Samsung sells 110-inch ultra-HD TV for $150,000
By Youkyung Lee, Technology Writer

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Samsung said a 110-inch TV that has four times the resolution of standard high-definition TVs is going on sale for about $150,000 in South Korea.

The launch Monday of the giant television set reflects global TV makers’ move toward ultra HD TVs, as manufacturing bigger TVs using OLED proves too costly.

Last year, Samsung and rival LG Electronics, the world’s top two TV makers, touted OLED as the future of TV. OLED screens are ultrathin and can display images with enhanced clarity and deeper color saturation.

But Samsung and LG failed to make OLED TVs a mainstream that would replace the LCD television sets and still struggling to mass produce larger and affordable TVs with OLED. Meanwhile, Japanese media reported last week that Sony Corp. and Panasonic Corp. decided to end their OLED partnership.

Demand for U-HD TVs is expected to rise despite dearth of content while its price will likely come down faster than that of the OLED TVs. Much of the growth is forecast to come from China, a major market for the South Korean TV makers. Chinese TV makers have been making a push into the U-HD TV market as well.

According to NPD DisplaySearch, global sales of ultra-HD TV sets will surge from 1.3 million this year to 23 million in 2017. More than half of the shipments will be taken by Chinese companies between 2013 and 2017, according to NPD.

While Chinese TV makers have been seeking to boost sales of U-HD TVs with a lower price and a smaller size, Samsung’s strategy is to go bigger with a higher price tag. Samsung’s 110-inch U-HD TV measures 2.6 meters by 1.8 meters. It will be available in China, the Middle East and Europe. In South Korea, the TV is priced at 160 million won ($152,000) while prices in other countries vary.

Samsung said it received 10 orders for the latest premium TVs from the Middle East. Previously, the largest U-HD TV made by Samsung was 85-inch measured diagonally.

The ultra-HD TVs are also known as “4K” because they contain four times more pixels than an HD TV.

Tech trends in 2013
By Anick Jesdanun, Technology Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — As I look back at the more than 100 tech products we reviewed in 2013, a handful of gadgets and services deserve a second look.

It’s become clear that one brand rarely stands out any more in whatever product category you look at. Competition is more intense than ever, which means consumers have more choices than ever. That’s why coming up with a “best of” list for 2013 proved difficult.

So instead of a comprehensive list, I’m highlighting five big trends. These are also areas where further innovations are likely in 2014, so stay tuned.

— Better camera phones.

This was the first year I didn’t mind leaving my point-and-shoot and full-bodied, SLR cameras at home. Camera phones have gotten good enough to stand in for those stand-alone cameras in many situations.

Of the ones I tried, Apple’s iPhone 5S proved to be the best as an all-around camera. It’s good at getting the auto-focus right, even for moving objects. A larger sensor and an improved flash compared with previous models mean better shots in low light.

An honorable mention goes to Nokia’s Lumia 1020. It’s consistently good at night and indoor shots. It combines the small amount of light from multiple pixels into one, resulting in better lighting. It also has manual controls typically absent from camera phones.

Given how frequently people use their phones to take photos, expect even more improvements in the coming year.

— Personalized technical support.

It used to be when you couldn’t figure out how a product worked, you called your tech-savvy children. With Mayday on Amazon’s new Kindle Fire HDX tablets, you no longer need to do that. Instead, just tap the Mayday button, and you’ll be connected to a live customer service representative within seconds, even at 4 a.m. on a weekend.

Amazon’s representatives can help you install apps, connect to Facebook or tackle anything else confounding you. You see them on the screen, but they can only hear you. They have a virtual orange marker to point you to buttons and menus on the screen. They also can take over your machine remotely and do it for you.

As gadgets do more, they also get more complicated to use. As someone who’s constantly asked by friends and family for tech assistance, the Mayday feature is something I would welcome in other products.

— Shackle-free phone plans.

The traditional way of buying phones: Pay $100 or $200 for a phone, and stay locked to your wireless carrier for two more years.

The new way: Buy or bring your own phone. Leave any time.

T-Mobile introduced that concept in March when it split the monthly phone bill into two parts — one for the device, and the other for the voice, text and data services. If you already have a device or have finished paying for it, your overall bill goes down. If you need a phone, you pay its full retail price, spread out into monthly installments. You’re no longer getting a subsidy for signing a contract, but you’re also not paying for it through a higher phone bill.

A few months later, T-Mobile introduced a program that lets you upgrade your phone up to twice a year, rather than every other year. The other national carriers followed with their own contract-free, frequent-upgrade plans. AT&T also lowered its service fees for voice, text and data for those who pay for phones separately. Sprint reduced those fees as well, but only temporarily.

Some people will still find it more cost-effective to buy phones the traditional way, but these contract-free options give consumers more freedom to leave their carrier or change phones frequently.

