Marc Policani's Digital Media Blog

A recent article posted on Newlaunches.com reports that Sharp created a nice Proof of Concept LCD screen which could doubble as a scanner or as a method of capturing multi-touch input.

"It's all of 3.5-inches but this LCD Screen from Sharp features an integrated optical scanner that could be used to scan business cards, but also be used as a method for multi-touch input. The prototype was seen at the Ceatec exhibition. Possible uses include the ability to recognize fingers or other objects and as biometric lock on your phone. And since each pixel has a scanner it may as well be a multi-touch screen."

This week several news outlets carried articles about Microsoft Surface, a new touch sensitivie tabletop product with compelling enterprise, retail and consumer applications (see Popular Mechanics; MSNBC; FileFront; Engadget; Ars Technica; Computerworld; The Tech Report; USA Today; The Seattle PI; Telegraph; and much, much, more).  

Similiar products have been developed or are being researched but have not received anywhere as much press - so for the sake of comparison and to help provide a bigger picture as to what is possible, here are a handful of links and resources to check out:

In an effort to make the HTPC experience more family friendly I decided that it was time to replace our HTPC's case and include it with our existing stack of home theater equipment.   I wanted a case that wouldn’t glow and whistle in the dark detracting from the home theater experience and wanted to go with something that would match our existing 17" home theater components, could run 24x7 without having to worry about overheating, and could be operated by a single remote control - all this for aging HTPC system built from spare parts that I didn’t feel comfortable spending more than $100 on...

After much searching, I stumbled accross the Thermaltake Mozart Media Lab VC4000SNS at Fry's for about $129.99 (now only $99.99).

The case ships with three front side 5 1/2" drive bays with a door designed to hide all but a single optical drive.  The black aluminum face plate for the optical drive is attached using a double-sided sticker which I wasn’t too excited about - although it looks far better than some of the other optical drive face plates that I've seen.  The door itself is fairly heavy which is nice, but it’s on what feels like a very flimsy hinge and clasp mechanism which would have been much better executed with a magnetic clasp and or a sideways opening drawer.

This particular case does not ship with the optional VFD and Media Lab feature (for that you want to look at the VC4001SNS), so no scrolling digital text in the front of your case or remote control.   If you’re like me, you don’t want any of that anyway because scrolling text detracts from the home theater experience and IR remote controls are just awful to use anyway (poor range, difficult to use behind a glass enclosures, etc).  Many TV tuner cards ship with their own optional RF remotes anyway (I’m running two ATI TV Wonder 550's and an ATI HDTV Wonder card all of which ship with their own RF remotes).  One thing I should mention for anyone attempting to use an RF remote is that it’s better to hang your remote antennas OUTSIDE of the case as the aluminum in the case shields too much of the signal.

The dual rear 60mm exhaust fans are somewhat loud but very much needed - DONT put this case into your Home Entertainment Center without first cutting holes to accommodate either the fans, or the entire unit.   Because of the form factor of the fans, I would imagine that it would be difficult to find replacement fans for this case that are any quieter than it ships with - but if you know of any please feel free to send me a quick e-mail.  In our implementation the HTPC case was too deep and I had to cut a 17" wide hole into the back for the entertainment center in order to accommodate the case.

There are two vents at the top of the case, although only one will allow you to attach a fan anywhere near it.  Depending upon the amount of hardware that your running you may or may not wish to install a blowhole fan there, for my purposes the blowhole fan was overkill and I'm getting ready to remove it to cut down on the amount of noise that emits from the case.

Speaking of noise, the fans that ship with the case are noisy.  With that said, the noise output of any case is always proportional to the amount of money you invest in your fans.   For HTPC purposes, I would recommend sinking a good $50 on specialty fans to reduce the amount of noise pollution that your going to subject your friends and family to.

PROS:
- Excellent Price / Performance for an HTPC case at $99.99
- Beautiful 17" wide brushed aluminum case
- No flashing lights to distract you from your digital content

CONS:
- Fatter than it needs to be - for a slimmer form factor without sacrificing width check out the VC7000SNS and 70001SNS series.
- Deeper than it needs to be
- Heavy aluminum door on a flimsy hinge and clasp system that feels like its going to break off at any moment
- Cheesy but effective black aluminum stick on faceplate
- Noisy stock fans are functional but not ideal for a home theater environment

This week I made an executive decision to replace the case under my desk with the Antec Sonata III (retail $129.99 at Fry's).   I had seen the Sonata II as well, but opted to go with the Sonata III at a higher price point preferring the more conservative looking front console, high gloss piano black finish and higher wattage power supply.

