Joel Johnson

Vizio connected HDTV remote reminds that everything is turning into a PC

Available soon, budget HDTV maker Vizio will soon be selling televisions that can stream internet content, including Netfli, Amazon, Showtime, Yahoo widgets, and more. But check out that snazzy slide-out QWERTY keyboard!

Previous ⌦ DIGITAL PICTURE FRAME REMINDS THAT EVERYTHING IS TURNING INTO A PC

Joel Johnson

All new Popcorn Hour C-200 set-top box supports Blu-ray and every video format

While I've been pleased as punch with my Mac Mini (with Boxee/Plex) working as a set-top box, I know many of you guys have been using Popcorn Hour boxes to great satisfaction. You may lust anew: there's a new model announced, the C-200, with Blu-ray support, a front-panel LCD, and a swappable bay that can hold a hard drive—if you don't use it to install a Blu-ray drive.

The C-200 will continue the Popcorn Hour tradition of playing pretty much every video format known to man. Except to pick it up next month for $300—with included HDMI cable. [via Oh Gizmo!]

Joel Johnson

Video Exclusive: Schematic's multi-meter, multi-touch, multi-user Touchwall

Trevor Kaufman of design haus Schematic passed along this shiny, produced video showing off their new "Touchwall" project that's the sequel to a previous multitouch panel they built. As it happens, we're the first to get a look at it.

Multitouch is in a weird spot. It's in our phones. It's in big projects like the Touchwall. But it's not in our home machines yet (for the most part, excepting Tablet PC users and a few HP and Asus customers). So kinks are still there for the working out, and that's a lot of what Schematic has been working on.

For instance, how do you type in a username and password on a big public wall? For Touchwall, you don't—you swipe an RFID badge on the screen.

What about letting multiple users access the system at once? Schematic solved that problem by letting that be possible.

Because Schematic is a design and special projects group, they aren't shy to crow about their fancy acheivents. (Kaufman said we should think of the Touchwall "not as a standalone device, but as a new technology paradigm", which implies a unique technical challenge: What does the Touchwall do when you get sick all over it?) But these are really interesting problems they're solving, and if these sort of interfaces really are the public access terminals of our future airports and Cinnabons, I look forward to greasing them up.

Joel Johnson

Loop pointer, a funky motion mouse for home theaters

Hilcrest Labs has released the "Loop pointer", a motion-sensitive "air mouse" with the proven ergonomic heft of a bagel. I'll give them this: there's something compelling about the shape alone that makes me want to give it a figurative whirl.

They've provided considerable compatibility with a wide variety of operating systems and devices—there's Mac and Windows support, sure, but also PlayStation 3 and Apple TV (if you flash it with a driver that lacks official support from Apple).

It'll cost you a shiny silver dollar and then 98 more. As a proud and pleased owned of a refurb Mac Mini that I've been using with Boxee and Plex for some luxurious evening soaks in old episodes of The Larry Sanders Show, I'm intrigued. It's a better solution that my crusty old wired Intellimouse sitting under the television and is just weird enough looking to not be embarrassing sitting on the side of the couch.

(These are official product images from Hillcrest Labs' support page, by the way. How awesome is it when a company isn't uptight about their product?)

Rob Beschizza

The only thing missing from WWDC

TUAW's Chris Rawson takes apart PC World's reaching list of things missing from WWDC. TUAW concludes that nothing was missing, because the laptops getting spec bumps took him completely by surprise. (SD card reader! I know!)

On this point, I have only one thing to say: where is my god-damned displayport 30" cinema display?

Rob Beschizza

JVC claims world's thinnest LCD display

From CrunchGear:

The full HD TV measures just 6.4mm at its thinnest point, and with a weight of just 5.7kg, JVC also gets the bragging rights for the planet's lightest LCD screen. It features 400cd/m2 brightness and a contrast ratio of 4,000:1.

JVC set to release the world's thinnest 32-inch LCD display [CrunchGear]

Rob Beschizza

NEC's massive 43" curved display soon on sale

The 2880x900 pixel resolution of NEC's CRV43 curved display is perfect for gaming, but at $8,000, it's not everyman territory. It has a 10,000:1 contrast ratio, 0.02ms response time, and is claimed to cover 100 percent of the sRGB color gamut. It hooks up with DVI-D and HDMI, and includes a USB 2 hub.

I saw this in person at CES a couple of times while it was in development: what you don't see in this product shot is that it's actually an oldschool rear-projection unit, with a nine inch rear.

After the jump, a gallery!

READ THE REST

Joel Johnson

Digital picture frame reminds that everything is turning into a PC

It's just an OEM design for the moment—the sort of thing Asian manufacturers create to show off their chops to entice better-known brands to partner up—but this digital picture frame from SilverPac is sort of hilariously overpowered, underlining yet again how everything is slowly but surely becoming a PC: it has Wi-Fi, instant message clients, and even a web browser. (It runs Windows CE.)

