A new study by the Consumer Electronics Association, the industry group representing electronics manufacturers, finds that nearly half of prospective TV buyers say they want to buy an Internet-connected TV.

The study, conducted in December 2008, asked respondents to say how they'd use their connected sets, and the most popular answers included accessing information about current TV shows or identifying a song played on a show (48 percent) and finding out more about the actors (44 percent). Asked whether they currently surf the Web while watching TV, 30 percent of "online adults" responded "always or usually" while 32 percent answered "sometimes." Activities likely to be moved from the PC to the living room TV include watching online video (62 percent), getting weather updates (59 percent), and playing online games (57 percent)....

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The 2009 entry-level LH30 series of LCD TVs re-establishes LG as the king of picture controls. Last year the company offered the most extensive suite of user-menu color adjustments available and this year there's even more ...

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Some of today's DVD and Blu-ray soundtracks are so densely mixed that dialog can be hard to understand.

When actors' lines are obscured by onscreen mayhem, you may miss important plot details. The dialog intelligibility problem is even worse for people who are hard of hearing.

Here's a simple fix to improve intelligibility that also works like a charm for quiet, late-night movie watching.

Turn up the center channel volume level. Please understand, that's not the same thing as cranking up your receiver's volume control. Raising the center channel volume relative to the left/right and surround channels makes dialog louder than the music and sound effects, so it's easier to understand what the actors are saying.

The easiest way to make the adjustment is with your receiver or home theater-in-a-box system's remote control. Check and see if your remote has a button marked "Channel Select." My Onkyo TX-SR805 receiver's remote has such a control, marked "CH SEL". It toggles through left, right, center, etc., and once I got to the center I used the "Level -" and "Level +" buttons to adjust the center channel volume.

Experiment to figure out how much louder you want the center channel speaker to be, but start with turning it up by three decibels. That might be enough, but don't hesitate to turn it up higher if that's what you need.

Of course, you can also use the CH SEL feature to boost subwoofer volume to taste whenever you switch movies or CDs. Or adjust the surround channels volume.

...

Originally posted at The Audiophiliac

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Prior to CES, Samsung's reps mentioned in a conversation with CNET that a successor to the company's best 2008 HDTV, the LNA950 series, would be available later in 2009, and now details are beginning to emerge. ...

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