Recently Filed in Enhancements

Guess what? Motorized window treatments can be green. Shades and drapes that open or close at the press of a button can save you energy by helping to keep a room cool in the summer months, warm it with sunshine in the winter or illuminate it with natural light. This is nothing new. The motorized window treatment crowd has been touting the energy efficiency of its products for decades. Only no one cared until now. How times change. Now saving energy is fashionable. And that… View this story
Home Control • Lighting Control • Shades and Blinds • Green Technology • Enhancements • Info and Answers

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. It’s an old cliche, but it still holds true today, especially if you’re thinking of having an automation system installed into your home. Automation systems, by nature, are able to perform some pretty amazing (and unusual) feats. They can regulate the temperature of fish tanks and hot tubs, snap on the lights when you step through the door and open the window shades precisely at 9 a.m. It’s this kind of magic that makes automation… View this story
Home Control • Home Control Systems • Touchpanels and Keypads • Home Control • Enhancements • Info and Answers • Optimize

When this home overlooking historic Fort Sumter in Charleston, S.C., was originally purchased, it was already equipped with a distributed audio system, volume controls in various rooms, a multidisc DVD/CD player and a multitude of remote controls. But over the course of a decade, those technologies became outdated, and the homeowners grew disgruntled with their system’s inability to keep pace with new entertainment options. Wires were strung about the house for Internet access. TVs had poor and intermittent reception. The in-coming satellite antenna cabling was… View this story
Family Room • Home of the Year Awards 2009 • Home Theater • Enhancements • Cool Homes • Slideshows

I hate remembering passwords, but soon we’ll be able to just smile and fuhgeddabout ’em. Our faces will be the keys to unlocking our future. As we step in front of doors, computer monitors or home control panels, facial recognition will trigger activities. “You want your personal settings to be remembered, and a biometric sensor allows devices to know who you are and adjust accordingly,” says Alex Carrausse, business development manager for XID Technologies, a Singapore-based developer of facial detection solutions. “Say you arrive at… View this story
Home Control • Home Control Systems • Safety and Security • Home Security Systems • Web Cameras • Enhancements • Info and Answers

As far as “full HD” 1080p video goes, just about every new HDTV features the resolution but the options for taking advantage of it are still limited. Upscaling DVD players aside, you’ve got native 1080p high-def from Blu-ray players and Blu-ray discs; HD DVD discs and some HD DVD players, some media servers that let you load Blu-ray; on-demand video from satellite providers DirecTV and DISH Network (though Blu-ray scoffs at the satellites’ claims of Blu-ray-like 1080p performance) and the Vudu player; and some web… View this story
Gaming • Gaming Accessories • Gaming Systems • Enhancements • Info and Answers

If one is an innovator, then two means it’s becoming a trend, right? Well, the bandwagon may still have a few good seats available, but Bang & Olufsen has followed in Sharp’s footsteps by incorporating a Blu-ray player as part of the TV. B&O’s flagship BeoVision 7 40-inch LCD has been given an upgrade from integrated DVD player to integrated Blu-ray player (plus it comes with an integrated full-throttle stereo or center-channel speaker too). After DVD had gone through its commoditization stage and became as… View this story
HDTV • Blu-ray • Enhancements • Product News

The other day it dawned on me. My kids aren’t so little anymore. Sooner than I’d like, they’ll be teenagers. Although they’re just 11 and 9 now, they’re already showing signs of adolescence, like sleeping until noon, eating me out of house and home and taking marathon showers. They used to skip in and out of the stall, barely taking the time to wet their hair. Now a good 20 minutes passes before they emerge. I’m happy that they’re finally getting this hygiene thing, but… View this story
Home Control • Bathroom • Gadgets • Enhancements • Info and Answers

Renting movies has never been so easy, with so many choices these days it’s enough to make your head spin—and see Netflix, Blockbuster, Amazon, iTunes, CinemaNow and other on-demand options while you’re spinning. Just two months ago we took a look at how Netflix was extending its “Watch Instantly” reach from the computer to the living room, including a preview of things to come later this year with connected TVs from LG and Vizio that will incorporate Netflix when they arrive. In the meantime, more… View this story
Blu-ray • Digital Media Servers • Digital Media Stores • Enhancements • Info and Answers

Joe Kane has been producing testing and tweaking tutorials to help calibrate video displays for more than 20 years, from TV to Laserdisc to DVD to Blu-ray. His most recent work, Digital Video Essentials: HD Basics, can be found on Blu-ray; we caught up with Kane to give beginners a start on calibration. He couldn’t share too much, of course—if you just got a new HDTV and Blu-ray player and are trying your hand at calibration, you’ll have to check out the disc yourself. What’s… View this story
HDTV • Enhancements • Info and Answers

Don’t expect full HD resolution 1080p to be squeezed through your cable bandwidth very soon, but if you’ve got a TV hooked up to your broadband connection you can give CBS’s online videos a shot. The lone major network holdout to online video megasite Hulu has added a 1080p option its CBS.com HD Gallery and to videos on TV.com. The options are available on a bunch of clips and some full episodes including primetime comedies “How I Met Your Mother” and “Rules of Engagement” and… View this story
Web Services • Enhancements • Product News

Editor’s Note: This article was originally posted on May 1, 2008. In this Cleveland-area loft, the more people, the bigger the party. And what a party it is: Along with the usual nightclub suspects, like a bar, billiards table and blaring music, the loft has a TV around every turn and two theater areas. Yup, this 1,800-square-foot space packs ’em in and packs a punch. “He’s had hundreds of people in there,” says Shane Horner, whose Horner Networks installed the audio/video and home control systems… View this story
Displays • Digital Media Servers • Home of the Year Awards 2008 • Home Theater • Enhancements • Cool Homes • Slideshows

So do you want to hold your entire uncompressed music library and maybe a bunch of movies on a clunky portable hard drive or one CD-size disc? General Electric is pushing the disc on us. Well, maybe not in the marketplace quite today, so we’ll stick with those hard drives (and no, of course they’re not all clunky). But the company did announce that it’s successfully demonstrated its micro-holographic storage on a disc. And the storage capacity of that disc? Try 500 gigabytes, or the… View this story
Enhancements • Product News