Meanwhile, some phone makers have come out with cheaper phones that do almost as much as the $600-plus ones. Motorola’s Moto G phone is particularly notable, at just $179 — ideal when you pay for your own phone.

— Laptops with long-lasting batteries.

Most laptop owners no doubt have found themselves out of juice at the most inopportune times, whether in the middle of an important business meeting or the start of a super-long flight to Asia or Australia.

A new generation of processing chips from Intel makes that far less likely to happen. These chips, known as Haswell, are more efficient at using power. It’s now possible to go a full waking day on a single charge, with some reasonable breaks for meals and exercise.

The 13-inch MacBook Air, for instance, promises up to 12 hours of battery life. I was able to stretch that to more than 14 hours by turning off Wi-Fi, though nine to 11 hours was more common with general Web surfing. On the Windows 8 machines I tested, I was able to get seven to nine hours consistently.

Expect to pay at least $1,000 for a Haswell laptop, though prices may start coming down in the new year.

— Internet television.

A few friends and I dropped cable TV service this year. I saved more than $100 a month and used some of that to buy a new TV. You might be wondering: Huh?

Several options are now available for watching television over the Internet. Watching on a computer or a tablet seems unsatisfactory.

With a streaming device such as Roku, Apple TV or Chromecast or a game console such as the PlayStation 4 or the Xbox One, you can project Internet video to the big screen. You’ll need to subscribe to a handful of services such as Netflix or Hulu Plus.

The downside is you often need to wait at least a day for shows to become available online. That means avoiding spoilers on social networks. It’s also a poor option for live sports. Major League Baseball has a great online service, but typically blocks hometown teams.

But it’s money saved to buy the hot gadgets of 2014 — or tickets to a ballgame, plus beer and hot dogs.

Canon key player in The Watsons Go To Birmingham
LOS ANGELES–Re-creating the past can be challenging for filmmakers, especially when tasked to duplicate the look of a particular time in history for a period movie. Add a tight budget, cramped locations, and underwater photography, and you have the situation James Chressanthis, ASC, faced as cinematographer for the movie The Watsons Go to Birmingham. Based on the novel by Christopher Paul Curtis, the film depicts a fictional family’s 1963 road trip intersecting with an actual terrorist bombing during the civil-rights era. To help with some of the film’s challenging production requirements, Chressanthis used two EOS C300 Digital Cinema cameras and EF-series lenses from Canon U.S.A., Inc., a leader in digital imaging solutions.

“The Canon EOS C300 camera is a lightweight camera that’s very agile and easy to hold steady because it has just enough weight and bulk to it,” Chressanthis said, noting that he worked with two full crews and two camera operators. Five different portions of the movie relied on the Canon EOS C300 Digital Cinema camera’s compact size, high mobility, and other advantages. Those portions included interior car photography during the Watson family’s road trip, a crucial scene in a tiny bathroom, a near-drowning sequence in a lake, faux home movies seen under the opening and closing credits, and the re-creation of 1963 newsreels. The newsreels required sophisticated postproduction software to degrade the superb image quality of the EOS C300 camera’s footage so that it would match the flicker, dirt, and grain of actual newsreels from that era.

“The wide exposure latitude of the Canon EOS C300 camera allowed us to re-create the film newsreels of 1963,” Chressanthis explained. “We created our own newsreel footage and flashback scenes to introduce our characters into those newsreels. All of it had to integrate with real archival newsreel footage of civil rights demonstrations, and we were quite successful in doing that.”

Other imaging formats used to duplicate the look of old newsreels included Super-8mm film cameras and the Canon XF100 HD video camcorder. “The Canon XF100 is a super-light camera; I call it the ‘news journalist camera,’” Chressanthis noted. “It would be my camera of choice if I had to go to Afghanistan because it is so tiny. The fact that it is so tiny made it a little less stable, but I would turn its built-in Canon optical image stabilizer on or off, depending on the needs of the scene.”

Grain, noise, and other image artifacts were not added to the home movie sequences shot with the Canon EOS C300 Digital Cinema cameras, Chressanthis added. “We instead turned those into really clean, crisp, beautiful black & white images, which included live-action home movies of the family and still portraits that were used as freeze-frames and stills in sequence.”

When Mooney and production partner Cristeen Dennis formed Crescent Moon, they purchased a Sony HD F900/3 and complemented it with a Vinten Vision 250 Pan and Tilt Head. “The idea to shoot a real estate program with a $180K camera and a $10K head was unheard of at the time, but it worked. People and clients noticed. The Vision 250 has simply been the best head I have ever owned–and we still use it on everything from Chapman PeeWee Dollies to Fisher Dollies and the Titan Super Nova Crane.”

Money noted, “Last month we upgraded to the Sony F5 and a system of Zeiss Primes. And, long telephotos. The head is perfect. Constantly changing lenses on the big sensor camera is a breeze with the sliding plate. And the camera is always in perfect balance.”

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