Author: Press Room

A single TV setting made my picture look better with almost no effort

I’m always tweaking the settings on my smart TV to better suit my setup and the way I watch content. Over time, I’ve experimented with quite a few things. I replaced the default interface with a custom launcher to give the TV a cleaner, more organized home screen. I also turned off tracking features that monitor viewing habits and even switched to a browser that’s far more capable. After trying all these different changes, I realized something interesting. I had been focusing on small tweaks here and there, but I hadn’t really addressed one aspect of the viewing experience that…

Read More
Streaming still looks worse than Blu-ray and it’s down to one simple reason

Streaming services offer content at high resolutions and relatively low costs, making them appealing to casual movie and TV watchers. You might think that a 4K video stream is superior to a 1080p Blu-ray disc or an old DVD, but that isn’t always the case. In fact, the best Blu-ray 4K Ultra HD discs will always outperform seemingly comparable 4K streaming content, and there’s a technical reason for it. Resolutions, like 1080p or 4K, only provide a snapshot of visual quality. They demonstrate the potential visual quality of a piece of content, not the actual visual quality. Resolution is a…

Read More
Dolby Atmos is great until you realize your setup isn’t actually using it

Dolby Atmos is a surround sound audio format that brought spatial audio mainstream. Rather than invest in an expensive surround sound speaker system, users can now experience spatial audio in Dolby Atmos with many of the earbuds and headphones they already own. Dolby Atmos is available for music, TV shows, and movies, and it creates an immersive and three-dimensional listening experience. The mastering process for Atmos content is object-based with a focus on spatial height, so you can really feel where sounds are coming from in a song, show, or movie. It’s rather easy to use Dolby Atmos with mobile…

Read More
Your smart TV is snitching on your watch history — here’s how to stop it completely

Smart TVs have become a mainstay in many households throughout the world. Since the dawn of the streaming revolution, smart TVs are some of the most valuable ways to watch TV and movies. For anyone who has cut the cord, a smart TV is probably an option they’ve considered at some point. For some people, arguably the best feature of a smart TV is that it can recommend what you should watch next. No matter which streaming service you prefer, you’ll be able to get recommendations based on what you’ve watched before. But, if you’re not interested in having your…

Read More
If you want a great binge, start with these finished Netflix shows

Netflix is one of the oldest streaming services in the game, and despite rising costs, it still gives people a ton for their money. With so many original shows available to watch, it can be hard to choose where to start. That’s where we come in, with a list of shows guaranteed to satisfy from the first episode to the last. Before we get to it, there are some ground rules: 1) All these shows have to have more than one season, so no miniseries allowed, no matter how good they are. To be a true binge, it’s got to…

Read More
These 6 sci-fi predictions about the future aged horribly

Making movies and TV shows set in the future can be dangerous, because while they sometimes turn out accurate, they always run the risk of getting things incredibly wrong and looking embarrassing later when the future they predict doesn’t come to pass. In fact, this happens more often than not. The history of sci-fi is littered with examples of movies, TV shows, and books that got things completely wrong. That doesn’t mean these movies are bad; it’s just a warning not to put too much stock in what they have to say. Back to the Future Part II (1989) The…

Read More
This 1998 drama predicted our future better than most hard sci-fi films

When you think of movies and shows that predicted the future, your mind will probably go to something like Continuum, a sci-fi drama where heroes try to prevent a future where corporations are more powerful than governments and everyone has cybernetic implants in their bodies that can be hacked. And that’s very exciting, but maybe a little dramatic. A lot of those predictions still feel too far in the future to feel relevant. There’s another movie, one that doesn’t even really quality as sci-fi, that did a better job of predicting our current reality than most hard sci-fi films: the…

Read More
I turned on this Android Auto feature and driving got way less distracting

I enjoy using Apple CarPlay, but there are a few things it still doesn’t handle as neatly as Android Auto. One of the biggest differences becomes obvious when you think about how distracting notifications can be while driving. When you’re on the road, your attention should stay firmly on what’s ahead of you. Even small interruptions like a message alert or a notification pop-up can pull your attention away for longer than you realize. In an ideal world, the car’s dashboard exists primarily for navigation. Its main job is to guide you to your destination. Everything else, whether it’s calls,…

Read More
I stopped opening ChatGPT in my browser and started using this shortcut instead

Over time, ChatGPT has become one of the tools that I use every day. Be it drafting email replies, brainstorming ideas, summarizing lengthy pages, or solving quick problems, I use ChatGPT for several everyday tasks. That being said, for a long time, accessing it became a little inconvenient. Every time I needed ChatGPT, I would open my browser, search through the tabs, or visit the website. Frankly, this didn’t feel like a big task in the beginning. Slowly, it started to feel like friction. That’s why I decided to switch to a simple shortcut that allows me to open ChatGPT…

Read More
The cyberpunk classic that shaped modern sci-fi is finally coming to TV — everything we know

Between Severance, Pluribus, For All Mankind, Foundation, Silo, Dark Matter, and more, Apple TV+ has absolutely marked itself as the premiere streaming service for science fiction TV. They’re now taking on their biggest challenge yet: a TV adaptation of Neuromancer, William Gibson’s 1984 novel about a hacker who gets caught up in a globe-trotting conspiracy. Neuromancer is a hugely influential book, but despite numerous attempts has never been adapted for the screen. If anyone can do it, it’s the sci-fi nerds at Apple TV. What is Neuromancer about? The seminal cyberpunk story Credit: Ace Neuromancer is about Case, a hacker who…

Read More