The case comes with room for up to nine drives (3 x 5 1/2" drives, 2 x 3 1/2" drives, and four hard drives).  The front facing 5 1/2" and 3 1/2" drives are accessable from the front thanks to a screwless pinch-clip system which is somewhat tacky but thanfully hidden by a hinged door.  The four drive trays are a very nice touch because they come with little rubber feet to reduce the amount of noise that emits from your hard drives as they vibrate against the sides of your case.  Four holes have been drilled out adjacent to the 4 hard drive bays to place an optional 120mm mounted fan to blow air over at least two, perhaps 2 and a half of up to four drives.  Personally, I've lost a LOT of hard drives to heat damage, so while I like the idea of giving your customer a clean tray system that they can use to blow air over their hard dives my personal preference is to go with a smaller dedicated fan and heat sync for each drive and with the Antec Sonata III you just out of luck if you want to mount dedicated fans to your hard drives.  You wont have as much space aftewards, but if your in a pinch and you NEED to use dedicated hard drive fans you can get the same noise and vibration reducing affect that the stock rubber feet give you by rigging up a rubber band array.

Out of the box, the Sonata III ships with an EarthWatts EA 500 500 Watt power supply, two front side USB ports, an eSATA port, and headphone and microphone jacks.  It also comes with a washable air filter in the front of the case, however it appears as though this filter was thrown in as an afterthought as I cant see it as offering you much in the way of air filtering.  I was also somewhat saddened to see that they did away with the firewire port that ships with the Sonata II case in favor of adding a next generation eSATA port that I cant use yet, but this isnt too big of a deal for me because I use firewire so infrequently that I might as well run a cable off the back of the PC when its time to upload video from my camcorder.

The case is advertised by Antec to be "whisper quiet", however there isn’t anything special about this case outside of the fact that you can step down the power 120mm stock fan that it ships with to reduce the amount of noise it makes. One thing big difference between the Sonata II and III cases that made me a bit sad was that Antec either did away with the air duct between the two models, or that the model that I purchased did not ship with the same air duct that the Sonata II on the showroom floor had.   Airducts are always a nice touch in "silent" cases because they serve two purposes - they bring in air from outside of the case to cool the CPU with which ends up being about 10-20 degrees cooler than the air inside of the case.   It also serves to muffel the sound of the CPU fan.  I'm following up with Antec's customer service department now to see if theres anyway that I can purchase one of their air duct mufflers for the Sonata III as an added option but if they do offer one they have made it difficult for the consumer to determine which model on their web site was designed to be used with the Sonata III (no pictures on their web site).  

Antec was kind enough to place a lockable latch door on the side and front of the case - however because Antec decided to place the power and reset buttons behind the door as well its somewhat of a nusance for the casual home user that just wants to turn the PC on and work.  The lockable front and side doors would come in pretty handy if your looking to secure the PC from passers walking by however which would would have made the case ideal for anyone using the case to run public demo if it werent for a cheap plastic hinge which is easy to imagine breaking off after a year or two of regular usage attempting to gain access to the PC's on/off button and or drives.  

In conclusion, the case has a lot of nice little features and value added extras that make it an excellent product and a more than fair price BUT there's nothing special about the case that makes it perform any better than any other standard case in terms of its ability to perform quielty and or cool devices effeciently. 

PROS:
- Clean interior design
- Clean and conservative exterior look and finish
- Lots of space for devices
- Lockable doors
- Price performance
- Nice presentation of front side ports (USB, eSATA, Audio)

CONS:
- The way the case is designed, you have to decide whether you will use a 120mm fan to cool 2 1/2 of your hard drives at a time or using no cooling at all.  In order to get four hard drives into my with their respective hard drive coolers I had to insert 2 under the 120mm fan and two at a 90 degree angle free floating on their sides.
- Lockable doors hide power button and reset switch
- Cheaply made plastic front door with hinges which are easily broken or snapped off
- No noticible difference in sound performance for a case that advertises that its a quetest in class model
- No air duct / muffler like the one that ships with the Sonata II
- Another case that cut the holy living daylights out of my hands while attempting to screw things in  

The 52" TV runs a super high-resolution of 2160p (3840 x 2160 pixels). In absolute numbers, the device is running a stunning 8.3 megapixels - four times more than 1080p TVs (1920x1080p) and more than twice the resolution of Dell's, HP's and Apple's 30" desktop LCDs. So, what do you get from this resolution, especially if HD DVD and Blu-ray are running only 1080p anyway?

