Walmart introduces ‘Black Thursday’ in a conspiracy against family traditions

You better plan ahead - way ahead - for upcoming Black Friday sales this year, especially now that Walmart will open up stores at 8 p.m. Thanksgiving Thursday.

Walmart officially hates families. It’s not crazy enough that people have to stuff turkey into their mouths like a July 4th hot dog eating contest so they can be out and in line by midnight for Black Friday, now the superstore aims to move the sale up to 8 p.m. Thanksgiving night. Or what you’d otherwise call “dinner time.”

The retailer also announced that anyone already inside Walmart between 10 to 11 p.m. will be guaranteed three gadgets of their shopping heart’s desires – including an Apple iPad (albiet the second-generation edition) priced at $400 with a $75 Walmart gift card. The stores will be open overnight onto the standard Black Friday sales hours to accommodate shoppers not willing to leave Thanksgiving dinner to shop just yet. But of course, you snooze, you lose so don’t blame the retailer if your sought-out laptop is gone by the time you arrive.

“We got customer feedback that says ‘I like to shop earlier so I can go to bed earlier,’” Duncan MacNaughton, Walmart’s chief merchandising officer, said in a statement.

Walmart says this year’s sales will be its most “aggressive” yet, including video games starting at $10, a 43-inch Samsung 720p HDTV for $378, Beats by Dr. Dre headphones for $179, and a Nintendo Wii console for $89. MacNaughton says any combination of the aforementioned items will be available during the Thursday night sales hours, and Walmart will have enough inventory to meet the anticipated demand. “We bought deep, very deep, and we bought deep on items that matter to our customers,” he said.

In addition to the earlier extended hours, Walmart will also include online-specific deals that will be available on Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. We’re not sure who Walmart polled to decide to ruin family traditions with consumerism, but if you need an excuse to escape your family or don’t so much as care to watch the annual Thanksgiving NFL football game, you’ll probably want to plan for a Thanksgiving lunch this holiday season. You poor, lonely, materialistic thing.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

DirecTV Genie HD DVR records up to five shows at once

Definitely a great idea for large families with differing tastes in programming, DirecTV's five-tuner Genie will record a ton of content.

Detailed on DirecTV today, the company announced the addition of the DirecTV Genie HD DVR as a competitor to Dish Network’s Hopper DVR system. The DirecTV Genie set-top box offers the consumer the ability to record up to five different shows in high definition at the same time. According to DirecTV management, the Genie should be able to store up to 200 hours of high definition content on the one terabyte drive within the device. In addition, the Genie can play up to four different live or recorded shows on other televisions within the home.

In order to connect to the other televisions in the home, the DirecTV subscriber must have a RVU-enabled television or connect a small receiver called the Genie Mini to the television set. Currently, only a handful of Samsung LED televisions are RVU certified.

For those unfamiliar with RVU, it’s a communications protocol that facilitates access to high-definition programming, media and other applications between two devices. Besides DirecTV and Samsung, other members of the RVU alliance include Verizon, Cisco and Broadcom. It’s possible that more television manufacturers will roll out RVU-enabled televisions during CES 2013.

In addition to allowing subscribers to record a large amount of content, the Genie also has a recommendations engine similar to a TiVo. Called “Genie Recommends” within the user interface, the software will suggest television shows and movies based on your viewing habits. However, this is an opt-in feature that has to be turned on and will authorize DirecTV to analyze the type of shows that are being watched on the Genie.

The user interface allows the subscriber to record shows up to two weeks in advance in addition to catching up on shows that are no more than five weeks old. The Genie also comes with standard applications within the user interface such as Facebook, Twitter, ScoreGuide and Pandora. 

According to DirecTV’s site, the Genie has a MSRP of $299 and the Genie Mini clients are priced at $99. However, new customers will be able to acquire the Genie and up to three Genie Mini’s for free assuming they sign up for an extended service contract. Two additional Genie Mini clients can be purchased at a discounted price of $49 each. In addition to the new hardware, the subscriber will have to pay an additional $20 monthly fee for “Advanced Receiver Service.” However, that fee can be cut in half  by signing up for automatic bill pay.

