Technology reviews

There’s a saying that “technology begets technology”.

I know this because I made it up a minute ago.

I used to have a 21“ 4:3 TV that I bought ex-rental from Rumbelows for £50. Then, six months later, I bought a DVD player from Woolworths for the princely sum of £150 (oh the extravagance). Being a purist, I insisted on watching movies on it in letterbox format rather than 4:3.

It looked rubbish. So I had to go out and buy myself a 28” widescreen set from Matsui (aka Dixons own brand). As I said, technology begets technology.

This lasted me all of nine years before keeling over and dying in January. So I bought myself a replacement – an HD-capable Sony Bravia 26“ LCD tele. This has a really nice picture when dealing with digital sources connected using an HDMI cable (eg my Apple TV, particularly now I’ve set it to 1080i 50Hz rather than 720); it has a reasonably fuzzy/crap picture with analogue sources (ie anything that uses a SCART cable such as a standard DVD player or a Sky box).

My DVD player keeled over and died on Friday: Davina McCall and the T1000 are to blame. I managed to fix it once, through the manly use of screwdrivers and ”shaking it a bit“, but that little Alba DVD player wasn’t coming back from the dead for a second time. Bang goes £17.99 worth of electronics from Sainsbury’s straight into the pink ”small household electrical appliances“ recycling bin at Makro on the Greenwich Peninsula.

We therefore had a few choices

1. Go without a DVD player.
2. Buy an equally cheap DVD player from Sainsbury’s or Argos.
3. Buy a colossally expensive Blu-ray player
4. Buy a colossally expensive HD-DVD player
5. Buy a £50 DVD player with HD-upres capabilities

Which would you have picked?

1. What are you? Amish?
2. A reasonable conclusion that would condemn you to another year of slightly fuzzy DVD playback
3. Interesting call, rich early adopter. They’ll be £100 cheaper in a year and the disks are still nearly £30 each. I can wait
4. Ha ha ha! I’ve got a Betamax I can sell you if you want
5. Correct. Technology begets technology and if you have an HD set, you need a DVD player that can upgrade the DVD picture to HD quality.

So we headed off to Argos and bought ourselves a Philips DVP 5960 and HDMI cable for £7 (see what I meant about Curry’s overpricing?). Here’s our experience so far

Continue reading “Review: Philips DVP 5960”

The New Year brings with it many things, and technology updates – once the Christmas bills have been paid off – is one of them. As it happens, I’ve updated two things: my TV and Bastard, my PVR. I haven’t updated to Sky+ because while I’m just about okay with paying £99 for a new box, I draw the line at paying £60 to have some bloke turn up with it and plug it into an aerial socket.

Anyway, I, in common with a sizeable percentage of SE London, judging by

1. the number of nice people down at the recycling centre bringing in old TVs and giant cardboard boxes marked “Sony Bravia”
2. the number of not-so-nice people who have left old TVs and giant cardboard boxes marked “Sony Bravia” lining most of the pavements in the neighbourhood

have bought a Sony Bravia. The reasons for this are threefold. Firstly, my clapped out 28“ Matsui CRT widescreen TV that I bought in 1999 was starting to do an odd thing to the picture. Mathematicians call it an affine transformation, Mac users call it the ”Dock Genie“ effect – everyone else, particularly in SE London, just calls it ”f*cked“.

Secondly, Sainsbury’s have been selling 26” Sony Bravias for £349. They don’t deliver, so that saves them from WEEE – the gits – but it does make it all a bit cheaper. Everyone else appears to have been going for 40“, but we wanted something smaller than before and less power hungry, so 26” works out well.

Thirdly, the adverts have claymation bunnies in them.

Continue reading “Review: Sony Bravia 26″ and EyeTV 3.0”