Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment
We already saw Panasonic’s 50-inch TH-50PZ80Q plasma doing the tru2way thing at CEDIA 2008, but the official lever has just been pulled in Denver and Chicago. As of today, Comcast’s tru2way platform is active in the aforesaid cities, and the very first tru2way-capable HDTVs are arriving to retail. Eager consumers in the Windy or Mile High City who are ready to ditch the set-top-box altogether without sacrificing VOD and such can polish off their wounded credit cards, as both a 42-inch (TH-42PZ80Q; $1,599.95) and 50-inch (TH-50PZ80Q; $2,999.95) VIERA plasma will be on sale by “late October.” As for the rest of the US anxious to dip in the cool, cool waters of tru2way? A few undisclosed locales should be going live with the service “in the coming months,” though your guess is as good as ours as to what exactly that means.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: Desktops
Sony’s VAIO JS series, which was introduced at CEDIA alongside two larger siblings, is finally on sale and shipping… if you’re after the VGC-JS110J/S, that is. Sony’s initial plan was to have the full line out and about by “mid-October,” though just the bottom-end $999.99 model is currently ready to ship at Amazon. We’d expect the other variations to follow suit shortly, and if you’re still trying to make up your mind if this is the all-in-one for you, why not take a look at a review?
[Via ComputerMonger]
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: Displays, HDTV
Samsung and LG are locked in a tight race for “best HDTV you won’t be buying this year or next” this week at the International Meeting on Information Display 2008, trading shots with OLEDs, LCDs and more. Samsung brought along an upgraded version of its true 240Hz 15-inch Blue Phase LCD panel with improved image quality, some fresh carbon nanotube-based color electronic paper, plus slimmed-down versions of its 40- and 50-inch LCDs. Then it got busy with the OLEDs, dropping in a 14-inch HD display, 31-inch 1080p display and 5-inch VGA panel, to which LG could only respond with the above 19-inch OLED powered by amorphous silicon TFT. More stills of the carnage exist beyond the read link, but in the battle of display tech streeting in 2011 at the earliest, we just hope LG is holding back a few surprises for CES.
[Via OLED-Display, thanks Erik]
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Media PCs
Alright, something’s fishy here. When Apple announced that the new MacBook Pro has two NVIDIA GeForce chips — the 9400M and the 9600M GT — the focus was on what that means for battery life. Absent any mention of Hybrid SLI, we assumed that was all, but PC Mag has posted some eyebrow-raising benchmarks comparing the new MacBook Pro to HP’s Pavilion HDX16t, which also features a 9600M GT. While the MacBook Pro test model fell behind the Pavilion in most benchmarks due to its slower processor, its Crysis framerate beat that of the Pavilion by 24.1 frames per second — 41.9 over 17.3. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, unless you look at benchmarks of a desktop with NVIDIA’s similar GeForce 9300 chipset and a GeForce 8500 GT — turns out Crysis runs 12.63 frames per second faster (29.19 over 16.56) in Hybrid SLI than it does on the 8500 GT alone. Is the MacBook Pro running in SLI mode when set for performance? We don’t have confirmation of that, but we’ll put it to the test in our forthcoming review — until then, feel free to grab a grain of salt while freaking out anyway.
Update: Sorry, folks — NVIDIA’s just posted a support doc that says the MBP doesn’t support Hybrid SLI in either OS X or Windows — and when running Windows, it’s locked into using the 9600M GT. We’re not sure where that Crysis boost is coming from — GDDR3 vs GDDR2, perhaps — but we’ll dig deeper in our review. Stay tuned.
Read – PC Mag (MacBook Pro benchmarks)
Read – Hot Hardware (NVIDIA GeForce 9300 desktop motherboards benchmarks)
Permalink | Email this | Comments
