HAI Makes Product Announcements at ISC; All Omni Family Controllers Now CP-01 Compliant, Wireless Glass Break Detector and Spanish OmniPro II Controller Now Shipping

Home Automation, Inc. (HAI), a leading manufacturer of home control products since 1985, continued its commitment to the security industry by making several major product announcements at the ISC show opening today in New York. Among the announcements; HAI's security and home control Omni family of controllers are all now CP-01 compliant, HAI is shipping a new glass break detector as part of its Wireless Security line, and the announcement that its flagship OmniPro II controller is now available in a Spanish version.

"The security industry has been, and continues to be, an important market for our products," explains HAI President and CEO, Jay McLellan. "We now have an entire controller line which we introduced last year, called Lumina, to integrate lighting and automation to existing security panels, we've added the CP-01 compliance to all of our UL-Listed Omni controllers for the reduction of false alarms, and we continue to expand our wireless security line, as well as our international offerings."

CP-01 is a standard initiated by the Security Industry Association for security system control panels and their associated arming and disarming devices to reduce the incidence of false alarms. All HAI Omni controllers; the OmniLT, Omni IIe and OmniPro II are now shipping as CP-01 compliant. HAI's new Wireless Glass break Detector is an omni-directional acoustic sensor and wireless transmitter. It is used for detecting the sound of breaking glass, providing 360º of coverage.

The Spanish OmniPro II controller has the same functionality as the original but is intended to make the Spanish speaking end user more comfortable with the interface. Voice, menu, touchscreen, and the PC Access software are all in Spanish.

Now with blacker blacks and whiter whites, the Sanyo PLV-Z25 projector will sure to please even the grumpiest of videophiles. Close to hitting market, this beauty boasts a sexy 10000:1 contrast, ratio dual HDMI connections, 1100 ANSI lumens brightness and a dual-iris system. 

From the article:

Part of the PLV-Z5's secret is what Sany's calling the industry's first twin-iris system, which integrates both a lens aperture and a lamp aperture. Combined with Sanyo's TopazReal Technology, the brightness level is blended with the lamp output and the projector's integrated LCD panels to create a sharper, crisper picture in any scene with a brightness level. Other components include a 12-bit processing IC which "looks ahead" in a a video input stream to look for bright and dark scenes, adjusting the image brightness appropriately. The unit offers a brightness of 1,00 ANSI lumens, and can project the equivalent of a 100-inch screen from a distance of 9.8 feet.

The Home Theater Guys are at it again with podcast #114! This week they talk about a few news tidbits including more Blu-ray delay rumours. As well, they talk in depth about the DVD iScan VP30 video processor-A/V Switcher.

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So what does it do?  It cleans everything up and gives you the best possible display.  We all know the TVs and projectors we own are capable of so much more than just displaying the content we feed into them.  If you've ever seen a 30 Mb high definition loop, you'll know what we're talking about.  The DVDO does it's best to present the content in a way that takes full advantage of everything your display equipment can do.  And in our opinion, it does just that.  Standard definition looked much better on every TV we tried it with.  The film processing worked wonders to smooth out movies that had noticeable motion artifacts before.  Of course, High Definition always looks good, right?  The HD we saw with the VP30 inline looked more like the 30 Mb loop and less like an over-compressed, potentially good, show.

Well, let's just say don't go canceling your cable subscription or tossing out your DVR just yet. Ellen Gray does just that however, and sees how life with strictly internet-tv fares. Suffice to say, it's not there yet. But hey, it's better than where we were 1 year ago.

Watching on the Web tends to take longer than watching a tape or a program recorded on a DVR. Not only can't you fast-forward through commercials, but at one time or another, every one of the four major networks' Web sites shut the video down abruptly during viewing, sometimes more than once during the same program. Starting over eats time.

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EngadgetHD (formerly HDBeat) has a cool article about how to change out your TiVo Series 3 CableCARD enabled DVR with a larger hard drive. The Series 3 shockinly only comes with a 250GB drive, which as many of us know, HDTV will fill pretty quickly.

As much as we love the TiVo Series3, for $800 we would like a bigger hard drive than 250GB. Sure it's still almost 100GB more than most Cable Company DVRs, but we need more than 35 hours of HD goodness.

They put in a 500GB Western Digital SATA drive and...

mfstool resports success and lets us know that we have 581 SD hours now which is about 65 hours in the format that matters: HD.

You can get down to the nitty gritty of this mod by clicking on this link.

I guess this is the good part of there being no decisive winner in the HD wars, we should see some pretty nice offers from both tempting users to take the plunge.

The offer from Toshiba follows two competing offers from Sony and Microsoft, which are both bundling a single disc with initial sales of their respective high-def playback solutions (the first 500,000 PlayStation 3 buyers will receive a free 'Talladega Nights' Blu-ray, while buyers of Microsoft's new XBox 360 HD DVD player will receive a free 'King Kong' HD DVD).

Apollo 13, Casablanca...and yes...thank god....Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Read the rest here.