WesleyTech.com – Exploring Technology

Best Buy is the ultimate destination for the latest cameras to capture your holiday memories. The Canon EOS Rebel T5i is one of the best-selling DSLRs. This camera makes advanced photography easy and fun, and gives you exceptional image quality, along with a host of features to enhance your creative expression.
• Capture Hollywood caliber full HD video
• Continuous autofocus while taking HD video
• Features an 18.0-megapixel CMOS sensor and a DIGIC 5 image processor to ensure vivid, crystal-clear images.
• The 3″ vari-angle touch screen simplifies navigation.

Canon has been manufacturing high quality photography solutions for as long as I can remember. The Canon brand has gained well deserved prestige in the industry, by continually producing cutting edge photography and video equipment.

I’d love to get my hands on a Canon DSLR. Owning one of these bad boys will quickly catapult you into the ranks of aspiring professionals and advanced photographers. The myriad settings and the fine grained controls built into these cameras allows you to experiment, adjust, tinker and really delve into advanced photography techniques, which will help you step up your game in order to capture more stunning images.

Nowadays, these DSLR cameras are also fantastic tools for capturing stunning high definition video. I know many friends and colleagues who use these for filming skateboarding, snowboarding and all types of other activities. These Canon DSLRs produce crystal clear video quality that rivals, and many times bests, traditional high-end ‘camcorders’.

Save $150 on the Canon EOS Rebel T5i at Best Buy*. Visit Best Buy to learn more. *offer valid 12/7-12/20.

The reviewer has been compensated in the form of a Best Buy Gift Card and/or received the product/service at a reduced price or for free.

LG’s remarkable OLED TV technology is revolutionizing how we watch TV. We’ve all read about ‘virtual reality’ concepts in books, and seen it in movies and TV…

But what if the television in your living room looked so dramatically life-like and was so immersive that it transported you to new places? It’s time to forget virtual reality and check out the LG OLED TV at Best Buy. View REAL reality at its best, with unbelievable clarity in stunning OLED high definition.

I’m personally excited about LG’s OLED TV due to the technological advances and break-throughs that it brings along with it. Traditional LED TV’s used inorganic LED’s as their backlighting mechanism, but they still maintained the same old Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) architecture that we’ve been using in HDTV’s for years. OLED is a whole new animal, utilizing organic light emitting diodes that function as the pixels themselves, leading to much better contrast, color and every other aspect of picture quality. Traditional LED and LCD HDTV’s can’t come close to this picture quality!

Discover LG OLED TV – The Ultimate Display!

What is OLED TV?

The stunning design of LG OLED TV is only 0.21″ thick at its thinnest point. Picture quality is spectacular, with Infinite Contrast that ranges from the most blazing whites to the deepest blacks. And, LG’s exclusive 4 Color Pixel technology delivers bright, vibrant colors. Learn more here: LGOLEDatBestbuy.com

Your first kiss. A baby’s first steps. The majesty of a desert sunset. Some things in life defy all explanation and must be experienced to be believed. Such is the case with LG’s latest display technology. With deeper and richer colors, stunning contrast and ingeniously curved screens, it is unlike any technology you’ve ever seen, and it delivers a picture that exceeds your wildest imagination.

LG 55EC9300 SKU# 7846019 – OLED TV

· Infinite contrast ratio and stunning color – delivers more natural, lifelike viewing.

· 4 Color Pixel technology enhances color range and accuracy.

· Super thin design (consider how to show visually)

· Find content faster with webOS

Head on over to Best Buy, because you have to see LG’s OLED TV to believe it. If you want in on this beauty, Best Buy is offering this pinnacle of TV technology at the everyday price of $3499.99 (save $500).

The reviewer has been compensated in the form of a Best Buy Gift Card and/or received the product/service at a reduced price or for free.

Coming soon: 4K Blu-ray Discs

The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) have announced an updated Blu-ray Disc standard that will include 4K Ultra-HD (UHD) content. The update will allow for UHD content to be used on 50GB, 66GB and 100GB discs. The content will support up to 60 frames per second, will feature High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) compression technology and both high-dynamic range and wider color gamut. The first players should be available as early as spring 2015, with 4K Blu-ray Discs available as quickly Christmas 2015.

With the prices of UHDTVs falling to near parity with Full HD (1080p) sets, and video components supporting the new HDMI 2.0 spec and HEVC codec, the only next step is providing the sources. Currently, 4k video is supplied through limited means. For example: certain UHDTVs from Samsung can stream 4k video from Netflix. A few high-end services provide first-run movies in 4k (at steep prices), and Sony has a proprietary 4k movie store with limited options from Sony Pictures.

Victor Matsuda, global promotions chair for the BDA and VP of Sony Corp.’s Blu-ray group, argues physical discs are still the best way to consume media. “I think it’s very much in line with what we’ve experienced in the past: Packaged media offers a very controlled, stable, known environment, that’s fundamentally an advantage, compared to streaming services. The more information you’re trying to stream, it becomes more of a challenge for Internet-based services.

