I had a sausage sizzle and movie night at a friends on Saturday and they were showing off their new Dell laptop and Samsung Plasma TV with 3D. Being a Mac person myself I was quite smug when they turned on their new, empty of any data laptop, and it still took at least 1 minute to boot up when my Macbook Pro, full of files and data and software, boots up in less than 20 seconds. Not impressed with the laptop I turned my attention to the TV. It was definitely very slim, which was impressive and the border around the edge of the television was little more than a keyline, but I was most impressed when they turned it on.
I have of course seen the emergence of 3D television, which I’ve noticed with some interest but have not paid much attention too. Despite being “in digital”, I’m not always an early adoptor. I tend to watch the market place, read the reviews and then buy the product upon its 2nd release when they’ve ironed out the bugs. I myself have a second hand LCD flatscreen which I bought off a colleague when she was moving back to the UK – being a greenie and all I figure there’s no need to buy brand new things as there are plenty of folk who upgrade their technology every 12 months and I can benefit from their off-casts. It seems that retailers are now catering for this type of cutting edge consumer and you can now buy a package that allows you to buy products on a rolling payment plan where you can upgrade to the new next best thing every 2 years (my friend told me about this but I can’t find any reference to it online except renting). Anyway, this tangent is not why I was writing this blog post …
So, this new Samsung Plasma TV, which can also be viewed in 3D, also links into your internet connection, either by wireless, USB or LAN, and you can browse YouTube, use Skype, update your facebook, twitter or MySpace profile etc. Now I know people can set up their TV on their home network and use the TV as a monitor (as we already do with our MacTV and iMac mini) but having not bought a new TV in the last year (and obviously not talking to anyone else who has), I didn’t know that now the internet came built in to the TV. Brilliant!
This friend of mine, was then able to sync to the TV with his HTC smartphone and use his phone as a keyboard. He could do this with his laptop also and obviously a wireless keyboard would be more ergonomic but we made do with what we had available to us at the time.
So this Plasma TV was also able to be viewed in 3D with some fancy glasses (not attached to a lead and power source). I knew that some programs or movies could be viewed in 3D but again I didn’t know that any program could be made 3D just by adding glasses. I didn’t test it out and I’m not wholly convinced but I’m happy to report back here with my weekend learnings.
When looking online this morning so that I could link to the correct product, I found that their TV wasn’t even the newest version (the 8 series), but the 2010 model, the 6 series. Anyway, I think that’s enough gushing about Samsung Plasma TV’s.
Surprisingly, this discovery didn’t make me want to rush out and buy one. I’m content just knowing that these products now exist. What I was surprised by was the fact that I read copious digital blog articles every week, I watch TV, I read the newspapers and I’ve never come across anything about the internet on your TV that made me dig a little deeper. Perhaps I’m not the target market, or perhaps the advertising and PR hasn’t been very effective?
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