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Techradar |
- Tutorial: How to isolate colour in photos
- In Depth: 12 essential system recovery tools
- Tutorial: How to protect your website from hackers
- Review: Canton Vento 820
- Review: Toshiba 32CV711B
- Catch up: this week's most popular posts
| Tutorial: How to isolate colour in photos Posted: 23 Jan 2011 12:00 AM PST  The ability to isolate a single colour in your photographs is one of the best examples of how digital photography can offer techniques and effects that are difficult to create with film. While the effect is certainly possible in a chemical darkroom, it's a time-consuming process. Follow this tutorial and you'll be able to knock up a finished example on your PC in less than 10 minutes. The best reason to create an image with a strong isolated colour – or a bold area of isolated colours – is to add impact to an element that otherwise gets lost in the composition. It can add poignant impact to a small but crucial detail, and can be a way of tugging on people's heartstrings. Examples in photography abound – visit any tourist art market and you're bound to see a few. London telephone boxes and double-decker buses are typical examples. The fact that the technique is so popular tells you all you need to know – it gets the message across, and can turn a dull photograph onto one with an instantly obvious focal point. Choosing your shot The popularity of colour isolation means you need to be careful using it. You're unlikely, for instance, to find many coffee table books stuffed with colour-isolated images. As with any technique designed to have an emotional impact, overdoing it will result in images that are exhausting and repetitive to browse through. Your best bet is to pick one photo on which the effect works well and use that, rather than applying the technique to everything you shoot.
While isolating a colour can save a dull photo, it's good practice to use shots that you're already happy with. Tight zooms don't work well, but choose an image with a strong, clear and brightlycoloured main subject. Bold red generally works well, hence the popularity of buses and telephone boxes. Composition isn't so important when choosing a shot – you're forcing the viewer to notice what you want them to by rendering an object in colour, so this is a good way to use an image that's sharp and well exposed, but slightly off compositionally. What you'll need As well as your image, you'll need something to edit it with. The techniques used here can be translated easily to GIMP (available to download free from www.gimp.org), but most users will have more success with Photoshop Elements (£78 from www.adobe.co.uk). Elements is not only a more comprehensive application, offering a capable library as well as an editor, but some of its tools - such as quick selection - are more refined and quicker to use. Applications that don't allow proper 'per-pixel' editing, such as Adobe's Lightroom or the free Picasa, aren't good for this kind of work. You might find that your camera has an automatic colour isolation setting, removing the need to edit your images in post-production at all and leaving you with roughly the same effect.
Getting going Before you begin the walkthrough, make sure your image is otherwise finished. That means that any sharpening, cropping or tone curve adjustments should be completed before you start. Attempting to finish a photo that's already had major work done on it will result in loss of detail, particularly if you're working on a JPG image rather than a Photoshop PSD file. When editing your image initially, remember that you're aiming for an over-the-top effect. Feel free to overdo the saturation, paying particular attention to the area that you intend to remain in colour – we're going to make sure there's plenty of contrast in the background on the final image, so make sure the colour stands out. With this technique, representing reality accurately is secondary to achieving maximum impact. It's also a good idea to work on a copy of your image in case you save an imperfect version accidentally. Open your prepared image and save it as a work in progress file. If you're using Photoshop, saving the image as a PSD file is generally a good idea. PSD files have a few strengths for this kind of work – crucially, they don't degrade in quality each time you save them, as JPGs images do. They also support layers, which means that once your image is finished, you don't need to flatten it and lose the ability to make wholesale changes later. The only time you should save your work as a JPG is when it's totally finished and ready for print or uploading to an online photo album. How it works This technique works because of the support many advanced editing applications have for layers. A layer is a simple concept – it's effectively another image that fits exactly on top of your first image, all within the original file. Each layer can have elements added to it such as text, and in Photoshop it can work as an adjustment layer, filtering the image beneath to give it more saturation, for example, without editing the original pixels. In this example, we use layers very simply. The topmost layer of the image is a black and white version of the original photograph, with areas carefully removed to reveal the colour version beneath. If you have a steady hand (particularly in conjunction with a graphics tablet), you may find that you're able to simply erase sections of the topmost layer on some images by hand. In most cases, however, it will make sense to select an area precisely first and use your selection as a guide. Isolating colours with Photoshop Elements 1. Prepare layers: Open your image (ideally from a copied file so you have a backup), and pay attention to the Layers palette. If you can't see it, click 'Window | Layers'. You'll see a thumbnail – right-click it, choose 'Duplicate layer', and click 'OK'. Nothing will happen to your image, but you now have two layers – one on top of the other. Making one layer black and white and exposing parts of the layer below will produce our effect.
