| CTV makers bank on cricket world cup
MUMBAI: Colour television makers, who had put price hikes on hold unlike their home appliances counterparts, are banking heavily on the oncoming world cup cricket season to yield better volumes. The leading brands have lined up innovatively designed, game-centric high definition LCDs, plasma and flat TVs to push growth across markets. Manufacturers are expecting CTV sales to touch 10.5-11 million units in 2007 up by 15% compared to last year. Aggressive pricing, range enhancements. extended warranties, product related schemes and incentives are expected to boost hi-end sales, accounting for 20-30% of the total sales this world cup season. "We expect more than 30% of CTV sales to come from the world cup. High definition TVs, LCDs, plasmas and bluray introductions are the new technology introductions for this year," said P Tognatta, director sales, Samsung India.
Sony Bravia KDL-46XBR2 46-inch 1080P LCD HDTV
With all the brouhaha around the Blu-Ray Disc vs. HD-DVD format war, another battle has been quietly simmering in the HDTV marketplace. With the sad but inevitable demise of CRT technology, now direct view HDTV buyers have a single technological choice: Plasma vs. LCD. And while some manufacturers such as LG and Samsung still straddle the fence with both LCD and plasma models, Sony has made its choice: Liquid Crystal Display (aka. LCD). Up until recently, the technology choice had been clear... at least for me. The best plasma televisions have always outperformed LCD technology in terms of the ability to reproduce blacks, fast-moving images and natural well-saturated colors. And it used to be that LCD TVs in the larger screen sizes were prohibitively expensive. .
DViCO's TiVX 5010-P HDTV recorder: everything but the disk
Korea's DViCO is prepping to launch their latest home media system with this, their new TiVX 5010-P HD TV recorder. If you think this all-singing, all-dancing personal video recorder looks like their M-5000U media streamer well, you'd be right. So as you'd expect, you get all that existing media goodness in addition to a new EPG, integrated ATSC hi-def television tuner, and the ability to record video at a 1920 x 1080 resolution in MPEG-2 TP transport stream files. In other words, it supports MPEG-1, MPEG-2, (VOB, ISO and IFO), AVI, TP, WMV9, tp, trp and ts (and the most common subtitle formats) video; JPEG images; and MP3, WMA, AAC, Ogg, PCM, AC3, M4A, FLAC and WAV audio. It also packs DVI, component, S-Video and composite video outs and 2x USB 2.0 ports for adding external disk drives (this PVR is diskless) or optical discs.
With only days until the Superbowl there's a mad rush to get your ...
Everywhere you look, there they are -- HDTV's. Many stores are offering deep discounts this week leading up to the biggest sporting event of the year, the Superbowl. Paul DeMilio said, “Very affordable, the prices dropped tremendously in the last year or two." At Towne TV in Rotterdam they've had a tough time keeping some models on the shelf. DeMilio said, “The days of the old analog signal with 330 lines, that's gone...everybody wants the sharpest picture out there." An estimated 2.5 million Americans are purchasing a fancy new TV for Superbowl Sunday which has meant a lot of busy days for the installers. DeMilio said, “These last two weeks, we're exhausted, we got crews out till 8 o'clock, we're exhausted...we really are these things are flying out the door." Really one of the main reasons for the spike in sales is the fact that these TV's, no matter how large, have come down significantly in price.
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