HDTV Magazine Reviews

We reviewed the original Slingbox way back in 2005. Ara currently has two of them and has been able to watch TV from his hotel in Chicago, Denver, and Europe. But the main way the Slingbox is used in the Derderian family is to extend TV reception to any room in the house. While the Slingbox works well via the Internet it works really well on your local network. The issue with Internet usage is bandwidth. First, if your upstream bandwidth is limited, it really doesn't matter how much downstream bandwidth you have. In Ara's home the upstream is capped at 1 Mbps although lately I have exceeded that.

When we saw the Slingbox PRO-HD come to market we were very excited. We realize that...

The movie won seven Oscars when it was released in 1970 and is one of Ara's favorites. He has seen it at least ten times over the years and it has a permanent place on his movie server. So with the recent release on Blu-ray, We wanted to see if the movie benefited from the new technology.

Orb Audio makes small speakers and sells direct to the consumer similar to Aperion and many other speaker manufacturers. By cutting out middle men the company is able to sell speakers at a greatly reduced cost. The speakers are small in size measuring 4 3/16" W x 5" H x 4 7/8" D with stand and weigh 2.0625 pounds (.94 Kg). They also come in a center channel orientation with the two spheres mounted side by side.

The speakers are made out of American carbon steel and hand made in the USA (California and Oregon). The only exception is part of the subwoofer, which is made in Canada. The speakers come in 5 finishes (Metallic Black Gloss, Pearl White Gloss, Hand Polished Steel, Hand Antiqued Copper, and Hand Antiqued Bronze) so there will definitely be something that the aesthetics committee will approve.

If you have an HDTV or are thinking about getting one before the analog cutoff early next year, you may also want to consider picking up your digital TV via an antenna. Many of you are concerned that an antenna is an eye sore or that they are just too big to to deal with. Today we talk about an antenna that takes care of both these issues.

The ClearStream2 (C2) from Antennas Direct is less than...

HQV Benchmark is produced by Silicon Optix, a leading developer of video processing technology. If you are new to the terms video processing and scaling, then a great foundational start is our own Video Dictionary on HD Library, Scaler.

The HQV Benchmark series of discs have received a lot of press and a lot of players have failed to pass many of the tests. Let's take a look at what each of these tests are, what their purpose is and what it actually means to disc players...