2. Convert to mono: Go to 'Enhance' on the menu bar and click 'Convert to black and white', or use [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[B] on your keyboard. A few styles are listed for you to click through, with the results previewed both in the conversion window and in the main image window. Our advice is to go for something with a medium amount of contrast – not too bright or too dark. Click 'OK' when you're happy with your choice.
3. Zoom in: This technique works by selecting an object in your photo, then removing it from the topmost layer, allowing the coloured layer to show through. It's always best to work very carefully – mistakes might not be obvious when reviewing your images on screen, but they will be once printed. Click the magnifying glass in the toolbar or press [Z] , then click and drag around the object you want to select to zoom in on it.
4. Select object: Click the Quick Selection tool or press [A]. This tool works by selecting adjacent areas of your image which are the same colour or texture. Click and drag the mouse pointer over the part of your image you want to colourise, and don't worry if the selector makes the odd mistake. The edges will be refined when you let go of the mouse button, and the next step demonstrates how to refine your selection.
5. Fine-tune selection: It's very important that you don't tolerate a less-than-perfect selection, because it will have a negative impact on your final image. If the selection tool has chosen inappropriate parts of your image, press [Alt] and click and drag the mouse pointer over them. This will remove them from your selection. Similarly, if you remove part of your selection that you wanted to keep, simply click and drag back over it.
6. Delete selection: Tap [Delete], and the area you've selected will be removed, allowing the layer beneath, which is still in colour, to show through. Zoom to 100 per cent and make sure the edges look bold and confident If you find an area that needs editing, the Eraser tool (press [E]) is a good way of carefully removing stray black and white elements. Once you're happy, save the file with layers as a PSD document.
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| In Depth: 12 essential system recovery tools Posted: 22 Jan 2011 04:00 AM PST  Computers fail, hard disks crash and memory chips fry, irrespective of the oodles of money you've spent on surge protectors, SMPS and state of the art power backups. That's the dark side of computing. When it's time to go, it's time to go, and it usually happens at a bad time. There's no point fretting over the loss, though. Instead, use the plethora of tools out there to minimise the damage. Have you accidentally deleted your anniversary photos? Installed a new OS that's botched the partition table? Can't read data from an old CD? Don't panic. We'll point you to the free tools that'll help you get out of a tight spot. Install a Linux distro – Ubuntu is a perennial favourite – then use its package manager to install the following programs. Search for the program name exactly as written to install it. 1. Photorec - recover lost files from all kinds of corrupted media You don't have to try too hard to wipe data from your had drive. A misplaced space in the 'rm' command will do the trick. At least graphical environments are a little more forgiving, letting you restore files you've trashed accidentally. But what about the holiday photos that were stored on the CF card you just flashed?
