December 18, 2009 | by Lisa Montgomery

2009 is coming to a close, so I thought it would be appropriate to look back at the homes I’ve featured during the year.

Surprisingly, I remembered at least one interesting tidbit about each and every one, and we’re talking dozens of homes—including many winners and finalists from our annual Home of the Year Awards program.

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Authorized Savant dealers will be able to resell iPads.

Update (April 1, 2010 at 4:30 p.m.): The ROSIE iPad App is now available in the App Store. Check out the image below for the description.

Update 2: (April 2, 4:30 p.m.) Savant has released an image of its iPad App, which it called the ROSIE 4i iPad App.

Savant already told us Apple’s iPad will redefine home automation.

Soon, we’ll know how.

The home automation manufacturer plans to go public with its ROSIE iPad app on April 5. The ROSIE iPad app will cost $9.99 at the App Store.

President Jim Carroll previously told CE Pro that Savant was designing a version of its ROSIE iPhone app specifically for the iPad. “We’re going to do some pretty cool things and take advantage of the additional [9.7-inch screen] real estate,” he said.

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December 18, 2009 | by Steven Castle

Whatever the reason – marketing hysteria, living on technology’s bleeding edge, you need a new TV so why-the-hell-not? or the overwhelming desire to sell everything and move to Pandora – you’ve decided that life can’t go on without owning a 3D TV. Now what?  What do you need? What do you do? Here are 10 things you need to know about making the switch to 3D.

1)    Do I need a new TV?

To view 3D programming from cable, satellite or Blu-ray, you will need a 3D capable TV and, for the vast majority of people, this will mean buying a new TV. Currently, Panasonic currently offers one 3D set in limited markets, but expect models from Sony, Toshiba, Samsung and others by this summer.  Mitsubishi and Samsung have been marketing 3D capable DLP rear projection sets for several years, and at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, they say that there will be a device that will enable these existing sets to work with the new 3D specifications. This device is expected to sell for around $100.

1A)  You mean the set I just bought when they switched to HD (and then again when everything went to 1080p) won’t work?

Technologically is a cruel mistress, and she lays harsh commands on her followers. Sadly, your old set is a casualty in the move to 3D. But, you can still enjoy it in your bedroom!

2)    Will my existing DVD or Blu-ray work?

They will continue to work as they always have, they just won’t play any of the new 3D movies. To do that, you’ll need to buy a 3D capable Blu-ray player. These are just starting to become available at prices starting under $200 and many offer other cool features like Internet streaming of YouTube and Netflix, etc. If you use a Sony PlayStation3 as your Blu-ray player, you own the only Blu-ray on the market that is capable of being firmware upgraded to 3D. Congratulations! (Now, take that $200 and buy an extra set of glasses! See #5) (There actually is talk about other Blu-ray players being upgraded, however it looks like they will not offer full 1080p resoultion when displaying 3D.

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February 03, 2010 | by Lisa Montgomery

Not everyone has the luxury of dedicating a room solely for big-screen movie viewing. More often, that space is shared with a family room, a den or a guest bedroom.

And that’s OK. Your family room is already finished and furnished. Plus, it probably already has a good-size TV and modest surround-sound system.

If your family room is like most, it may not look or feel much like a theater. What it’s likely lacking is ambiance - something in the arrangement and design of the room that gives off a theater vibe.

You can go as simple or as complicated as you want to produce the desired cinematic effect. Here are 10 ideas to consider.

1. Re-paint: Dark, rich colors like burgundy and navy blue scream theater. Plus, because light doesn’t reflect off dark colors like it does off light colors, the video on your TV will look better.

2. Rearrange the Furniture: The screen at your local cinema sits directly in front of the seats; your TV should, too, which may require a slight adjustment of your family room furniture.

3. Add Architectural Details: Decorative moldings, pillars and other theater-inspired details are widely available at home improvement stores.

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by Brent Butterworth

I swear, I will never put in a home theater for anyone ever again. I’m just going to tell them to go to a pro.

Thanks to my experience in wiring, carpentry, etc., family and friends often call on me to install their home theater gear. I review gear for a living, so the gear itself I can handle. It’s the control system that keeps me on the phone with them for hours, or has me rushing to their homes minutes before the Super Bowl or the Oscars.

All because they can’t figure out how to work the system. Or more accurately, because I can’t figure out how to build a system they can work.

Sure, there are lots of universal remotes that can, in theory, control an entire home theater system. But they have problems. Most consumers can’t figure out that they have to switch inputs when they want to watch a DVD instead of cable TV. Many can’t remember that they have to hit the DVD button on the remote when they want to control the DVD player.

