“Showrooming,” the practice of browsing brick-and-mortar stores for products and then buying them at a steeper discount online, is becoming a more and more prominent problem for traditional retailers, with app’s like Amazon’s Price Check making it easier than ever before to use retail shops as nothing but glorified store windows. According to a new Story in more »

Unfortunately, overloaded 3G networks and a complete lack of internet connectivity in my hotel room made much reporting from the show itself next to impossible (although hopefully you were following me @hometechtell for the handful of 140-character observations I could sneak out from time to time). But I’m home now, and after thinking over the more »

Breaking with their longstanding commitment to plasma, all but two of Panasonic’s new televisions for 2012 have moved over to LED backlit LCD panels. Their new IPS LCD panels focus on high performance scanning, fast decay rates (how fast a pixel goes to black or the next color) and wide viewing angles. The different series more »

Panasonic has always had some of the best Blu-ray players on the market, and 2012 explodes with a lot of brand new options. Especially interesting to home theater fans is the support for FLAC audio, and the unheard-of bump to 192khz/32-bit audio processing. Also worthy of note are touchpad remotes, smartphone control apps, and 24 more »

    Pioneer is showing  a brand new, high-end network audio streamer next week at CES. Part of their Elite line, the N-30 and N-50 are intended to act as the hub for all the audio on your DNLA 1.5 network or Apple’s AirPlay, giving you high-end DACs and processing to make your lossy and more »

The most common cause of failure in consumer electronics is traces and solder points being broken by boards expanding and contracting, the most famous of which would be Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death. But what if they could fix themselves? A team at the University of Illinois seems to have found a solution. While more »

I am fascinated with product placements in movies. Seriously. I live for those subtle things that so many other people just gloss over. Like the brand of watch that a character is wearing, or the bottle of wine on the table or perhaps the pen they use to sign a contract. Someone went to the more »

If the day after Thanksgiving is called “Black Friday,” what is the day after Christmas called? Boxing Day. But just what is this “Boxing Day” all about? After you read Edward C. Baig’s article in USA Today, I think you’ll agree that Boxing Day isn’t so much a bank holiday in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, more »

There was a period a few years ago when Sound + Vision ran a how-to column in each issue. I think it was in something called “The Tech Zone” or the like and the feature section was titled Step-by-Step. As in, “Here are the step-by-step instructions for you to go forth and do… something.” Kind more »

Ours isn’t an easy market to assemble a Holiday gift guide for — because, let’s face it, TVs and receivers aren’t usually the sort of gift most of us give or receive this time of year — but avoiding those big-ticket items, there have still been some nifty new releases that the home tech geek more »