PHOTOREC: With the size of modern hard disks, don't be surprised if Photorec finds a file you deleted weeks ago. It can find files in over 300 popular formats. That's where PhotoRec comes in handy. It ignores the filesystem and goes directly after deleted files on hard disks, optical discs, USB drives, memory cards and even portable music players such as iPods. It reads blocks of data in FAT, NTFS, EXT2/3 and HFS+ partitions, and looks for deleted files in over 300 common formats, including ZIP, HTML, PDF and JPG to name a few. 2. e2fscktools - check and correct filesystem inconsistencies Hard disks do a lot of work. Modern OSes perform so many read and write operations, it isn't surprising that filesystems inevitably develop inconsistencies here and there over time. This is why all mainstream Linux distros bundle the e2fscktools package, which includes tools that check and modify EXT2, EXT3 and EXT4 filesystems. For other filesystems, you can use xfs_ repair, jfs_fsck, and fsck.resiserfs. Most modern distros typically invoke the file system check after a particular number of reboots. If the check fails, it's probably because it can't locate the file system metadata.
E2FSCK: You can use e2fsck to mark bad blocks in a disk, so they aren't used for storing data. This is helpful if your hard disk is starting to throw up errors. In that case, use the dumpe2fsck utility to locate the backup superblock and point to it via e2fsck. When e2fsck encounters problematic data, it places it in the 'lost+found' directory, along with the inode number that the data is associated with. If there's a great deal of data corruption on your hard disk and you have lots of files in the 'lost+found' directory, it's best to restore your data from a backup. 3. ntfsresize - resize NTFS partitions Like the e2fsck tool, ntfsresize is included with most mainstream Linux desktop distributions. It helps you resize a Windows partition on a 32-bit or 64-bit installation without defragmenting the disk first. This tool checks NTFS partitions for errors and comes in handy when you want to expand and shrink the filesystem. It's especially useful when you're working with partitions that Windows refuses to recognise because of bad sectors. The ntfsresize tool may alter the Windows boot-up, depending on how it's used. For example, it schedules an NTFS consistency check after the first boot into Windows. If you've experimented with the size of the partition, Windows might also throw up a system settings change message. 4. FSArchiver - duplicate entire partitions The only effective answer to a damaged disk is a backup. There's no shortage of backup utilities out there, but they aren't all as smart as FSArchiver. With FSArchiver, you can save the contents of your filesystem into a compressed archive. This saves you space, and the backup is easily mountable in read-write format. You can also restore backups into smaller or larger partitions. To ensure the integrity of the backed up data, FSArchiver checksums individual files, which it verifies during restoration. FSArchiver's main advantage over traditional archiving tools is that even if one file in the backup becomes corrupted, the tool will only skip over the specific file that's gone bad and still restore the rest of the backup as normal. 5. chntpw - reset Windows passwords Password protecting your accounts is a good way to keep them secure, but all hell breaks loose when you forget your own password. Most web services have a backup plan – a way for you to retrieve your forgotten password, either by emailing you a new one or verifying your identity with a secret question. Unfortunately, Windows has neither. There's little you can do if you forget your Windows password. Or is there? The chntpw tool can be used to reset passwords on Windows installations. It works by reading the Security Account Manager database under the Windows registry. Just boot from the live CD, point it to your Windows installation and breathe a sigh of relief as it prints a list of all the users on the installation. Reset the password for the admin user – you can ignore the rest. If you want to recover your password instead of setting a new one, use Ophcrack. 6. Sfdisk - back up partition tables If you juggle multiple OSes, it can be easy to mess up the partition table. Tools such as GParted mean that creating and resizing partitions isn't much of a chore any more, but they aren't very helpful when you've got a misaligned partition table. That's when you need sfdisk. It's a small command line utility that's included with every Linux distro, and will back up, edit and restore partition tables. You use a considerable amount of disk space backing up data, so it only makes sense to back up the few bytes taken up by the partition table.