Joel Johnson

E Ink acquisition sets stage for color epaper by 2010

Reuters:

Prime View said on Monday it would pay about $215 million for E Ink, whose flexible digital displays are used in Amazon's Kindle and the Sony Reader. ... E Ink Vice President Sriram Peruvemba said the deal would provide the financing and manpower needed to fuel development of color displays, slated for mass production at the end of 2010.

Joel Johnson

New HDMI 1.4 standard offers just five confusing options

BusinessWire press release:

Consumers will have a choice of the following HDMI cables:

• Standard HDMI Cable - supports data rates up to 1080i/60;
• High Speed HDMI Cable - supports data rates beyond 1080p, including Deep Color and all 3D formats of the new 1.4 specification;
• Standard HDMI Cable with Ethernet - includes Ethernet connectivity;
• High Speed HDMI Cable with Ethernet - includes Ethernet connectivity;
• Automotive HDMI Cable - allows the connection of external HDMI-enabled devices to an in-vehicle HDMI device.

Joel Johnson

Boxee on Apple TV: Don't bother

Boxee, the free fork of the stupendous Xbox Media Center (XBMC) project, certainly gets a lot of attention. And it's often mentioned in the same breath as the Apple TV, one of the platforms on which it can run. What isn't said is this: Boxee on Apple TV is not very good.

Here's what's good about it:

⌦ Install is simple. Download an app to make a USB stick, follow a few short steps, and you're golden.

⌦ The form factor is right. The Apple TV is small, but has all the right outputs: HDMI, component, optical audio.

Here's what's bad about it:

⌦ It's so slow. The Apple TV has a 1GHz processor inside. The variant of OS X that runs uses that processor for all video decoding, which works fine for Apple-provided content, because Apple has optimized both its content and its software to take full advantage of that modest processor.

But Boxee is trying to do all sorts of magic, from streaming internet video to indexing content on network shares. That little 1GHz processor just can't handle it, especially since there isn't yet a way for Boxee (and XBMC) to pass some of that decoding over to a GPU.

⌦ It crashes a lot. Button presses from the remote are often ignored. The interface will lock up when trying to stop playback.

⌦ There's no way to shut it down. Telling Boxee to shut down (or at least go back to the Apple TV software), on my unit, just fails. That means to turn the unit off, you have to get up and physically remove the power plug.

⌦ No Netflix streaming. The little processor can't handle it.

⌦ Uh, I guess that's it. But isn't that enough? It's slow, buggy, and crashy. Boxee is pretty great, but I don't want anyone else to make the same mistake I did when considering new hardware on which to put one of these XBMC variants.

Next for me? A Mac Mini, with Boxee and/or Plex. It'll cost twice as much, but there's no content it shouldn't be able to play with ease.

Photo: SkyFirePDL

Joel Johnson

Plasma sticking around for a while, says plasma HDTV makers

HD Guru asked the LG, Panasonic, and Samsung if they were phasing out plasma. Their answer? Not yet.

Joel Johnson

Photo: Amazon Kindling

This exists.

Joel Johnson

Computer lock-up using the Monoprice Mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter

Not a big deal, but throwing this out there for anyone else who may be experiencing it: About once every dozen times or so, plugging in the Mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter from Monoprice causes my unibody MacBook Pro to hard lock. I can only fix it by power cycling the laptop.

For $10 I'm not going to complain, especially when it may well be a problem with the computer—and no one else on the Monoprice customer reviews page seems to mention it—but if it has happened to you, take comfort: you are not alone.

Joel Johnson

JVC 8K projector: Until your monitor has 8,192 x 4,320 pixels...

There aren't much in the way of details—and this is pro gear, so it's wank material for the likes of most of us anyway—but JVC has launched two new video projectors, an 8K (8,192 x 4,320 pixel) and 4K (3,840 x 2,160 pixel) models, as well as the pleasingly austere 4K camera seen above.

The camera's just a prototype, but there are plenty of other high-end digital camcorders that can shoot 4K these days, or at least the RED and surely some stuff from Sony, right? I just said I wasn't a professional. Back off! (See also: Dalsa, Basler, other companies that I could Google.)

So what do you think? I'm getting the inkling that we're only a couple of years away from 4K monitors becoming the hot new thing for desktop PCs, seasoned with a dash of resolution-independent operating system widget rendering.

Joel Johnson

VFX engineer on why Star Trek ain't IMAX

My friend, a VFX engineer, shares this frustration with the IMAX version of Star Trek (which she otherwise dug):

Just for future reference, ST was not shot in IMAX, and therefore is not a true imax film. imax is 65mm, 15-perf film, with an aspect ratio of 1:1.37 and a MASSIVE amount of image area, approximately 4x the size of VistaVision (VV is also the same format 35mm still cameras shoot, imagine a negative almost four times the surface area of one that was shot in your still camera.)

Star Trek was shot in cinemascope, an anamorphic format that squeezes the image on the film, but projects it through lenses that stretch it back out horizontally to its 1:2.35 aspect ratio. C-scope is run through a normal movie camera vertically, (90 degrees to a still camera) and exposes a frame taking up four perfs of film - about half the film area of a 35mm still camera.

