By Chief Gadgeteer, Gizmos for Geeks
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews.
We’re getting really warm now. Only 1 more day to the top of the heap for the 12 Gizmos of Christmas. But back to the present, #2, which is HDTV products. The obvious in this group are of course, HD televisions, so no suprise that the first 2 of the 2 are HDTVs. We’ve split the honors between an LCD model and a Plasma. The LCD spot belongs to the very sharp (pardon the pun) Sharp Aquos 52″ 1080p LCD flat-panel. This LCD performs with good backlighting to provide more accurate black shades. Panasonic snags the Plasma spot with its highly-rated 42″ beauty. The third HDTV product actually goes to an inexpensive upscaling DVD player discovered by RealTechNews’ own Alice Hill – the Helios H4000 1080p. The H4000 upscales not only your standard DVD titles, but also “home-made” DVDs, not to mention MPEG4 formats such as DivX and XviD.
Next up: The top rated gizmos on everyone’s shopping list.
Source: Gizmos for Geeks.
If you’re interested in HDTV products, the only one that I can recommend so far (outside of TVs, and there are a lot of good HDTVs) is Tivo Series3.
I’ve been using an ATSC receiver for years, but only for limited kinds of content like sports. With the Series3 I am pulling in HD content from both ATSC and cable and watching it many times more often.
I had a Motorola DVR from my cable company but it was one of the worst consumer electronics devices I had ever used, in pretty much every dimension. So, even though it could record HD (and sometimes it even got a clean recording!), it was not used very often (an SD Tivo hooked up to the same TV, however, was used all the time — it would appear that we liked Tivo way more than we liked HD).
The Series3 makes HD useful today in a way that nothing else I’ve used does. The thing is bloody expensive, but then again so was my HDTV, and I didn’t even use it for HD very much before the Series3.