Sure, you can set the remote control up for macros, where it performs a whole bunch of operations at the touch of one button. But the fact that most gear has just a single power button tends to flummox most macros. If the TV is off but the cable box is on, any macro that tries to turn them both on will shut the cable box off.

I did program a fairly fancy touchscreen remote for a friend of mine a few years ago. (He bought it from Amazon.) Unfortunately, this remote is still primitive enough that I had to get really creative when I programmed it. And the more creative the installer has to be, the less reliable the home theater system usually is. So still, I get the calls. He’s on his second touchscreen now and I refuse to program a third.

Control systems from companies like AMX, Control4, and Crestron solve these problems easily. These systems can monitor whether a device in your system is on or off, so they never shut it off accidentally. They can be programmed with simple commands like “Watch a Movie” instead of requiring you to remember how to work the system. And the installer can leave off the complex, confusing options that cause most people to mess up their systems.

Best of all, these systems are reliable. Yes, they can break, but it’s not like you’ll be calling your installer once a week because you can’t get the TV going.

These control systems aren’t cheap, and you can only get them through custom installers. But you’ll find them well worth every penny. After all, what’s the point of saving a few thousand on your fancy home theater system if you can’t figure out how to work it?

By John Sciacca

Quick….name a luxury automobile. Maybe you thought of Bentley, or Rolls Royce, or something sportier like Aston Martin or Ferrari. Now…..name a high-end watch. You probably thought of Rolex or maybe Omega or Patek or Cartier. How about a luxury kitchen appliance? There’s Viking, Sub-Zero, Thermador or Wolf…

Now, name me some high-end audio/video gear. If you thought Sony and Bose, then you are like the vast majority of the population. And while I have absolutely nothing against either of these companies, no one “in the know” would consider either of them to be high-end.

For all its bluster and billions, the consumer electronics industry has really done a poor job of promoting itself, especially on the high-end. In fact, most companies that are really considered to be performance leaders are totally unknown to the vast majority of people, even those that are looking to purchase them. When introduced to a brand that has the equivalent pedigree of a Bentley, Rolex or Viking, most people shrug their shoulders and say, “Never heard of ‘em.” So, I thought I would introduce you to some high-end manufacturers, and explain what they are…and what they are not.

In the electronics world, Wilson is not the volleyball from Castaway, rather the manufacturer of some truly stellar loudspeakers.

There is a Meridian in Santa Barbara, CA that makes affordable – yet drinkable – wines. However, the A/V Meridian is from the UK and a leader in digital audio processing.

Macintosh is an Apple computer; McIntosh has been making highly desirable audio gear that engenders fanatical-like loyalty since 1949.

BO is generally considered offensive and undesirable. B&O (Bang & Olufsen) is a Danish company known for world-class industrial design.

A kaleidoscope offers a complex pattern of constantly changing colors and shapes; a Kaleidescape is a media server capable of storing literally thousands of movies.

Ronco is the late-night huckster trying to sell you things like the Chop-o-Matic and the pocket fisherman. Runco makes some of the world’s finest video projectors.

Crestron and Lutron are not characters in the upcoming Disney Tron reboot. They are actually leaders in home automation and lighting control, respectively.

B&W is not BMW. B&W is Bowers and Wilkins, the British speaker manufacturer, whose speakers are used in places like Skywalker Ranch and Abbey Road. BMW is Bavarian Motor Works, the car company.

Theta is the eighth letter of the Greek alphabet and the name of that Fraternity/Sorority you rushed in college. It is also the manufacturer of some terrific processors and amplifiers.

SIM2 is not a sequel to the popular “The Sims” video game, but an Italian projector manufacturer.

Oppo, Sonos and ADA are not merely examples of corporate palindromes. Oppo makes a highly regarded Blu-ray play, Sonos a terrific wireless audio distribution system, and ADA (Audio Design Associates) has been pioneering high-end audio and distribution systems for over 30 years.

Classé might sound like a term from the Urban Dictionary, but it is actually Canada’s leading maker of high-performance music and theater components.

by Brent Butterworth
A new generation of projectors promises to fix every problem we ever had with video projection. Based on the time I’ve recently spent with a couple of these machines, it looks like the promises have been fulfilled.

These new projectors use LEDs as a light source instead of the UHP lamps that other projectors use. LEDs offer all sorts of advantages over lamps. The biggest one is that LEDs never need replacing—unlike lamps, which need to be replaced every 2,000 to 3,000 hours. That means a huge cost savings over the course of several years. Manufacturers rate the lifetime of the LEDs anywhere from 20,000 hours to practically forever (even though they’re all using the same LEDs).

