Featured Television Reviews

Video phones were supposed to be the future. Instead, it's taken until just the past couple of years for a company like Apple to bring us FaceTime. And of course that's not the first videoconferencing system to hit consumers, but it seemed to be one of the first systems designed with ease of use in mind. Now we've got the Biscotti TV Phone. What's different about Biscotti, aside from it being named after an Italian cookie, is that it aims to use your TV as your video phone. By passing HDMI video through the phone, it acts as a sort of overlay so that you can take and receive calls at-will - and on the big screen of your television to boot. We got hold of the Biscotti TV and gave it a run-through to see if it was truly the next evolution of the videophone. Really, we wanted to see if it was revolutionary or just "nifty".

This week we're reviewing an Acer S271HL LED Monitor. At Audioholics we've looked at a lot of televisions and projectors, but we're finding that more and more, it's the flat panel monitor that's making it's way into bedrooms and dorms across the country. Given the lightweight nature of these new flat panels, and the ever increasing quality with which they're made, it's no wonder that thousands of consumers are reaching for monitors instead of TVs.

There are three things I honestly look at when shopping for TVs: picture quality, features, and the TV's overall look. If you can find a TV that has the features you need, looks good and, well... looks good, then you're really in good shape - of course, you're typically going to have to pay for it as well. Sony's XBR series TVs have always been fascinating to us because they represented the best the company has to offer. Back in the day you simply couldn't find a better TV than an XBR Trinitron. Nowadays Sony has a lot more competition, but the XBR line is still their cream of the crop.

Acer has been doing some remarkable things lately in the world of laptops, but this week they announced five new ultra slim LED-backlight displays. While they've been in the display market for some time, these new displays, available in 20-, 23- or 27-inches and with adjustable tilt bases, offer incredibly slim profiles and sleek contemporary designs. They're also packed with top-of-the line features and technologies. Designed with viewing family photos and videos in mind, the displays are perfect for both watching the latest DVDs/movies, as well as for business applications that require excellent resolution, contrast ratios and graphics performance.

Wanna buy a $40,000 42" LCD display? Dolby's got one for you with their PRM-4200 Professional Reference Monitor. Now before you get all bent out of shape and assume Dolby just designed a TV with monstrous markups, realize that this is a super-accurate monitor designed for use in reference video houses across the country... not your living room. Dolby uses a patented dual-modulation display technology to produce images of the highest quality possible on this flat-panel monitor. They are so confident in its abilities, in fact, that they are dubbing it as "the first flat panel to surpass the CRT". Dolby is hoping that its Professional Reference Monitor is destined to become the industry-standard reference monitor. Given the lack of competition, it probably will, though there won't be a whole lot of them out on the market.

What if you talked to your TV? OK, so many of you do, particularly during political debates and football season... But what if you spoke to your TV and it did what you told it? And while I don't think it will command a beer to materialize out of thin air and find its way to your hand - let's at least admit that changing the channel and adjusting the volume would be a good start. Nuance Communications, the parent company behind Dragon Naturally Speaking, has officially spilled the beans that it is the brains behind LG's new voice recognition features contained within the company's Magic Remote. This is the new remote control we already disclosed in our coverage of their new LG CINEMA 3D Smart TVs.

While the 55", 4k, glasses-free 3d, back lit LED display stole the show, Toshiba is looking to catch the attention of those without $10,000 burning a hole in their pocket with their new LED lineup. The edge lit displays should impress with their thin profile, the back lit LED with its deep blacks, and the new Aero Family aesthetics and Audyssey Sound Enhancement features should give consumers reason enough to give Toshiba another look. While none of the features of the LED line up are all that spectacular (120Hz, no 3d, etc.), if the prices are right, they may be big sellers. We'll have a wait a few months to find out.

LG finally jumped into the Google TV bandwagon at CES 2012, bringing the familiarity of Google's Android OS to the convenience and tiled interface of its 3D and Smart TVs. Together, the combination offers consumers a new and attractive home entertainment option, not to mention a ton of streaming media and online content options. Possibly the nicest aspect of LG's implementation of Google TV is the mixing of its Android-based user interface with the Magic Remote Qwerty. LG's Google TV user interface and main screen have been designed for convenient browsing and content selection and the latest iteration allows for multitasking, so search, social networking and TV functions can be run simultaneously. The user interface can be directly accessed using the Magic Remote Qwerty which, as the name implies, combines the user-friendly benefits of LG’s Magic Remote with a QWERTY keyboard.

LG Electronics is touting its new Cinema Screen design at the 2012 CES and it is, in a word: fabulous. I don't think I've ever used that word in a sentence before, but I don't know how else to describe a 1mm thin bezel that truly gives a flat panel LED backlit TV the appearance of a true edge-to-edge display. This is something really new and it's got people all riled up and really interested. What's really exciting is that several of LG's high end 2012 Cinema Screen Smart TV models are going to look like this. In fact, so far there are three models that include the 1mm thin bezel, but more are certain to come. All of these TVs are 3D and the company has also released new Cinema 3D glasses for 2012. There are three models and they are 20 percent lighter than previous Iterations. Now if only they could "lighten" the obligatory 3D headaches...