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Vizio / Olevia pitted against one another in LCD shootout
If you've been considering buying yourself a budget LCD HDTV, chances are Vizio and Olevia are still on your radar. Thankfully, LCD TV Buying Guide has taken the time to pit the two against one another in order to give you the information you need to choose the best of the pair. In the test, the 46-inch Vizio VW46L and 42-inch Olevia 242T FHD were used, and all of the important issues -- you know, image quality, shadow detail, color accuracy, motion lag, etc. -- were all covered. We don't plan on ruining it for you, so you'll have to exert a bit of effort and check out the read link below if you're interested in finding out which set came out on top.
Display technology shootout: OLED vs. LCD vs. plasma
Every so often, we see a writeup pitting whatever the hottest display technologies at the time are against one another, and sure enough, CES 2008 lit a fire under the folks at Sound & Vision and out came the latest shootout. This particular one highlights OLED, LCD and plasma, and doesn't hesitate to point out that SED isn't included because it simply "seems DOA," while the Laser TV was dissed for still relying on rear-projection design. Ready to check out the strengths, weaknesses and domination potential for each of the three? Hit up the read link -- and be sure to dodge those stray punches.
Seven-inch digital photo frame shootout
Hot on the heels of the SSD shootout comes a five-man competition stocked with some of the most prolific digital photo frames on the market, and now that prices on these bad boys are dipping down from the stratosphere, there's a good chance you'd like to know which would look best in your den. Thankfully, GearDigest has taken the task upon itself to pit Kodak's EasyShare SV710, Pandigital's 7-inch Photo Frame, Philips' 7FF1CM1, Smartpart's Portable Picture And Video Player, and Westinghouse's DPF-702 against each other to see who's really the champ. After hours of viewing countless relatives and vacations of yesteryear, the group found that the obvious assumptions of "you get what you pay for" proved completely true. The four frames not labeled by Philips all featured a similar 16:9 display with a paltry 480 x 234 resolution, and while a few offered niceties not found elsewhere (Kodak's PictBridge, for instance), all of the devices were decent at best in terms of image quality -- and they all ranged from $119 to $129.95 in price. Handily snagging the gold was the $199 7FF1CM1, which upped the ante with a 720 x 480 panel and proved worthwhile if you actually want your photos to shine. But hey, it's still your dough, so do your duty and dive into the full review below before swaying one way or another.[Via DigitalMediaThoughts]
SSD shootout: pricey HDD replacements do battle
Considering that solid state discs -- although still noticeably more expensive that traditional HDDs -- are quickly plummeting in price, it's about time a brief roundup was executed in order to pinpoint which SSD was best for you. Granted, CustomPC's evaluation only included a handful of options, but the in-depth testing process found a few glaring losers and even fewer runaway winners. As expected, reviewers used a number of read / write testing applications to judge the speed differences and real-world performance increases on seven SSDs ranging from 8GB to 32GB in size. Coming out on top was Samsung's 32GB drive, which proved both "quick and silent" in their testing; however, the 18GB STEC Zeus-IOPS proved the hands-down winner in terms of sheer speed. 'Course, we highly doubt many of you will be snagging the latter after witnessing its £7,050 ($14,461) pricetag, but a number of slightly slower performers including PQI's Turbo Plus 2.5 could very well provide the boost you desire without (totally) breaking the bank.
O'Reilly posts iPod microphone shootout
Over at O'Reilly, Mark Nelson tested all three major iPod microphone add-ons and wrote about his results. He tried out the Belkin TuneTalk stereo, the Griffin iTalk Pro, and the XtremeMac MicroMemo. When all was said and done, all three solutions performed well despite the fact that they were all horrible battery hogs. The $50 iTalk Pro offered one-touch recording and three input levels but its built-in microphone picked up a lot of hard drive noise. The $60 MicroMemo used a handy boom that avoided picking up iPod noises but had no level controls and could only record mono audio. The $70 TuneTalk Stereo offers a USB port that allows you to record while your iPod is docked and charging but had stability issues for positioning and the microphone, like the iTalk Pro, picked up iPod hard drive noises. TUAW readers: have you bought an iPod mic? Which one did you buy? And are you happy with your purchase? Let us know in the comments. Full disclosure: I write for O'Reilly.
Battle of the 3+ megapixel cameraphones
Comparing cameraphone image quality can be a tough nut; apart from obvious things like poor focus or grainy quality, it can be a pretty subjective beast. PhoneArena went wild with high end handsets to give us a "thousand-angle" view of what it takes to stand out in an über (notice the umlauted u? We don't do that often, so this is serious business) shootout between three 3 megapixel cams -- including the D900, K800, and N93i -- and the KG920 and N95 at 5 megapixels. Each handset is put through a series of grueling tests including shooting outdoors, night shots, and macro mode with points awarded based on how they fare in each challenge. We won't spoil the read for you, but as a hint the winner rhymes with "okia." Hit the read link to check it out.[Thanks, Orhan C]
System Shootouts: Mac Pro vs Dell Precision 690
System Shootouts has pit a Mac Pro against a Dell Precision 690 workstation in an in-depth feature-for-feature comparison to see who gets to go home with the prom queen. This match is of particular interest in part because of how detailed the feature criteria is (it included extra drive/bays like a floppy or memory card readers, as well as any included backup solutions and even web authoring software), but also because of how ultimately mismatched these two machines are. One machine is so overpriced that System Shootouts opted to break traditional policy and include a display and/or extended warranty program in the name of mercy for the losing contender.In case you can't tell, I'm trying not to spoil this particular match because I think it's such an interesting upset, especially in light of how Apple did their own hardware match-up on stage at WWDC 2006. Check out the shootout for yourself to see whether the Mac Pro or the Dell wound up spending prom night home alone.
MacBook vs. iBook
Everyone has gone MacBook crazy (or is it just me?)! However, let us not forget the honorable iBook that the MacBook has replaced in Apple's product matrix. System Shootouts hasn't forgotten. They have, in fact, pitted the MacBook against the iBook in a point by point comparison. Who comes out on top? I'm not telling, but I think you might be a little surprised.
