HP LP3065

Aimed squarely at the working professional, the 30-inch HP LP3065 monitor provides fast response times, a high 2560 x 1600 resolution and deep, rich colors. Gamers will be drawn to the LP3065 solely for the reason that there is only a handful 30-inch monitors on the market with a response rate this good (6ms) with colors this rich. Multimedia enthusiasts that plan on using their PC as a home theater display will be pleasantly surprised to find that the LP3065 offers not one, or two, but three HDCP-compatible DVI inputs, meaning you can use this monitor with your system’s Blu-ray or HD DVD drive (with the proper videocard). But before you plunk down $1,500 USD for this bad boy, read our review to make sure it’s right for you.

Elgato Turbo.264

These days, almost every Mac user in the world has some sort of collection of videos on his or her computer — home movies, TV shows, short clips, and even professionally produced videos. Watching those movies on the computer is easy; however, converting them to iPod or Apple TV format can be frustrating and terribly time consuming, especially for people with older G4 and G5 Macs. Elgato comes to the rescue with the Turbo.264 USB-based video encoder. Claiming to boost the speed of video conversions by upward of 1,200 percent, Elgato makes a pretty strong argument for buying their $99 USD product. We gave the Turbo.264 a thorough test to see if it lives up to the hype.

iPhone nano Later This Year?

There’s no doubt that the iPhone had an incredibly successful launch, and that Apple seems to be on the way to another winner. But, according to Kevin Chang, an analyst at JPMorgan, Apple might be on the way to introducing a cheaper phone with similarities to its iPod nano. He’s drawn his conclusions from a patent filed by Apple last week that refers to a handheld device that’s multifunctional with a circular touch pad control, sounding very similar to the Nano.

HP Demonstrates Makeup Color Matching Tech

Ladies, your boat has come in. Despite the guy-centric slant of a lot of technology (you really don’t need a 50-inch TV and 5.1 surround sound for anything but explosions), HP has announced one new technology that could actually serve to benefit the fairer sex. On the Wednesday, the company demonstrated its new color-matching technology, which can be used to match makeup to a woman’s skin tone using only a photo from a camera phone and a special chart. To start, a woman has her picture taken holding HP’s chart, which features a number of different color samples.

Sony Unveils Redesigned PSP

At its presentation at this week's E3 Expo in Santa Monica, Sony took the wraps off a redesigned PlayStation Portable (PSP) which is 33 percent lighter, 19 percent thinner, and sports a high quality video output so users can hook the unit to an external monitor or display to view photos, videos, or movies. On the surface, the new PSP doesn't look dramatically different from its current incarnation, and in some ways the redesign fails to meet some gamers' hopes for a "PSP 2" with dramatically enhanced capabilities.

Sony STR-DG910 A/V Receiver

Just how much A/V receiver can they contrive to give us for $500? The current answer, at least from Sony, is "Lots!" The no-baloney brand's new STR-DG910 hits the pavement with three 1080p HDMI inputs, transcoding of component (and composite) analog video to HDMI, XM sat-radio readiness, automatic speaker setup with a supplied calibration microphone, a Digital Media Port for use with an optional iPod dock or Bluetooth dongle, and seven 100-watt amplifier channels, and a good deal more.
Sony crams all this in at this price, at least in part, by omitting some items we've come to consider pretty much standard on receivers in recent years. For example: Although the Sony STR-DG910 A/V receiver is amply equipped with composite- and component-video inputs and outputs, it has no S-Video connections whatsoever. Surprising at first, on reflection this seems perfectly sensible, since component has pretty much superseded Y/C hookups altogether.

Even more radically, the Sony eschews multichannel analog inputs, which means that some systems wouldn't be able to present multichannel SACD (or DVD-A) recordings at all, given that some current and most earlier players furnish no high-resolution multichannel digital output, and this receiver does not decode SACD's DSD-multichannel stream as do some higher-end models. (Is this tacit admission from Sony that SACD is, practically speaking, moribund — or at the very least, pining for the fjords?) The DG910 further lacks any second-zone capabilities, which however rarely exploited are a receiver staple at this level.

Nonetheless, the STR-DG910 still packs in a lot of good stuff. But "stuff" is only good if the underlying performance is there to back it up, so I was anxious to get the receiver up on my rack and under power.


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Toshiba Multimedia Center

If you use your Windows XP or 2000 notebook PC to play music, movies, or games, you can enhance the experience by sending the audio to your home theater setup via Toshiba’s Multimedia Center Audio/USB Hub. Or you can hook powered computer speakers directly to the Hub, which decodes Dolby Digital 5.1 surround soundtracks. About the size of a VHS cassette, the Hub includes a sound card, four USB ports, an Ethernet jack, and both analog stereo and coaxial digital audio outputs. The supplied remote can do things like select the type of sound processing or shut down your computer.

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