Hardware Features

We’ve all been there. Grovelled around the back of an AV system looking for the plug that needs jiggling in its socket to restore a mysteriously lost connection. We’ve trodden on a plug, and broken it, and so made an expensive cable useless; or broken the little plastic lock leaf on the RJ45 plug at the end of a carefully-laid Ethernet network cable. Worse still, we’ve tripped over a lead, wrenched the plug and broken the socket in a pricey piece of gear. And how many smartphones and tablets have been wrecked by someone pushing the USB connector home the wrong way round? What a wonderful world it would be if connections no long relied on plugs.

Can it really be five years since a TV and movie industry desperate to find the next big tech temptation set out to entice us and our traditionally 2D AV brains into the third dimension? 'Fraid so.In fact, it’s a bit longer than that if you take the 2009 launch of Avatar as your 3D starting gun. At HCC, however, it was the Summer of 2010 when the format became a going concern, marked by the arrival in the UK of the first 3D TV sets.

Where is your home cinema from? While speakers and even amplifiers designed for discerning domestic theatre owners often come from specialist boutique brands, the centrepieces – the TV screen, the projector and the Blu-ray player – almost always hail from East Asia. Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, Epson and Sharp were birthed in Japan, and Korea's LG and Samsung have been busy chipping away at their dominance for the last decade.

It’s a curious fact that even the smartest TVs can seem inscrutably dumb. So much so that many buyers fail to even get them online. Even if you’re tech savvy, Smart TVs often seem little more than utilitarian devices. 

Light and cinema have always enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. Without the former, our flickering home theatres would be little more than gloomy sheds with extravagantly comfortable seating. A well-designed lighting system can really help deliver that 'wow factor' that we want our cinema setups to provide – especially if you want the room to rock even when you're not watching a movie.

Right. I’m hearing an awful lot about 4K, but why should I be excited?

It all started with a disastrous screening at my local multiplex cinema, where I eventually had to complain about stifling heat, 3D trailers in a no-glasses 2D showing and a baffling system of seat allocation. And when the complaint yielded a grunted response, I began looking for another cinema for my business – and discovered that my local Odeon in Uxbridge had a new IMAX screen.