November, 2006 | HD TV PROFESSOR

Month: November 2006

Truth Patrol: Ford’s Ultimate Confusion

November 15, 2006 | Ibex Marketing

Okay, I'm blowing the whistle and throwing the flag on this play myself. Am I the only one who noticed the ads for Ford's "Ultimate Tailgate Sweepstakes"? It's a cool promotion, in which someone will win a new Ford F-150 pickup truck that has been tricked out for tailgate parties. According to the ads, it has a built-in gas grill. The amazing feature, however, is that it will have "5...

Black Friday Looms Large

November 14, 2006 | Ibex Marketing

Last week, I mentioned Wal-Mart's preemptive strike on Black Friday HDTV pricing, with low prices on major brand models. Well, another shoe has dropped as sources are publicizing the specials that Best Buy will reportedly be offering on Black Friday. How about a 50" plasma for $1,699? That's not some off-brand model, either; it's a Toshiba. Or how about a 32" Westinghouse LCD HDTV for less than $500? Or a...

A 42″ LCD HDTV for $200?

November 13, 2006 | Ibex Marketing

A news item in DigiTimes last month didn't make the waves that I thought it might have. The senior vice president for LCDs at Samsung Electronics gave a speech at the FPD International 2006 conference in Yokohama, Japan. In the speech, he stated that Samsung aims to reduce the production costs for LCD panels from the current $1,500 per square meter, to just $100. That's a 93% reduction in costs....

The $500 Projector

November 10, 2006 | Ibex Marketing

No, it's not capable of HDTV, but with an SVGA resolution (800 by 600 pixels), it is capable of showing widescreen EDTV (Enhanced Definition TV, 848 by 480 pixels) with just minimal scaling. Wide format DVDs should look great on this. And because it's a front projector, you can make the image as large as you want; fill a whole wall. Now, there are lots of SVGA projectors out there,...

TV Downloads a Hit!

November 9, 2006 | Ibex Marketing

The major networks continue to throw spaghetti at TV over the Internet in hopes of discovering that sticks. While ABC has experimented with selling episodes on iTunes, ABC, CBS, and NBC are all providing free downloads of episodes from some of their hit shows. According to reports, NBC has delivered more than 5 million episodes, and ABC claims it provided 2.5 million episodes in the first two weeks of its...

Get the Lead Out!

November 8, 2006 | Ibex Marketing

You may not have heard about RoHS (pronounced ROW-hass), but you will. It's a set of laws passed by the European Union that restricts the use of hazardous substances in consumer electronics. Since we live in a global economy, most manufacturers will end up making their entire product line conform. One of the big problems with plasma displays is that lead is used in making the glass. (LCD glass is...

Wal-Mart’s Opening Salvo

November 7, 2006 | Ibex Marketing

Inventories of flat panel HDTVs have declined since midsummer; actually, they have increased, but unit sales have increasd much more, so the net effect is that the supplies are tighter. The net effect, however, is that this has eased the pressure on manufacturers and retailers to keep cutting prices. And so my earlier predictions that September was a pretty good time to buy an HDTV was about right. But now...

The World Wide TV

November 6, 2006 | Ibex Marketing

If you get all the news you want from USA Today, just go ahead and skip today's entry. We tend to think of television as a uniquely American phenomenon, and until the advent of cable and satellite service, we rarely got a chance to see video programming from other countries. It still is rare on broadcast television services. Nowhere do the cultural differences show more clearly than in news programming....

Wireless HDTV

November 3, 2006 | Ibex Marketing

One of the biggest challenges with home entertainment systems is what to do with all the wires. HDMI is one attempt to create a data chain to simplify connections between devices, but the potential remains largely unrealized at this point. Wouldn't it be great if all the components could just talk to each other without wires at all? Some of the heavy hitters in the HDTV industry have formed the...

HDTV Ads

November 2, 2006 | Ibex Marketing

What do you get when you take 70,000 liters of colored paint (that's about 18,500 gallons), load it into firework mortars, and set them off? You get one of the most memorable TV commercials for HDTV that I've ever seen. Sony created the ad for its BRAVIA line, with the slogan "Color like no other". And they've gone and posted the ad -- along with a behind-the-scenes documentary and other...

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