TVs

For marketers of television programming, after the TV itself, what's the next most important home entertainment device? The remote control. Every day and night we literally fight for the viewers' "share of thumb!" Think about it.

The remote control device has gone through many changes. My first remote control was my younger brother, Peter. "Louder, please!" I would command, and Peter would get up and adjust the volume. Same for channel up and down. One could say it was actually voice-activated.

Today, Peter has his own remote. From a simple up, down, left, right, and … Read more

The TV remote control of the future isn't an expensive device with an LCD screen and blinking lights. It's your hand.

The classic TV remote control most of us have grown up with has been around in essentially the same incarnation for half a century. It's been tweaked over the years, but now one company is looking at ditching the remote altogether and using a camera mounted below a TV screen that senses hand motions instead of button pushes. The result is something that seems right out of Minority Report.

But the high-tech user interface Tom Cruise coolly manipulates onscreen isn't even all that far-fetched now, thanks to incremental improvements. Until now, the most innovative new input for entertainment in the living room has been the Wii-mote, the motion-sensing remote control/wand that has made Nintendo's game console a cultural phenomenon. Swing it like a tennis racket and you can pretend you're playing tennis, point it at the screen and use it like a mouse to navigate menus.

Televisions have progressed as well, with better picture quality and capability. Now TVs can record TV shows, stream Netflix movies, check the weather, read news headlines, and skim RSS feeds. The menus on those TVs appear more and more like what we see on our computer screens, so a new interface that operates more like a mouse seems almost inevitable.

… Read more

Remember the lovable four-legged alien with big teeth from the Disney movie "Lilo & Stitch"? If your little tyke is a big fan of Stitch, this is the perfect bedroom-size LCD TV for him or her.

This 20-inch panel has a full-size Stitch climbing over its back, complete with a moveable jaw that conceals the onboard controls. For a hefty 100,000 yen ($1,015), this Japanese concoction will deliver a monitorish 1,680x1,050 resolution, HDMI input, and B-CAS Japan digital TV broadcast support.

That said, you will have to hand-carry it back from Japan even if … Read more

The Sony XEL-1 OLED TV is a beautiful display. Its contrast ratio makes pictures pop, it's thinner than a credit card, but with an 11-inch screen, it's too small, and at $2,500, too expensive.

But it's been a year since it was introduced in January 2008, and as of today, it still has no competitors. Where are they?

Though we've been long promised that the era of OLED (organic light-emitting diode) TVs is just around the corner, it appears we're going to have to wait even longer. The major players in electronics who have the resources to build OLED TVs have been whacked by the global financial meltdown along with the rest of us. In other words, the timing to jump-start a brand new TV technology is terrible.

"The cost to manufacture them remains high and will remain high until someone's willing to take the risk to develop their own manufacturing capacity on a large scale," explained Paul Gagnon, TV market analyst for DisplaySearch. "Risky investments are not something most of these companies are looking at right now."

Samsung, Sony, LG Electronics, Toshiba, and Panasonic have at various points promised to make OLED TVs. Only one of them, Sony, has done so. But even Sony's is hardly what most people would call a viable option. It's not the standard size of a TV, and isn't exactly priced for a recession. The other firms have only prototypes to show.

Fading hope There was some hope that Samsung and Sony would be able to release larger OLED TVs this year. But if they were, they'd have brought them to CES in January in order to stir up excitement for them. That didn't happen. Instead, Sony brought the same 11-inch XEL-1 product that's been available for a year, as well as a 21-inch prototype. Samsung brought out a 40-inch prototype.

It's not that OLED is completely impossible to produce. There are a variety of gadgets sporting OLED screens made by these companies, but they're really small: cell phones, GPS devices, and now portable media players.

Small is easy. Making OLED displays big enough for the most attractive applications like laptop screens and televisions is the hard part. There are only a few TV manufacturers with the resources to invest in and build enormous panel factories, among them Samsung, Sony, Sharp, LG, and Panasonic. Panasonic said in September it would hold off on OLED--which basically means it's going to ride the success of its dominance in plasma displays for the time being. Toshiba, which showed a large OLED TV prototype in early 2007, said just a few months later that it would wait to see how popular the sets would be before jumping in head first. (Also, instead of doing it individually, there are a few smaller other makers getting together to push OLED into faster mass production.) … Read more

Lots of news in gadgets this week, which is welcome after the usual post-CES lull. If you didn't have time to catch it all in real time, we've helpfully compiled a list of some of this week's best stories. Consider it Crave's Valentine to you. <3

• In honor of the holiday everyone loves to hate, we here at Crave compiled a list of the gadgets we've loved and lost, or got so frustrated with we wanted to throw them against the wall. Check out the gadgets that broke our hearts.

• The Kindle 2 arrived … Read more

Update: This article was corrected to reflect that the information is for the fourth quarter of 2008, not the whole year.

The liquid crystal display TV market is beginning to lose some steam.

The fourth quarter was the first time that the total number of shipments of LCD TVs in North America was lower than the same quarter the previous year. Just 8.7 million units were shipped during the last quarter of 2008, a 2 percent decline from the 8.9 million shipped during the same time in 2007, according to data released Thursday by DisplaySearch, which tracks the … Read more

Vizio turned the HDTV market on its head with its low-priced sets, and now the company will concentrate all of its TV efforts on LCD.

The California-based flat-panel maker will no longer produce plasma TVs, according to a report in The New York Times Wednesday. It was the third-largest plasma TV maker in North America as of the end of the third quarter of 2008, with 13 percent of all shipments, according to DisplaySearch.

Vizio co-founder Laynie Newsome told the Times the reasons for the move away from plasma TVs were that they didn't sell as well in big-box … Read more

Erica Ogg's post "Report: Pioneer to exit TV business" made a point abundantly clear: TV buyers won't pay a premium price for a better display.

"The company is reportedly exiting the TV business rather than continuing to incur losses in that division," Ogg wrote. "This latest report comes a few months after Pioneer announced that it anticipated huge losses at the end of its fiscal year in March and plans to lay off 2,000 workers."

The market's demands for lower and lower prices eventually take high-quality manufacturers out of the … Read more

Updated 2/12/09 at 9:35 a.m. PST with Pioneer's confirmation.

Pioneer will no longer manufacture televisions and plans to spin off its DVD player business into a joint venture with Sharp, according to a report in Japan's Nikkei newspaper.

The company is reportedly exiting the TV business rather than continue to incur losses in that division. This latest report comes a few months after Pioneer announced it anticipated huge losses at the end of its fiscal year in March and plans to lay off 2,000 workers.

Pioneer had built itself into a widely respected … Read more