Decide what to buy | the Reevoo.com blog, featuring news on TVs, cameras, laptops, mp3 players & other gadgets, shopping tips and deals, reviews and more

The BBC is planning a live three-dimensional test broadcast of the Six Nations rugby match between England and Scotland in a little over a week’s time.

Technical details for the Riverside event have not been finalised but
it is understood that three 3D rigs comprising dual Sony HDC950s will
capture the action. One will be positioned up high for wide shots with
two at pitch level. The dual HD streams will be transmitted multiplexed
to down link at Riverside Studios, demultiplexed and combined on
reception before projection onto a large screen for an audience wearing
stereoscopic glasses.

3D HDTV should be pretty lifelike, and they are claiming that the viewing experience will be just like being at Murrayfield.

Meanwhile, if you live in Korea, you can now buy a 3D plasma TV from Samsung at ?1,750,000 or ?2,500,000 for a 42" or 50" model respectively. That’s £935 or £1200 in Sterling, for comparison. For the moment, people buying 3D TVs will be restricted to using them for computer games and a limited number of specially created 3D movies.

Regular live 3D broadcasts are obviously still a little way off, but the technology’s in place: at this rate it might not be that long before we’re all able to watch them. I just hope that the motion sickness problems that have affected 3D TV in the past have been addressed — otherwise, I wouldn’t want to be in the pub when they start showing matches in 3D!

On a related note, you can get a three-dimensional effect and annoy fellow bus passengers with Sony’s new £250 headphones, whose speakers that float just in front of your ears.

Like Stephen Fry, I’m a big fan of the Asus Eee PC. In fact, I’m using one right now to write this! Sure, the screen’s a bit small, and the keyboard’s not for the fattest-fingered typist, but the price, size and resilience are what make it really useful. It’s small and light enough to take anywhere, and the solid state disk has no moving parts to break, which means that you can throw the Eee PC in your bag without the normal laptop paranoia. Reviewers agree that it’s excellent value for money.

Tiny computers have been available for a long time, with Sony and Toshiba in particular making some very small but full-featured devices. However, they’ve typically been expensive, and some of the best ones that they sell in Japan haven’t been available for sale over here. The success of the Eee PC shows that there’s a market for a cheap ultra-portable computer, and it looks like Sony are feeling threatened by it.

According to UMPC Portal, Asus, T-Mobile, and Microsoft are going to make an announcement about the Eee PC and mobile internet access at the CeBIT trade show next month. They surmise that this will be the introduction of an Eee PC model running Windows with an internal 3G data adaptor.

3G internet access would be a natural addition to the Eee. It already has WiFi, but there are plenty of places where WiFi’s not available (or, worse, available only at exorbitant prices). With 3G and a sensible pricing plan, an Eee PC would be ideal for nomadic working. As someone who’s happily running a customised version of Ubuntu Linux on my Eee PC, I’d be aggrieved to pay extra for a copy of Windows, but I know that it will make a lot of people happy.

We’ll find out for certain on 4th March.

Earlier this week, a woman in Seoul, South Korea, received an unpleasant surprise when her Samsung laptop computer spontaneously combusted.

A Samsung Electronics Co. official confirmed the accident, saying that
it might be caused by overheating, because the laptop computer was used
for a long time on a pillow, which apparently blocked ventilation of
the machine.

"Since the woman used the computer on a pillow for
hours, it could block a ventilating hole below the model," said the
company official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

There’s been a spate of burning battery stories in the news over the last few years. Sony, Dell, Apple, LG and others have had to recall faulty batches of lithium ion batteries. There was even a report last month that a South Korean man was killed by an exploding mobile phone battery.

Here’s a great video showing what actually happens when a laptop’s lithium ion battery catches fire:

Luckily, catastrophic failure doesn’t actually happen all that often, when you consider just how many of these batteries are around the place: there must be a hundred or more lithium ion batteries in the Reevoo offices alone, and none of them have blown up so far — touch wood.

Still, you’d be hard pressed to find any manufacturer referring to their portable computer as a ‘laptop’ these days. Sure, we
the buying public call them laptops — we even use them on our laps —
but the makers are afraid of the liability of encouraging this
behaviour, selling ‘notebook’ or ‘portable’ computers instead.

It’s
perhaps not particularly surprising, given the high energy density of lithium ion cells and their tendency to burst, burn,
or even blow up when overheated. Blocking your computer’s air vents
with bedding is one way to make it overheat, as is placing it on a soft surface that restricts its ability to dissipate heat — trousered legs, for example.

Gentlemen have something else to worry about, too: using a computer on your lap may affect your fertility!

Loewe’s new Connect line of do-everything TVs is just the thing for your minimalist high-tech bachelor pad.

As reported by Gizmodo, they’re Full HD (1080p) with Freeview tuners, a built-in PVR (hard disk recorder), and ethernet, WiFi and USB connections to let you play content from a computer or external disk. There are three screen sizes available: 32", 37" and 42". As you might expect from Loewe, they’re not cheap, either: the prices go from £1,949 up.

You could achieve the same functionality today with a PC running Windows Media Center or MythTV software plugged into your TV, but with a lot more cables and fuss — and I say this as a MythTV user myself. So maybe that additional cost isn’t all so bad after all. And, unlike these complicated computer-based solutions, it should be a lot easier for other members of the household to watch the TV.

