The State of TV 2021
LG made all the necessary moves, we’re now waiting for the price tags
Anyone following the way televisions have evolved over the last few years knows this, yes, but it’s worth pointing it out anyway: in the eyes of people who value picture quality over everything else, OLEDs reign supreme. LED/LCD TVs have become much better at balancing their weaknesses with stronger performance in other areas but they still can’t touch the overall display greatness of the OLEDs, as pixel-level control and superior contrast offered by the latter prove to be of the utmost importance every time (especially as far as cinematic picture is concerned). It’s just that simple.
There were only two…
Road to NextGen 2020
2021 marks a quarter of a century of tomb raiding, Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics celebrate
Whether you were actually there to remember Lara Croft’s amazingly pointy polygonal in-game breasts back in 1996 or just read about it in magazine features… why, of course you’ve heard about the Tomb Raider series. You’ve probably played at least one of the “proper” console or PC titles — if only to find out what the fuss was all about — and you sure as hell remember Angelina Jolie as Lara bouncing up and down while shooting intruders in the Croft Manor during the first movie. Well, that British posh fox is now 25 years old — don’t linger on…
Road to NextGen Gaming
Common tech, different philosophies: what it means, why it matters
Enjoying second rounds? Blasts from the past? How about deja vu trips? For many people who went through the launch period of PS4/Xbox One in 2013 — and went through the launch period of the PS5/Xbox Series S|X recently — these past few months must feel oddly, uncomfortably, even annoyingly familiar. A lot of articles published by a lot of outlets go on and on about “the PC-like upgrades of the new PlayStation and Xbox”, about their “evolutionary architecture working just like the one established by PCs” or even about how “home consoles are now basically PCs”.
Comparing the PS5/XSS/XSX…
Road to NextGen Gaming
That’s a lot of shade for a product that’s so good, but here’s how Sony can make it even better
The PlayStation5 has been out for almost 3 months now and a few thousand shy of 5 million people have had the chance to get their hands on one. Doing the rounds in forum threads, article comments and the like, the overall impression regarding Sony’s system is a positive one and rightly so: it’s a modern, fast, truly next-gen console capable of delivering amazing games. …
Road to NextGen Gaming
Do (many) more pixels bring more joy to video games, movies and shows?
That is one of the weird and wonderful things about technology, isn’t it? It can’t be held back. While there’s still some debate regarding the circumstances under which 8K televisions offer tangible benefits to consumers, manufacturers are forging ahead anyway by making plenty of new models available at lower prices than ever. LG knows that not many people can afford its top-notch 8K OLED TVs, yes, but that there’s also bound to be some interest for 8K among early adopters who want to go for big screens — so it’s offering a premium 8K LED/LCD option as well. …
Road to NextGen Gaming
Sony’s system is still very young but a few everyday-life findings deserve mentioning
So it’s been about two and a half months now since I unboxed my PlayStation5 and I’ve been using it every single day since then (as have other family members) for work as well as for fun (not related to work). When reviewing a consumer product of this kind it’s not unusual to find out or appreciate in a different way things that take some time to become apparent. Were there any such things in the case of the PS5?
Well, yes, they were — five of them, in fact. …
Road to NextGen Gaming
It’s marketed as such, so is it really the gaming TV to get right now?
Home gaming — as opposed to mobile gaming — is big these days. Total numbers may not be easy to pin down but if console gamers and PC gamers were put together as one target group — even with considerable overlapping between owners of more than one system — they’d exceed e.g. the Netflix and Disney Plus global userbase put together. Hardly surprising, then, that many different displays of all kinds claim they are “made for gamers”, from small cheap monitors to extremely expensive projectors.
…
Light up the night… with a dashcam? Right on!
It’s true that as far as driver safety is concerned consumer cars have come a long way in the last decade or so: many assistive systems once considered luxurious or exotic have become standard, while basic computers incorporated in most models are able to control and oversee a number of functions that used to require a driver’s attention (just don’t get us started on autopilot). What car manufacturers cannot help with are street and road conditions (which are often far from ideal) and consumers with disabilities that can make driving harder.
Enter Lanmodo’s Vast Pro, a device that can help…
Road to NextGen 2020
The PS5 and Xbox Series were never going to have a problem-free start in 2020… but this is kind of pushing it
So I’ve been using the PlayStation5 for more than a month now and, in the meantime, Microsoft launched the Xbox Series S|X globally with Sony following suit a few days later. These powerful new systems made a lot of promises and managed to keep many of them — you were not really expecting them to keep each and every one of those, right? — hence the positive impressions posted by developers, journalists, influencers and consumers alike. …
Road to NextGen Gaming
The potential for a top media player is there but Sony may not be interested in that
Sony’s new home entertainment system finally launched after a long waiting period of more than 18 months — during a pandemic, no less, which is something no other PlayStation had to do in the past. Still: it’s always a cause for celebration when a new platform promising countless hours of fun arrives and the PS5 promises that and more. Expectations are understandably high given the fact that its predecessor, the PS4, is the most successful platform of the previous generation, boasting a userbase of over 110 million worldwide. So… well? Does it seem to be everything we’ve been hoping for?
Kostas Farkonas
Veteran journalist, project kickstarter, tech nut, cynical gamer, music addict, movie maniac. Will work for money, fame and bandwidth. More on farkonas.com.
