Hasta La Gadget!

Many thought that Profile 1.1 players should’ve died last year, but that just wasn’t the case. But those internet content lovin’ fools can finally get behind Sharp’s Blu-ray players. At this point Sharp realizes that with all the Blu-ray players available, you gotta do something special to get noticed, so Sharp is striving to make its players work better with its line of TVs by automatically putting configuring the display the optimal viewing setting — like dot by dot. The only thing that distinguishes these two players from each other is that the BD-HP22U will be out in May, includes 2GB of USB memory, and retails at $299, while the BD-HP16U is due in March for $229.

Filed under: CES, HDTV, Home Entertainment

Sharp gets with the Profile 2.0 program with the BD-HP16U & BD-HP22U originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While Samsung‘s design may be changing in the Blu-ray player department, its latest DVD player pays homage to last year’s DVD-F1080. The all new, very pebble-like DVD-H1080 touts the company’s Touch of Color design, weighs just over two pounds and is only marginally bigger than the DVDs it will one day play. As expected, the deck features 1080p upscaling to go along with the USB host function which adds support for DivX, MP3 and JPEG files. There’s nary a word on price, but it should be landing at your favorite (and least favorite, for the record) retailer in the first half of 2009.

Filed under: CES, Home Entertainment

Samsung’s DVD-H1080 looks like a large pebble, plays DVDs originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re here, live, at Samsung’s always hot CES 2009 press event. The house is packed with a line running at least a hundred deep.

Continue reading Live from Samsung’s CES press event

Filed under: CES

Live from Samsung’s CES press event originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve now got a content provider giving support to Netgear’s Digital Entertainer Elite, and that honor goes to CinemaNow. At today’s overly-enthusiastic press conference — seriously, they threw apples, footballs, and a beer can at certain points — the company showed off the pay-per-view service on both the aforementioned media streamer as well as the new, much smaller Internet TV Player that’s coming this summer for $199. It’s very lightweight and has an HDMI output alongside two USB 2.0 ports. It’s got YouTube support as well as North American, Europe, and Asia internet TV. The upscaled video looked good, although nothing that’s gonna replace your HDTV anytime soon. One very nice feature is support for torrents that you can trigger remotely for download to the player (presumably on an attached disk drive here, as there’s no internal storage from what we can tell). No word on codec support, but if they’re touting torrents, we’re hoping for at least some DivX / XviD and MKV love. The much larger and heavier granddaddy Elite, whos specs we’ve already heard care of the FCC, is coming February for $399. A fun little feature touted in the presser allows you to pause a video on one TV and watch it on another — provided you’ve got a separate Elite unit connected to each. The bad news? Neither device supports Hulu or Netflix, although a rep told us that they’re kinda sorta looking into adding the latter sometime in the future.

Filed under: CES, HDTV, Home Entertainment

Netgear unveils Internet TV Player, Digital Entertainer Elite with CinemaNow originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Providing some audio punch to go along with all the video, Sharp’s taking the wraps off of two new 5.1 HTIBs with Blu-ray included , the BD-MPC40 and BD-MPC30, plus two new 2.1 channel sound bars, the HT-SB300 and HT-SB200. Since no AV rollout is complete without an iPod dock, the DK-AP7N and DK-CL6N. Why, you ask, is only the soundbar pictured? To peek into the eye of the $799 piano black Blu-ray packing home theater units would be madness, ditto for the $99 – $129 iPod docks, ready to give you two channel audio (DK-CL6N) and 2.1 ESound processing, video out packing DK-AP7N. The theme here is convenience and quality in small packages, some hands and ears-on time should give us enough info to safely pass judgement.

Filed under: CES, Home Entertainment

Sharp debuts Blu-ray HTIB, soundbars and iPod docks originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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