Supposedly, the performance of LEDs doesn’t change much over time. But lamps start to dim and shift color after about 1,000 hours, necessitating frequent readjustment of the picture controls.

LEDs can also deliver deeper black levels and better contrast. Many lamp-based projectors use an automatic iris to get deep blacks; the iris closes down automatically during dark scenes to make the blacks darker. Problem is, you can often see the iris working. LEDs don’t need the iris, because they can be dimmed almost instantly to any level. Based on what I’ve seen so far, the speedy operation of the LEDs can indeed eliminate the “pumping” and flickering you sometimes see with auto iris mechanisms.

That’s a lot of advantages, right? Well, there’s more.

Because LED projectors use separate red, green, and blue LEDs instead of a white lamp shining through a rotating color filter wheel, the “color fringing” effect you see on most DLP projectors is eliminated. And because LEDs can deliver more intense, saturated color, you can set the projectors up for an ultra-vivid picture. Some will say it’s unrealistic, but I’ve grown addicted to the look after living with it for a few weeks.

This first generation of LED projectors warms up in 40 seconds, only about a third of the time it takes for a lamp-based projector to fire up. And when you shut them off, they go off instantly because unlike lamps, they don’t need to be cooled down gradually by a fan.

The time I recently spent with the Digital Projection M-Vision Cine LED convinced me that LED is the wave of the future for video projection. It’s a shame that only a small handful of people are getting to enjoy the rich hues of the Winter Olympics on an LED projector, but I’m glad I’m one of them.

By John Sciacca

Today (February 3, 2010), the HDMI Licensing group announced that the 3D portion of the HDMI 1.4 Spec is available for download (www.hdmi.org). Steve Venuti, president of HDMI Licensing, commented, ”The HDMI Consortium recognizes the importance of standardized 3D formats for movies, gaming and broadcast content and the need for non-adopter companies and organizations to have access to that portion of the HDMI Specification. As the mainstream adoption of 3D is gaining momentum and content providers define and expand their 3D roadmaps, HDMI is ready to support this major market development.”

The press release went on to say that the HDMI Consortium plans on shortly releasing a 1.4a version of the spec which will include updates to the 3D portion of the spec.

If you’ve been involved with the consumer electronics industry for any amount of time at all, you know that standards and, especially cables, change. We’ve seen composite video, S-Video, Component Video, VGA, RGB, DVI (with –I, -D, and –A varieties), and IEEE 1394. But HDMI – which stands for High-Definition Multimedia Interface – has proved to be the moving-est target of them all. Since its inception, the HDMI cable has undergone more changes than Britney Spears.

In case you’re curious, these are the changes that each version has added, and what we can look forward to – at least for now – when the 1.4 spec finally hits the street.

HDMI 1.0 –Released December 2002. Intended to be a single cable replacement to DVI cables, supporting video up to 1080p/60 Hertz with HDCP copy protection, along with 8 channels of LPCM/192 kHz/24-bit audio. The ability to carry audio was the biggest difference from DVI cables, which were video only.

HDMI 1.1 – Released May of 2004. Added support for DVD-Audio soundtracks.

HDMI 1.2 – Released August 2005. Added support for SACD audio.

HDMI 1.2a – Released December 2005. Specified Consumer Electronic Control (CEC) features, commands and compliance tests, allowing (in theory) all devices to communicate and control each other.

HDMI 1.3 – Released June 2006. Increased bandwidth to 340 MHz (10.2 Gigabits per second) and added support for Deep Color with 30/36/48-bit xvYCC. (Previous versions supported up to 24-bit.) Also supports output of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio and incorporates automatic audio syncing with video capability (lip sync).

HDMI 1.3a – Released November 2006. Mostly “housekeeping” fixes and specifications for manufacturers. It did add support for streaming SACD in bitstream rather than raw DSD format used in previous versions.

HDMI 1.3b, 1.3b1 and 1.3c – Released Mary 2007, November 2007 and August 2008 respectively. Describe testing and products based on the 1.3a spec and the Type C Mini connector and active cables.

HDMI 1.4 – Increases maximum resolution to 4K x 2K, supporting much higher pixel counts than 1080p (up to 4096 x 2160 at 36-bit). Will allow Ethernet over HDMI, for 100 Mbps connection between connected devices. Also adds an audio return channel, allowing your TV to send audio back to your A/V receiver. Of course, it will also support 3D as announced today, with stereoscopic, 1080p images.

The only real bummer is that older gear likely won’t be upgradeable to the new spec, so enjoying 1.4 (and beyond) will require purchasing new hardware – Blu-ray, TV, A/V receiver – instead of just upgrading firmware.