According to Westinghouse, the TV does not really target the consumer market, but high-end industrial applications. What we saw was a demo of an oil company viewing a digital version of a mining site. And even at this very specialized application, the difference to the best 1080p we saw at CES appeared to be marginal, at least to our eyes. However, of course you do see a much clearer picture when compared to some lower-priced 1080p TVs. Westinghouse said that it has begun taking orders for the 2160p. However, the TV will not come to the consumer market anytime soon. Company officials decline dto comment on pricing, but the highest resolution on the market combined with limited availability are a good indication for one pricey TV. | more...

After having whetted the public's appetite for a high-definition console capable of playing both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats at this time last year, and then publicly withdrawing that plan, LG Electronics this morning announced it is jumping back into the high-def pool head first. The company is promising to provide "details" next week, at CES 2007 in Las Vegas, of a hybrid HD DVD / Blu-ray Disc player. | more...

 

From BetaNews.com...

After a daring programmer evidently seeking notoriety posted a relatively convincing looking homemade video to YouTube on Wednesday, purportedly showing an HD DVD video disc with AACS copy protection being cracked on a Windows-based system, a spokesperson for the AACS Licensing Authority told Reuters this morning it is seriously investigating the legitimacy of the claim. | more...

more...

Forget AT&T and the like. The only phone company you need is Skype, which routes your calls over the Internet and, as of May 15, 2006, costs nothing for outgoing calls made by users in the U.S. and Canada. And now you can almost forget your cellphone provider too—with this new Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) gear, you can make calls using Skype (or Vonage, another VoIP provider) from just about anywhere. No computer or dorky headset required.

Will the availability of free VoIP, teamed with the convenience of Wi-Fi handsets, spell trouble for the major phone companies? Discuss this, as well as Skype's move to free service, on the PopSci Blog.

Netgear Skype Wi-Fi Phone
$250; netgear.com [pictured above]
Power up the phone on any wireless network, enter your Skype username and password, and your Skype contacts will populate the handset’s color LCD screen. Call them instantly or phone outside numbers—either way, it's free.

Size: 4.3 x 1.8 x 0.8 in.
Weight: 3.8 oz.
Battery life: 3 hours talk; 50 hours standby
Service: Skype

Transfering music from CDS onto iPods and other MP3 players will no longer be illegal after federal cabinet agreed to make sweeping changes to copyright laws.

But beware the trap of downloading from the internet. The Government will increase surveillance and fines on internet piracy in a package to be announced by Attorney-General Philip Ruddock today.

Once the new laws are passed, "format shifting" of music, newspapers and books from personal collections onto MP3 players will become legal. The new laws will also make it legal for people to tape television and radio programs for playback later, a practice currently prohibited although millions of people regularly do it.

More...

In an article for TechWeb.com, David Gardner reports:

Like it or not, airline passengers in U.S. skies are likely to be listening to their fellow passengers talking on phones in a year or so. An FCC frequency auction underway this week will likely pave the way for VoIP calls in-flight.

Nine companies ranging from Verizon Communications' Airfone to JetBlue Airways are bidding for the frequencies. Airfone already offers phone service on many flights, but its high cost has limited its use. JetBlue has declined to say what its LiveTV LCC unit would do with a winning frequency.

More...

Will today's infrastructure support tommorrow's High-Definition Video?  Peter Svensson, a Technology Writer for the Associated Press writes:

Most home Internet use is in brief bursts — an e-mail here, a Web page there. If people start watching streaming video like they watch TV — for hours at a time — that puts a strain on the Internet that it wasn't designed for, ISPs say, and beefing up the Internet's capacity to prevent that will be expensive.

To offset that cost, ISPs want to start charging content providers to ensure delivery of large video files, for example.

Internet activists and consumer groups are vehemently against those plans, saying they amount to tilting the Internet's level playing field, one of the things that encourages innovation. They want legislation to guarantee a "neutral" Internet, but prospects appear slim.

At the heart of the debate is a key question: How much would it really cost the Internet carriers to provide a couple of hours of prime-time TV over their networks every day?

The carriers are playing their cards fairly close to their chest, but there are ways to get close to an answer.

One data point: As a rough estimate, an always-on, 1 megabit-per-second tap into the Internet backbone in downtown Atlanta, bought wholesale, costs an ISP $10 to $20 a month, according to the research firm TeleGeography Inc. An ISP's business is carrying data from that tap to the customer.

One megabit per second doesn't sound like that much, but ISPs spread that bandwidth out over their subscribers. Analysts estimate that ISPs sell around 30 times more bandwidth to their end users than they can connect simultaneously to the Internet (the figure probably varies widely from provider to provider).