Mini Digital TV from IWOOT for under £100

New from I Want One of Those is a Digital TV and Multimedia Player for under £100.

OK it’s only got a teeny, tiny 3.5inch screen but for use out and about this seems great – no idea what picture quality is like yet. Thanks to a digital tuner you can watch all the Freeview channels, though you will need to hook the device to your TV aerial first to download all the available channels.

Using the SD card the gadget also doubles as a video or digital audio (MP3 player)

I Want One of Those

LED 'green' TVs make little financial sense

Interesting piece over on www.oled-info.com about how much money you will save with a ‘green’ TV. It has picked up on research from an Israeli newspaper that shows if you buy Samsung 40inch green LED TV it will take over 166 years to offset the difference in price over a conventional LCD screen.

The newspaper has made the calculation, assuming that you watch 4 hours of TV a day. It has worked out that Samsung’s 40inch LED TV consumes almost half the amount of electricity when compared to normal 40inch LCD TVs (95Kw/h vs 175 Kw/h). This works out a little over a dollar a month in terms of electricity savings. But the cost of the set is more than double. Would be interesting if these results are replicated in the UK but they probably are quite similar.

All TV makers are now offering green or eco TVs. Usually they still sell their normal TV, and the new green model is offered at a premium. Some use LED technology to reduce power consumption, and some use ideas like an optical sensor that knows if you leave the room and shuts down the screen, or an ‘eco-mode’ button that reduces brightness by 20%. But it seems that while they might save energy, they make little financial sense right now.

Via Oled Info

Mini Freeview TV/recorder from August

It has the usual selection of facilities – nine inch screen, Freeview and analogue TV tuners, video, audio and photo file playback etc – but comes with one unique feature. It is the first of its kind that can record Freeview TV

Teletext axed in 2010

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Teletext will cease to be in 2010.

But don’t panic, BBC’s Ceefax is set to continue for as long as the analogue signal is broadcasting.

Closed caption information relay was initially designed by the BBC and Post Office in the early 70s as a way to subtitle shows. And it worked very well.

The BBC soon rolled it out to the full Ceefax service, that continues to this day. And still operates faster than digital text, which is still woefully slow.

Telext was originally due to close it’s pixelated doors in 2012 to coincide with the digital switchover, and although it has 12 million users a week, it has been operating at a loss for three years as people turned to the web for their instant news, celebrity gossip and football scores (the three pillars of any successful information platform).

But it won’t be the end of the Teletext brand, which will continue through its successful travel websites.

(Via Telegraph)