Different from Dish Network’s Hopper system, the DirecTV Genie set-top box does not allow the user to automatically skip past annoying commercials. Identical to other DVR systems, the user has to fast forward to get past the commercials during a typical television show. However, the Hopper has three tuners compared to DirecTV’s Genie. When it comes to tuners, TiVo also lags behind the Genie with the recently released TiVo Premiere 4 DVR. The standard TiVo Premiere 4 utilizes four tuners and can record up to 75 hours of high definition programming. However, the TiVo Premiere XL4 can record up to 300 hours of high definition programming compared to the Genie’s 200 hour limit.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Olympus refreshes the PEN lineup with the E-PL5, E-PM2, and introduces the XZ-2

Olympus joins its camera comrades and introduces some notable refreshes to its point-and-shoot and PEN families.

It’s Photokina time and you know what that means: All the hot names in digital photography are bringing out the big guns, refreshing their existing lineups and introducing all-new models into the mix. And Olympus is no exception, this morning officially unveiling the Stylus XZ-2 iHS, the PEN E-PL5, and the PEN E-PM2.

The XZ-2 (pictured at top) picks up where the XZ-1 left off, but will now fall under the Stylus umbrella (previously, it was in a family of its own, the X-series, but Olympus has decided it will be housed by its point-and-shoot lineup). If you remember, the XZ-1 was a fairly one-a-kind device introduced back 2010, a big-bodied point-and-shoot with DSLR tendencies – something we’re increasingly seeing in the market. Now, the XZ-2 offers a really nice update to the original but keeping, more or less, the same sleek, professional exterior.

The refresh houses the same F1.8-2.5 lens and 4x optical zoom as the XZ-1, but does its predecessor one better with a 12 megapixel, 1/1.7 inch high-sensitivity backlit CMOS sensor and the TruePic VI processor (same as in Olympus’s top of the line OM-D E-M5), which should help considerably its low-light performance (something the XZ-1 could handle, but not impressively well). You can push the camera’s ISO up to 12800, for the record.

Also new to the XZ-2 is its hybrid control ring, which you can customize to have the nice, hard click or a smoother feel – something that will come in handy when shooting video in manual. You can also choose what the ring controls; focus, zoom, exposure… it’s incredibly versatile. Also worth mentioning is the XZ-2’s 3-inch tilt-angle touchscreen, a feature Olympus’ is increasingly packaging with its new releases. In our quick hands-on with the camera in August, these two new additions in particular stood out. It’s a considerable upgrade to the XZ-1, a camera we loved, and the increased manual controls and the promise of better low-light performance are a tempting combination.

Olympus is taking a modest approach to Wi-Fi sharing with the XZ-2 as well, making it connection friendly with the help of a Toshiba FlashAir SDHC card. There’s also an upcoming app from Olympus that allows for easy upload to your smartphone. The XZ-2 will be available in November for $600.

Of course, Olympus is also updating its incredibly popular PEN lineup with the E-PL5 (above) and the E-PM2, plus updates to the E-PL3 and the E-PM1. As you can imagine, the E-PL5 and E-PM2 are upgrades of their respective predecessors, which were impressive cameras in their own rights. So suffice it to say that both have a handful of aesthetic and feature tweaks (like more filters) that are expected, and a few more notable big updates that are worth bringing your attention to.

For starters, both cameras have the 16 megapixel MOS sensor and TruePic VI processor as the OM-D E-M5 and can push ISO to 25600. They’ve also improved their AF systems, and shutter and release speed has also been increased – max frame rate is now boosted to 8 fps in single AF mode. The E-PL5 and E-PM2 also both have 3-inch LCD displays with anti-finger print coating and new tilting capabilities that let the screens flip up for easy self-portraits or video recording.

The various upgrades bring the more consumer-level cameras closer to the professional and feature-full E-M5 processors, one the biggest things separating these two being the 5-axis image stabilization system of the E-M5 (build being an obvious difference as well).

The E-PL5 will cost $700, and the E-PM2 $550 (both body only and available in October). 

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com