It’s starting at the high end of the market, but, as hard disks and WiFi get cheaper, and home networks become ubiquitous, we’ll inevitably see more manufacturers beginning to produce this kind of integrated television — at more affordable prices, with luck.

Now that HD-DVD’s been officially abandoned, everyone who still has hardware in stock is selling it off cheaply. Buying an HD-DVD player seems like a poor investment, but you can look at it another way: it’s now possible to buy a high-quality upscaling DVD player with an HDMI output that will make your existing DVDs look great. The retailers have noticed this marketing angle, as Engadget wryly observe.

Toshiba’s HD-EP30 is a prime example, having gone from over £200 to under £80 at the time of writing — and the price is still dropping. That’s quite a discount, and you’re probably getting some really good quality electronics for the money, but it might still not be the best value out there if you’re looking for a budget-friendly way to watch DVDs on an HDTV.

For example, the Toshiba SD370E is available for just £40. It’s an HD DVD player rather than an HD-DVD player — that hyphen makes a difference! — but its HDMI upscaling ‘makes old DVD’s sparkle on an HD television’, according to one reviewer.

Here’s another idea for all those obsolete HD-DVD discs that might otherwise be headed to make roads in China: bulletproof vests!

A man in the US was saved from a bullet in the stomach by a DVD in his pocket.

McRoy didn’t realise his DVD had taken a hit until he put his hand in
his jacket pocket and "pulled out a handful of shattered plastic" and a
fragment of the bullet.

That was an old school DVD, but I’m sure HD-DVDs would work just as well. A scale mail hauberk of HD-DVDs would make an excellent budget bulletproof vest.

On the other hand, if you actually want to watch what’s on the discs, you might find this guide to converting HD-DVDs to Blu-Ray useful.

For a long time, streaming video on the internet meant tiny, postage-stamp-sized images and a lot of buffering … buffering … buffering …. More recently, better connections, cheaper bandwidth, and improved compression technology have greatly improved things, as you can see on YouTube, the BBC’s streaming iPlayer, and other similar sites. But if you’ve tried to watch some of these clips full-screen on a big monitor, you’ll know that there are still some shortcomings, particularly when there’s a lot of action in the video.

Addressing this, video-sharing site Dailymotion has announced that, from now on, they’re going to be encoding everything in high definition where possible — i.e., where the source is high definition. They’re even going to go back and re-encode older stuff. By HD, they mean 720p, so it’s not ‘full’ HD, but it’s still pretty good, and should look much better on high-resolution screens. You can browse Dailymotion’s HD content on a dedicated page.

As they point out, however, you’ll need more bandwidth and processing power to watch these videos than for the regular content. So keep an eye on things, and don’t come crying to me when your ISP boots you off or charges extra for all the extra bits!

It’s not just individuals on capped tariffs who are going to be hit by this, though: ISPs are also suffering from the increased bandwidth demands. According to one analysis, the BBC iPlayer alone increased ISP bandwidth costs by two hundred percent.

Some people have been suggesting that the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray battle was already irrelevant, and that downloadable movies might turn out to be the real winner in the high definition format wars. It’s still the case that a lorry full of Blu-Ray discs is capable of moving a lot more data a lot more quickly than the internet can manage it, so the success of downloadable HD video would seem to depend on whether the infrastructure can keep pace. Plus, it looks like Blu-Ray is still the clear winner over other distribution methods in terms of video quality. Personally, my bet would be on Blu-Ray for the moment.

We’ve known for a while that some celebrities don’t look quite as good in high definition, and certain producers have even gone so far as to shoot their more distinguished actors in soft focus, but it now looks like EastEnders is the latest to fall victim to the curse of HDTV.

The Albert Square set looks OK on standard TV, but high definition shows up the scratches, bangs, and taped-over repair jobs that the Elstree set’s acquired over twenty years of regular use. As a BBC memo primly puts it, ‘HD will highlight scenery defects’.

The solution proposed is a move to a brand-new purpose-built Albert Square set at Pinewood Studios, to be made out of brick and concrete rather than cardboard and sticky tape.

Cynics are suggesting that it’s just a PR excuse, and that the BBC want to sell off the valuable Elstree land as part of cost-cutting measures, but we couldn’t possibly comment.

Continuing our occasional series on offbeat robotic TV accessories, we bring you news of an exciting product: CLO Systems’ remote controlled X-Arm robotic flat panel TV mounting arm.

Who are CLO Systems? you may ask. None other than ‘the industry leader in advanced robotic mounting solutions for flat panel displays’. I’m not sure that this is a particularly crowded marketplace, to be honest, but if you want a ‘robotic mounting solution’, you know where to go. I’ll let them explain it in their own words:

Don’t miss the interactive demo, which lets you extend, swivel, and tilt a simulated TV.

It’s cool, but in the same way that a motorised shopping trolley is cool: more because someone had the audacity to try it than because it’s solving a genuine problem. But hey, if you’ve got a 40"-60" flat panel TV, a significant viewing angle problem, and US$995 to spare, maybe it’s just what you’re looking for!

On Friday they said they might; yesterday they said they wouldn’t; this morning, I wake up to find that they have. Toshiba have officially given up on HD-DVD. They’re going to stop making players, recorders, and drives by the end of next month. Toshiba claim to have no plans to switch to Blu-Ray production, but I suspect it’s inevitable.

I’m just glad it’s over at last!