What Star Trek has done for their imax projection is just stretch their anamorphic cinemascope (1828x1556) image to 3656x1556 and then blow it up by 12% to 4096x1746 where it only takes up 60% of the height of the half-resolution imax - 4096x2988.

(that is, unless they have cropped in at the sides to literally do a pan&scan on the 1:2.35 cinemascope image, ugh!)

The end result of all this unsqueezing and blowing up is that at the very best, you will get an image that has 1/8th the information of a standard imax image. What you see will be much softer, although it may not be noticed by the general public unless they see a side-by-side comparison with a true imax print. Full-resolution imax is 10240x7470 (10k by 8k), btw, but it isn't often used in visual effects because of the sheer amount of data required for each frame.

Other films will be shot in imax and c-scope, with some sequences being full imax, so in the theater the screen will jump to a taller picture for some sequences. I think Batman did it last summer. Normal theaters will only see a c-scope extraction (trimming top and bottom) during the imax sequences.

Joel Johnson

Periscope Lighted Folio for Kindle 2

Periscope manages to take the clean lines of the Amazon Kindle 2 and wrap it in more leatherette straps and pockets than that time we accidentally started sending the S&M catalogs to the Accounts Payable department. But hey, at least there's a light.

It's $50.

Joel Johnson

Warmer, warmer: e-paper with sub-second refresh

Unlike other color e-paper examples, Bridgestone's prototype color e-paper can refresh its screen in just 0.8 seconds, making it fast enough to use with touchpen input.

Joel Johnson

Why pixel art looked better on old televisions

NFG of the NFGForum has an interesting series of posts about aspect ratios and scanlines in pixel art from the 8- and 16-bit days, how they were shown on old CRTs, and how that affects display on modern digital displays. Not a ton of new info for veterans of the emulated game scene, but still a pleasant overview all the same.

A couple of years ago I got into a fiery argument on a forum with someone who thought he knew the 'right way' to display a video game, and all other ways were simply wrong 'cause the designers wouldn't want it that way.. He went through great lengths to add screen curvature, scanlines and even reflections of overhead lights to try and replicate the appearance of gaming on a CRT monitor.

He was obviously deranged.

Joel Johnson

Howto: Read the Kindle in bed

Randall "xkcd" Munroe found holding the Kindle upright in bed too tedious, so crafted this bent wire contraption that allows him to turn pages while laying on his side with only a twitch of his thumb.

Joel Johnson

Book Time, a physical book reader

The Book Time unit turns the pages of magazines and catalogs automatically, making it easy for those who don't have the ability to do it themselves (as long as someone else helps them load it up, of course.) That tube in front looks a lot like something that is controlled by breath.

Which made me wonder: Do the Kindle or the Sony Reader either support any sort of remote control? A cursory search is that they do not, but the Kindle can be set to text-to-speech, which after turning down the volume, will operate as a sort of automatic page turning mechanism. That's okay, but there is a USB port on these things. They should support a basic forward/back input method. [Engadget]

Joel Johnson

OPDS: Open Publication Distribution System (RSS for eBooks, basically)

An open distribution standard for eBooks? Count me in:

Adobe and Lexcycle, the company behind the popular Stanza eBook application, announced today that they are working together with the Internet Archive on turning the Stanza online catalog system into an open standard for distributing free and commercial eBooks. This new standard, the Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS), will be built on top of Atom, and aims to create an open standard for distributed online catalogs for electronic books.

Joel Johnson

Reading Rights Coalition to protest Authors Guild whinging about Kindle 2 text-to-speech

The Reading Right Coalition and the National Federation of the Blind will be hosting a protest tomorrow outside the offices of the Authors Guild in an attempt to convince the Guild to quit busting Amazon's balls over the Kindle 2's text-to-speech technology that turns any eBook into a robotic audiobook. (Cory wrote about this a bit just recently.)

Here's their point: "The Coalition believes authors and publishes absolutely have the right to be paid for their work and control the rights to audio performances of their works however, it is discriminatory for authors and publishers to charge disabled consumers more for an e-book than they charge the rest of the general public as the only difference is the method by which the disabled person will read it."

The Kindle 2 is such a boon for the blind and others who have trouble reading printed books. I'm not in New York any more, but if I were I would probably still not actually go protest because I'm really lazy, but I would at least feel guilty about not going. I could sign an online petition, but you know how those work out.

If you're in New York tomorrow, have a more generous heart than I, and want to support the Reading Rights Coalition for a couple of hours starting at noon, here's where they'll be.

Joel Johnson

Monoprice Saves: Mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapters now available

Praise be to he who provides Chinese copies of simple cables: the Monoprice Mini DisplayPort adapters, as used on the new MacBooks, are now available for around $13: Mini DisplayPort to DVI (Compared to $30 for Apple's); Mini DisplayPort to VGA ($18); and the long-awaited Mini DisplayPort to HDMI, which Apple does not even make.

Relatedly, have you seen the bad reviews for the Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI Adapter on Apple's site? Sounds like those might be lemons. (I like Mini DisplayPort, too; I just hate paying out the nose for cables and adapters.)