Thursday, February 21, 2008

Big picture in a small package

Sony's OLED TV is vivid, small and ‘cute'

ust when you thought it was safe to buy a TV again, along comes the next wave of technology to make your recently purchased wall-sized liquid-crystal or gas-plasma television appear quaint.

It's a display technology called organic light emitting diode, or OLED, and Sony is the first to reach the consumer market with it as a standalone TV, which Sony has placed in its Bravia series. The XEL-1 model is a cute little thing, small enough to pass for a digital picture frame on a desktop, but one that happens to deliver TV.

Aside from the new screen, the XEL-1 is a basic TV with a couple of à-la-minute goodies tossed in. It comes with a remote control and two HDMI ports to connect to video from, say, a Blu-ray disc player and an HDTV set-top box. There's also a memory-stick port and a USB DMeX connection so you can watch content from Sony's Bravia Internet Video Link service. That service requires another box (selling for about $249), which will stream, via your cable Internet service (not DSL), Internet video, music videos, movie trailers and RSS feeds from AOL, Yahoo, Grouper, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Sony BMG Music.

Early prototypes reported there would be an Ethernet port to connect the XEL-1 to your home computer network, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside in the production model. | Read full article