Items tagged with Philips
Philips heavily invested into tech that it integrated with some of its higher-end TVs years back called Ambiglow or Ambilight. That tech put a backlight behind the TV that would glow to match the action on screen with light that filled the room. Watch a flick with the Incredible Hulk and your room would glow green. It is slick technology that not only improved immersion in a movie, but the light also helped to bias the eye to prevent flicker from the screen from straining your eyes in a dark room. Philips is now doing something similar for owners of its Hue lightbulbs with a new app called "Philips...
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Philips is cranking out a truly high-end display in the form of the Momentum 43-inch gaming monitor. Besides its rather mammoth (for a gaming display) screen size, the Momentum is notable for its support for the DisplayHDR 1000 standard. Up until now, the VESA standards organization has recognized DisplayHDR 400 and DisplayHDR 600 certified displays, which have brightness ratings of 400 nits and 600 nits respectively. However, given the DisplayHDR 1000 rating, the new Philips Momentum boasts a brightness rating of 1,000 nits. The display supports 4K resolutions (3840x2160) and 10-bit color input. In...
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EPI, the North American brand partner for Philips monitors, has announced that it will have a very drool-worthy monitor available to purchase in the U.S. later this year. The 49-inch Philips Brilliance 492P8 is a curved super-wide display with a native resolution of 5120 x 1440. That wide panel is a VA unit with 1800R curvature, up to 600 nits brightness and up to 5000:1 contrast ratio. Viewing angles are 178-degrees and it has very narrow bezels. The thin bezels of the monitor are intended to make them ideal for people that want to stack them in multiple monitor setups. EPI is aiming these monitors...
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On the desktop, a 4K resolution isn't just hard on our graphics cards; it can be hard on our eyeballs as well. When the first 4K monitors hit the market, most of them used similar form-factors as 1440p models, despite needing to cram way more pixels into that space. Speaking from experience, 4K on a 28" monitor can be headache-inducing, and it's for that reason that larger 4K panels can hold a lot of appeal. Philip's latest foray into 4K definitely has a lot of appeal with its 40-inch screen size, which means it'll require a fair bit of desk space, but your eyes won't bleed from squinting...
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Some people have the ability to light up a room just by their very presence. So can you, says Philips, when you use its Hue gen 2 app for iOS and Android. The new generation app for the company's smart lighting system gives you better control over your home illumination along with some intuitive ways of brightening up a room. One of the new features is called Rooms. Using the Rooms feature, you can group all of the lights in one room together to control them all at the same time. This can be handy for rooms like kitchens and the basement where you might have lights installed in different locations,...
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Philips is getting ready to release what it claims is the world's first quantum dot desktop monitor, the 276E6ADS. It's a 27-inch display with a Full HD 1080p (1920x1080) resolution, which is nothing to write home about, though what's interesting about the monitor is that it supposedly delivers 99 percent coverage of the Adobe RGB color space. There's an excellent primer on Wired about quantum dot technology, which was a point of focus at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas earlier this year. Quantum dots are semiconductor nanocrystals engineered to emit light. They have narrow light...
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Philips has a great product with its Hue LED lighting system, but up to this point, it's suffered one glaring flaw: it's a little pricey. It seems the company isn't ignorant of this fact, nor the one that most people are not going to buy into the Hue ecosystem until it becomes more affordable. Fortunately, a cheaper solution is on its way, and while it's only been announced for Europe, it seems likely that demand could bring it to other parts of the world, including North America. The latest product is called Hue wireless dimming kit and will retail for €40 (~$45 USD). It'll include a simple dimmer...
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Incandescent bulbs may be a 19th century invention, but some people swear by the bulbs due to the pleasant light they give off (despite the drain they put on your energy bill). For a time, CFLs were seen as the next logical step as a replacement for incandescent bulbs in residential homes, but LED technology is quickly dropping in price and more and more people are starting to embrace the extremely efficient bulbs. Philips is hoping to capitalize on the efficiency revolution with a new family of LED bulbs that will be available starting in early May. The new Everyday LED bulb is equivalent to a...
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Last month, news emerged that Philips was suing Nintendo over alleged patent infringements in the U.S., and the proverbial chickens are already coming home to roost in other countries. According to Reuters, Philips said it has won a patent suit in the UK (although no details about amounts for compensation have been shared). The patents concern motion, gesture, and pointing control that Philips licenses to companies that make set-top boxes and game consoles, and the company has asserted that Nintendo has been using the technology in the Wii U without a functioning license agreement. Philips spokesman...
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Logitech Harmony Ultimate and Smart Control Remotes Add SONOS Speaker Support, Speech To Text Search
Logitech has added more functionality to some of its remote control products, and with them the company is aiming for a smarter home. The Logitech Harmony Ultimate and Logitech Harmony Smart Control now have the ability to control SONOS wireless HIFi System speakers and Philips Hue lights, and they offer speech-to-text capabilities through the associated Harmony App. The speech-to-text functionality is particularly useful for searching for content on your set-top device such as the new Amazon Fire TV, and the app uses Siri or Android Speech Recognition (depending, obviously, on your device). This...
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To paraphrase David Letterman, we wouldn’t give Nintendo’s troubles to a monkey on a rock. Amid a terrible sales performance that only got worse over the first quarter of this year (Nintendo president Satoru Iwata took a 50% pay cut over the the Wii U’s awful sales back in January) and a mini-scandal when word emerged that users couldn’t be same-sex couples in the 3DS handheld console game Tomodachi Life (an oversight for which Nintendo has apologized), the company has a lawsuit on its hands. Philips is suing Nintendo over two potential patent infringements. The first concerns...
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Philips is developing an intelligent lighting system for supermarkets that communicate with your smartphone to guide you through the store, give you deals on products, show you recipes relevant to the items you’re trying to find, and more. In addition to offering efficient LED lighting that the company says will require no special infrastructure changes, the light fixtures act as a positioning grid. “Each fixture is identifiable and able to communicate its position to an app on a shopper’s smart device,” reads a Philips press release. “This enables the shopper to get...
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If you're in need of a new monitor for your gaming machine, you're in good shape. We've already seen a number of display announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, including an interesting 27-inch panel by Philips that uses NVIDIA's G-SYNC technology to synchronize refresh rates to the PC's GPU. The "Philips 27-inch Gaming Monitor with G-SYNC" (model 272G5DYEB) rocks a Full HD 1080p (1920x1080) resolution, 1,000:1 contrast ratio (typical), 300cd/cm2 brightness, and a 144Hz refresh rate with 1ms response time for fast action visuals presumably void of ghosting and other nasty...
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Historians can argue the exact date of the compact cassette tape's birth, but as far as Philips is concerned, it was on this day in 1963 when the company first launched the format at its headquarters in Amsterdam. It's hard to believe it's been that long, but that makes the compact cassette 50 years old today. "This month, Philips, the innovator behind compact cassette technology, celebrates the cassette’s golden anniversary. That’s 50 years of playing, recording, fast forwarding, rewinding and flipping the tape," Philips said. "As a company rooted in continuing our commitment to meaningful...
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