’m reading Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol on my international Kindle right now, sourced from outside Amazon’s site. But there are thousands of amazing texts available right now in Amazon’s proprietary ‘.azw’ format, as well as ‘.mobi’ and ‘.prc’ form, which Kindle can deal with, and book availability will only increase for Australian Kindle owners with time. So in this issue of the magazine, we thought we’d point you to some of the Noel-themed books you can enjoy on Kindle right now if you’re lucky enough to get one for Christmas. First off, how can you go past the quintessential Christmas story of Scrooge? Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is available for sale right now in a Kindle Edition for Aussie owners, at only $2.00 from Amazon – or, as with most classics, free elsewhere on the Internet, albeit not in the Kindle-specific format. Check out the ‘mobipocket’ titles at Project Guttenberg, an online repository of over 30,000 free books in digital form. Another classic in a warmer vein is Gift of the Magi, by Henry O, sporting illustrations as well as the story of love and sacrifice and ready to be beamed for free to your Kindle. Or, instead of buying these stories in singles, why not go for the Christmas! 12 Holiday Classics (Kindle Edition), which includes the story of Scrooge and Gift of the Magi along with a collection of other stories of adventure and mystery, all with the Christmas theme. For an even older but classic view on Christmas, how about Robert Louis Stevenson’s 19th century A Christmas Sermon for Kindle? If you’re looking to share the spirit with your kids, there are even Kindle versions of kids’ books. One example is the Big Book of Classic Christmas Tales that brings together 35 of the greats for children, or My First Story of Christmas by Tim Dowley, which is aimed at teaching the traditional bible story to 4–7 year olds, also complete with illustrations. There are Christmas books for the more investigative, such as The Case for Christmas: A Journalist Investigates the Identity of the Child in the Manger by journalist Lee Strobel, attempting to find the reality behind the story of Christmas, or even the non-believer, including The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas, written by UK comedian Ariane Sherine and bringing together a bunch of well-known heathens such as Richard Dawkins, Brian Cox and columnist Charlie Brooker. All royalties on that last book go to the Terrence Higgins Trust, so you’re buying a Kindle book for Christmas and contributing to a worthy charity at the same time. Finally, there are hundreds of books on the subject of miracles, an appropriate topic for your Kindle at Christmas, from the devoutly spiritual to the more scientific or sceptical, with something like The Physics of Miracles: Tapping in to the Field of Consciousness Potential by Richard Bartlett somewhere in the middle, with his mental empowerment teachings. REFERENCES www.amazon.com www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 | HOME ENTERTAINMENT 79

TIME WARP

Big picture, the old old way I n between the venerable CRT TV and modern plasma or LCD TV, there was a briefly popular display technology called RPTV – the Rear Projection TV. To be fair, it hasn’t completely disappeared, but it will because just about everything it could do, plasma and LCD can do better. RPTV came about because people wanted a big TV picture, and you simply couldn’t get a big one with CRT tellies. Once we did see one glass tube TV that offered a standard definition 97cm widescreen picture. It was well over 600mm deep and weighed 92kg! It was not the least bit practical in the home. RPTVs first appeared in the 1970s, but you weren’t likely to see one of those in your home. They were too big, too bulky and too bad. Analog TV didn’t scale up very well to a large screen, so having a big screen in your lounge room gave you a fuzzy, noisy picture. We didn’t even have colour until halfway through the decade! However, in the 1980s and 1990s they became useful in clubs for showing sporting events to large numbers of people. As time went on, even analog TV gradually improved and smaller size RPTVs began to be viable. At a time when a large TV had a screen size of 66cm in 4:3 aspect ratio, a 110cm RPTV was impressive. At the same time, improvements in design allowed them to be thinner, so that they weren’t too bulky when pushed up against a wall.

“Finally, in the late 1990s the DVD arrived, followed soon after by digital TV. Only with RPTV could you enjoy a large video image with decent quality” 80 HOME ENTERTAINMENT | DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010

Finally, in the late 1990s the DVD arrived, followed soon after by digital TV. Only with RPTV could you enjoy a large video image with decent quality. At this point the plasma display was just starting to appear, and cost tens of thousands of dollars, and the large screen LCD TV was still some years off in the future. For home theatre, RPTV ruled. So what was an RPTV? It was simply a projector in a box. It bounced its image from a mirror so that it struck the rear of a translucent screen. Its electronics flipped the image so that it looked the right way around to the viewers. But what kind of projector? Initially there was only the CRT projector: three glass tube CRT guns, one each for red, green and blue. Like regular TVs, these had the advantage of easily producing excellent levels of black, but they were rather weak. Since brightness was a problem, the translucent screen was designed to direct the light more or less directly forward. If you looked down at the screen from an angle, the picture was quite dark, so the vertical viewing angle was narrow. And in almost all cases, these were limited, like most regular TVs, to SDTV resolution. Later all the different front projector technologies migrated into the boxes of RPTVs: LCD, DLP, LCoS. Each had similar advantages and disadvantages to their front projection versions. In general, DLP gave better black levels and richer colours than LCD, but cost more and could generate the dreaded ‘Rainbow Effect’. LCoS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon) was just a bit too late to appear in more than a very few models. Brighter than CRT RPTVs, they could still get away with less powerful lamps than those used in front projectors, so they typically had a lamp life of 8000 hours rather than 2000. But even though newer designs reduced the depths of their cabinets to only 200 to 300 millimetres, in the end they could not compete with plasma and LCD panels, which start at 120mm and can now be as slim as 30mm. Valens Quinn

Regza ZV Series LCD TV

Liquid crystal dynamite Take a deep breath. Toshibaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 1080p Full HD series positively splashes natural colour and sound into your living room thanks to its ClearScanâ&#x201E;˘ 200Hz, Resolution+ and a goggle-eyed range of visual and aural enhancement features that bear the quality watermark of Toshiba. For more details dive in to www.regza.com.au

a touch of creativity