Freebie

This one is easy. Streaming content from Netflix onto your PS3.

If you have a Netflix unlimited account, you can do stream for free.

There are a few quirks, though.

TV Stands as Furniture

More than ever before, TVs are design statements. Sure you could show it off by mounting the TV to the wall and displaying it like a piece of art. But why not take the design statement one step further and mate your new prize with a unique TV stand that serves to elevate the entire room’s aesthetic appeal?

Gone are the days of utilitarian steel racks and boring black particleboard. Today’s A/V furniture designers really do offer something for every taste and décor.

A Smartphone for Your Living Room

Today’s consumer doesn’t just want it all; he wants it all in one package. No longer can a product just be a cell phone, gaming console or TV. To really sell, CE devices must wear many hats—and wear them all well.

Velocity Micro wears many hats. They offer PCs for business, gaming and digital media. But they also offer a dedicated home theater model that’s more media center than PC: the Fuzebox.

Blu-ray. Now with YouTube!

Already, Blu-ray players are separating into two camps: the uber-expensive, and the commodity. It’s easy to see what you get with the step-up players.

But what about the high end of the low end? What do you get at a step or so above the bargain players? Something like this $400 Panasonic, say. Well, turns out quite a lot.

The latest video processors seek to minimize picture artifacts and expand system capabilities

Jaggies, judder, combing, tearing, mosquito noise, block noise —these are just a handful of the terms to describe picture anomalies that degrade high definition picture quality.

Thankfully, the latest generation of stand-alone scalers/video processors aims to fix all of that.

Everything you ever wanted to know about video processing, but figured the answers would bore you to tears.

Scaling, upscaling, upconverting, deinterlacing, jaggies, 3:2 pulldown. Chances are you’ve never been able to figure out at least one of these words. No problem. Everyone has to learn somewhere. I’ll admit it: I was not, in fact, born with this knowledge. I know there are those that claim they were, but I suspect some of them are lying.

What I aim to do with this guide is to distill down the heady jargon and explain what all these words mean and why you should care (or not).

The next step in Internet-enabled video-on-demand.

“Internet-enabled” could very well be the CE industry’s 2009 catchphrase. Some manufacturers are adding simple Web widgets to their products, like the ability to access news, weather, or online photo albums.

Others, meanwhile, have embraced what many of us deem to be the Holy Grail of Internet-enabled functionality: video-on-demand access.

Real Wide Screen and No More Black Bars

One of the most common questions I get is about the black bars that appear above and below the image with many movies.

After all, a spiffy new HDTV and Blu-ray player will banish the black bars we had with DVDs and old TVs, right? Nope.

But with the right projector, screen, and lens, you can have CinemaScope in your home.

And no more black bars.

Samsung’s BD-P2500 and LG’s BD300 will get you instant content via Netflix. But why?

I didn’t get it. I sat there in the press conference listening to LG excitedly talk about their new Blu-ray player that had the ability to stream content from Netflix.

And they're not the only one. Samsung, TiVo, and several other companies are touting the same feature.

I don't get it. This is a dumb idea, right?

The Crestron Experience Center in Las Vegas is one of the few places in the world delivering hands-on demos of the wonders of home automation.

With its new Las Vegas Experience Center, Crestron—which in home automation is perhaps even more pervasive than Microsoft is in the computer business—seeks to make its creations more accessible to dealers and customers. The Experience Center is one of only a few places in the world where one can witness home automation at work.