Posts Tagged “sony”

One of the coolest little products I saw at CES was the Webbie HD camera from Sony. While I’m not a fan of the name (the manual calls it the Mobile HD Snap which is much better), this pocket sized tapeless cam shoots 30-frame HD video at either 720P or 1080P. It’s clearly targeted to those wanting to upload clips directly from the memory stick to YouTube. Even the name suggests that it captures web-quality video. But it DOES shoot in HD. So what’s the down side?  What’s the quality really like? Read… »

Apple has always often been the innovator. The company that sets the trends. We’ve seen it time and time again with the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone. And not just full products but also ideas and technology, like adopting firewire early or dropping floppy discs early, or integrating touch so well. Think about how the touch capabilities on the iPhone has influenced a plethora of copy cat products.

Some might believe that Apple innovated the GUI and the mouse. But they DIDN’T, they stole plagiarized those technologies during a visit to PARC, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. Some of Apple’s best innovations have been things that they’ve RE-invented. But Apple hasn’t really innovated anything since the iPhone – and that was years ago. Every MacWorld and WWDC since then has been mostly disappointing.

It’s time for Apple to “innovate” again. There are 4 products I saw at CES that Apple needs to look at, reverse engineer, license, or plagiarize. Read… »

Here is my bottom-line advice on home theatre projector screens: depending on your setup you’re probably better off not having one. Save your money! When I wrote my review of the Sony Bravia SXRD 1080P VPL-HW10, I knew my opinion on projector screens would draw some criticism. I only covered it briefly in that post, but I’ve decided to talk about it in more detail today.  Read on and get ready to have some intense debate… Read… »

Yesterday in Part 1 I covered the unboxing and reported that the HW10 is awesome. Today I’m going to continue the review and talk about my home theatre setup and show some high quality photos of the amazing 1080P picture projected on my wall. Read… »

Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas indeed!

For the past 3 or 4 years I’ve had a Sony Cineza HS-51 front projector and loved it. There’s something special about having a movie theatre in your living room. The HS51 is 720P, which from mostly NTSC upconverted sources, has been sufficient. With HD-DVD and Bluray I got to see the quality of 720P HD but wondered if 1080P would be noticeably better. A few months ago the lamp started going and I ordered a replacement. It was like having a new projector – bright and clear. However, about a month later I got home from a trip, turned it on and the screen had blue splotches all over it. Something failed, probably the LCD panel.

Which brings me to the VPL-HW10… I have to say that I have the coolest wife in the world because since the failure of the HS-51 she’s been on board to get a new projector as soon as we could swing it. Friday I ordered the Sony Bravia SXRD 1080P VPL-HW10 direct from Sony, but this time I added the 5-year warranty. So let’s get on with the unboxing…

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Moore’s Law (roughly) suggests that electronics double (capacity) every 18 – 24 months. I believe initially it had to do with the size and speed of transistors.  But it’s held mostly true in my experience for processor speeds and hard drive capacities – every two years you get twice as much for the same price.  By that math every 10 years you would have a 32x increase in speed and capacity.  That means that if 1 TB hard drives are the typical size now by 2018 we’ll be buying 32 TB drives.

During my clean up I came across some old Sony memory sticks and was a little surprised at their capacities.  It didn’t seem that long ago that we were using these sticks but now all the sudden they seem quite small.  Even the large one here is only 128MB.  Upgrading to a new camera, the next memory stick I purchased after that one was 1GB.  The next one after that was 4GB.  I expect that at this rate we’re only a year away from having 32GB if not 64GB memory sticks and thumb drives.  It almost seems that flash memory is accelerating at a much higher rate than Moore’s Law would suggest. Actually, I predict that due to new memory technologies thumb drives and solid state hard drives will take a very large jump in capacity within the next year or two, leaping all the way into the 250GB to 1TB range.  What would that do to traditional hard drive technology which has been mostly following Moore’s law?  What happens when memory capacities become so large and so cheap that almost anyone can afford a practically limitless amount of memory?  What new products emerge?

What would you do with a infinite amount of storage space?  Do you become a data pack rat?  Would your storage look like a teenager’s bedroom with unorganized random files all over the place?  Or do you build a data wonderland (ie., music and movies) with copies of everything all nicely organized in folders.  What about dream products?  A TiVo that can record multiple channels 24/7 and hold every show you ever care about forever?  A 30 megapixel camera that records forever and doesn’t have a delete button?  Oh wait, that could actually be bad.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that some smart people think that Moore’s Law can’t keep going forever.  History has shown that so far it’s been the trend.  Every time there’s a technological roadblock we see a small dip in the trend, but eventually some scientist figures out a way to get around it.  Or they come up with a new approach.  I see Moore’s Law not as the literal definition that Roger Moore um, Gordon Moore observed in 1965 about the actual size of transistors, but as an overall trend in scale/price/performance.  Sometimes PCs are faster because we put more cores or processors in them for the same retail price.  To me that counts as well.