OLED monitors needed to break-in technology

It’s been over eight months since Sony showed off its amazing OLED TVs at CES 2008, including the prototype 27-inch model, yet nothing has been heard about this “breakthrough” technology since that time.

I, for one, was blown away by what I saw (let Wil Wheaton explain it), but have been disappointed by the lack of any further movement. It seems like Sony’s strategy for the OLED screens may be focused in the wrong direction.

The price and size of the first generation OLED TVs is certainly a drawback — $2,500 for an 11-inch screen. It’s also literally impossible to see the vividness of the picture on any normal TV or monitor, so Sony’s decision to sell them only online or in a Sony store means most people would have to actively search one out, or buy sight unseen. Sony should at least put a display model in the home theater departments of electronics chains, just to generate awareness, and so people can see what it looks like.

Sony has also been emphasizing the thinness of the TV screen, even though the large base it sits on renders that feature almost pointless. The real draw (which, again, can only be seen in person) is the million to one contrast and blazing fast refresh speed.

What Sony should be doing is making and marketing OLED screens as monitors, not TVs. Here’s just a few reasons:

Without the TV base, the thin OLED screen could be sit much flatter on top of a much smaller base for a PC connection.

Monitors are a lot smaller than TVs, so an 11-inch screen would be a decent size, and they wouldn’t have to struggle to keep up with TV sizes, just go up a little to 15- and 17-inch models.

Hardcore gamers and PC users are already used to spending thousands of dollars for the latest graphic cards, memory, motherboards, etc. to keep their machines on the cutting edge.  The frame-rate watching, number-spewing crowd would be the perfect market for OLED monitors.

Of course, we are in a bit of a recession right now, so price might still be an issue no matter what. But we won’t see vibrant OLED screens really enter the market until the early adopters start things off, and that’s more the realm of computer enthusiasts than tiny-TV watchers. Granted, I’m sure you can hook an OLED TV up to a computer if you wanted to, but it’s still got the extra TV bulk. The bottom line is that Sony is selling this new technology on the wrong features and to the wrong crowd; many people will never buy one or even see one in person if the marketing isn’t fixed, which means the price will never go down. And I really want to have one.

-Aaron Burkhart

Product review: Sony bluetooth headphones and transmitter

By Aaron Burkhart

While headphones are mostly used for mobile devices, I’ve sometimes found that I want to watch a movie on the big screen but don’t want to bother the wife napping nearby on the couch. Really nice headphones don’t come with a long enough cord to sit far enough away from the screen, so I decided to pick up Sony’s bluetooth transmitter (TMR-BT10) and stereo headphones (DR-BT22) to see if they would fit my needs.

The transmitter is about the size of a thumb, with an alligator clip and a good length of cord to plug into any standard headphone jack. For my purposes, it plugs right into the stereo system, but would just as easily turn an iPod or even an old boom-box into a wireless audio source.

The headphones are collapsable for easy stowage, but as a result feel less than sturdy at times. They also can twist when putting them on, making it a little awkward if you’re not used headphones doing that, but once on they were snug and lightweight. Pairing the transmitter and headphones was easy (just hold the power button on both until the lights turn blue and they find each other), and the sound quality was pretty good, but not great. A tiny bit of background hum was always present, but not distracting.

When paired with my iPhone, there wasn’t the same hum. An odd note about pairing with an iPhone is it asks for a pin number, which of course it doesn’t do when paired with the transmitter. Turns out the pin is just 0000, which I had to look online for since I didn’t hang on to the manual. Otherwise the headphones work great as a hands-free option, as it picked up my voice easily and was still clear for both parties when I was almost 20 feet away from my actual phone. For whatever reason, though, when I switched the iPhone to iPod mode for music sound would only come out of the iPhone’s speakers and not the headphones. I couldn’t find any option to route the music through bluetooth, but when making a call it switched automatically as long as it was still paired. It just wouldn’t work with music or videos.

When using it with my home theater system and the transmitter, it worked with a similarlly long range of at least 20 feet, even through several walls. However, while my using it with a home theater may not be a standard use, I did find a syncronization problem when using it with a recorded DVR program. On DVDs it synced perfectly and there isn’t a problem with live TV. But when trying to watch a recorded program off the DVR the sound would be lagging behind the picture by as much as two seconds. Pausing and then unpausing would put the sync closer together, but it takes doing that a bunch of times before it gets close enough to sycn as to not be distracting.

Other than the iPhone music and DVR oddities, the headphones work great and have a surprizingly long battery life; I haven’t plugged them in for weeks and have watched around 5 hours of TV with them throughout that time.

Combined with the transmitter (which can be used to bypass the iPhone music gap), this bluetooth headphone set has a lot of possible uses and has been a satisfying purchase, if not flawless.