“One of the advantages Blu-ray and packaged-media formats have is having its own, enclosed, stable environment. We don’t have to worry about … how big the pipeline is from the service provider, whether your monthly data plan is going to affected by the 4K products rolling out.”

Blu-ray Disc sales have surged recently to account for over 30% of the retail disc market. This market, as a whole, has been shrinking, but internet service providers have also been clamping down on bandwidth utilization, making physical discs attractive to some more than others.

Roku TV now available for pre-order

Roku has beaten Apple to the punch, as it were, by incorporating their streaming software platform into a consumer flat panel television using their own brand badge. The long rumored “Apple TV” that’s actually a TV hasn’t seen the light of day, but the Roku TV is here. Chinese TV manufacturers Hisense and TCL have announced they are now taking pre-orders for the Roku TV.

There are many devices out now that have incorporated support for the Roku Stick, including Blu-ray Disc players, front projectors, televisions, and A/V receivers, but these TVs include the Roku software built in as part of the television’s operating system. In fact, there isn’t an Input button on the remote, and sources are selected from the Roku menu. Additionally, the TV can be controlled using a Roku remote control app.

The TCL Roku TVs are available in a 40-inch, 48-inch, and 55-inch (all 1080p). The pre-orders are available from Amazon starting at $329 for the 40″ size, and a proposed shipping date of 2 to 3 weeks.

Amazon Fire TV now $84

For a limited time, Amazon is selling the much lauded Fire TV
for only $84.00. The Apple TV and Roku competitor features hundreds of available apps, including Netflix, Hulu Plus, Prime Instant Video, Showtime Anytime, WatchESPN, and more.

Amazon’s “killer app” is the voice control using a microphone built into the remote. Speak a search and Amazon Fire TV will track it down.

Sony announces PlayStation TV

The streaming set-top box market has exploded recently, in spite of these features being included in new HDTVs, Blu-ray Disc players, gaming consoles, and even a select few cable boxes. Sony had their own offerings for years, including the recent box with Google TV. This fall, Sony will take on all contenders with their own PlayStation TV set-top box.

Previously launched in Japan as Vita Plus, the PlayStation TV box will be available in North America for the acceptable price of $99, making it on level terms with Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Roku 3. As with the competition, the PlayStation TV will not simply feature video and audio streaming, but will also focus on gaming.

It seems like a step back for gamers, because each successive generation of game consoles was more powerful, but the casual gamer market has exploded and Sony is not unaware of this. PlayStation TV will feature games from the original PlayStation One console for download, and some PS3 games will stream through the box. The PlayStation TV will also extend PS4 games (for PS4 owners) within the home network to a second location via Remote Play. For this reason a gaming bundle will come with a DualShock 3 controller and an 8GB memory card for $139.

Kaleidescape, DVD-CCA come to terms

Just after Kaleidescape brought their DVD server to market, the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) sued and this lawsuit has been over their and their customer’s heads ever since. No more.

The Kaleidescape System copies, bit-for-bit, the entire DVD data to a hard drive for playback. Kaleidescape argued, first successfully in 2007, that this preserved the spirit of the DVD CCA licensing agreement. Being the only server manufacturer to actually possess a DVD CCA license for the Content Scramble System (CSS), Kaleidescape was saved the fate of other competing servers who were sued to oblivion who had not.

The DVD CCA argued, successfully on appeal in 2012, that the CSS encryption licensing required the physical disc to be present in the playback device. Kaleidescape was given a permanent injunction, but this ruling was stayed pending appeal.

On June 2, 2014, Kaleidescape and the DVD CCA finalized terms of a settlement which requires Kaleidescape to have the physical disc present in the player upon playback effective on servers sold after November 30, 2014. Kaleidescape Systems will then no longer store data on the hard drives and will have to be played from the tray or vault. The same tags will be used so DVDs will start immediately without warnings or trailers, and chapter and scene tags will still be available.

Why would Kaleidescape agree to such terms after building their entire business model on the idea of no more discs? Because times are changing, and DVDs aren’t as popular as they once were. Blu-ray Disc is here now, and Kaleidescape does have rights to store the data on hard drives as long as the disc is present in the vault or tray upon playback. More than that, the Kaleidescape Store allows for bit-for-bit downloads of DVD and Blu-ray movies for playback without a disc present – including UltraViolet license. The future is arriving faster than you know, because the Kaleidescape Cinema One is intended mainly as a download device.

This settlement is also opening doors to more studios to allow for far more content to be sold through the Kaleidescape Store. This future cut off date may even be a foreboding of new hardware at better price points to push a download service with better features than any other to a larger market.

For more information, read this interview with Cheena Srinivasan, CEO of Kaleidescape.