SFDISK: If you juggle multiple operating systems, it's wise to use the sfdisk utility to back up the partition table in an easy to read (and modify) text file. It'll go a long way in recovering from a botched OS install. You can back up your partition table with sfdisk -d /dev/sda > sda_table.txt and restore it with sfdisk /dev/sda < sda_table.txt. If you have a RAID setup, you can mirror a partition table from one disk to another using sfdisk -d / dev/sda | sfdisk /dev/sdb. 7. ddrescue - recreate a damaged disk We've looked at tools that will help you check and correct a damaged partition, but what if a disk throws up read errors? This isn't unusual for older hard disks and optical drives. If you have such a disk, start by making a copy of the failing drive with ddrescue, then try to repair the copy. If your data is really important, use the copy as a master for a second copy and try to repair the second copy.
DDRECSUE: You can use ddrescue to recreate a damaged hard disk, but don't forget that it overwrites data on the partition you're copying to by default. The basic operation of ddrescue is fully automatic – it tries to recreate the data on a damaged disk. Better still, if you run it on two or more damaged copies of a failed disk, you might end up with a complete and error-free version. The tool uses a logfile to speed up the process by only reading the missing blocks. 8. Rsync - back up remotely Keeping local backups isn't a clever move unless you mirror disks. What you need is a utility that backs up data over a network with very little overhead, and nothing does that better than the rsync CLI utility.
RSYNC: Use Grsync to simulate a backup and assess errors that may occur. When run for the first time, the rsync command may seem a bit sluggish. However, all it needs to do from then on is transfer the bits that have changed in each directory or file since the last run. Since it's CLI, you can schedule it to do unattended remote backups. If CLI isn't you thing, try the various GUI avatars, such as Grsync, which runs on Linux and Windows. If you need something enterprise-ready, try BackupPC. 9. GAG - advanced boot loader MBRs are easily damaged if you're careless while installing multiple OSes, or if you clone a bootable partition. If you've cooked yours, it's a good excuse to switch to the GAG boot manager. GAG can boot nine different OSes installed in the primary or logical partitions of the disk. It's easy to configure and supports all the features you'd expect from a boot manager, including a timer to boot into the default OS, and password protecting the configuration menu.
GAG: Although it's more graphical than other bootloaders, GAG's interface is still entirely keyboard driven. You can install GAG from Windows, Linux, or from one of the rescue-centric live CDs. When using GAG, install the Linux boot loader (GRUB) in the superblock of the root partition (such as '/dev/sda6'), not in the MBR. 10. Inquisitor - stress test hardware Why wait for hardware to fail? It's a good idea to test your system thoroughly from time to time to make sure it can handle the stress it's put under. The Inquisitor live CD has lots of modules to test the various components in your system, such as hard disks, the disk controller, optical disks, USB drives, CPU, memory and more. The live CD also comes in handy to stress test an overclocked configuration. You can use Inquisitor to benchmark your computer, which is useful when comparing the performance of different configurations. There's also the Phronix Test Suite, which can be used for benchmarking your system and comparing it with configurations uploaded by other users. 11. chkrootkit - check for rootkits Computer viruses are the least of a power user's worries. An intruder can wreak much more damage than a virus by masking their intrusion with a rootkit, but help is just a scan away. Using chkrootkit, you can check your installation for many known rootkits. The program uses tools such as grep to check if '/proc' entries are hidden from ps and the readdir system call. It performs a battery of tests to find signs of over 60 rootkits. Although it's a CLI utility, you shouldn't schedule it to run unattended. To be doubly sure that you're running a clean ship, also try the rkhunter utility. 12. md5deep - search for lost files You'll probably need to recover lost files at some point, but how do you ensure their integrity? If your system has been compromised, the attacker might have replaced the original files with malicious copies. That's why you should keep a hash digest of all the files on your system. Depending on the density of your filesystem, this could be a complex task. That's unless you use md5deep. It recursively computes MD5 of all files inside a directory. Moreover, it can use those hashes to find lost files and then verify their integrity. Binaries for the tool are available for both Linux and Windows. 
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| Tutorial: How to protect your website from hackers Posted: 22 Jan 2011 02:00 AM PST  Previously, we saw how hackers spend a lot of time surveying websites they want to attack, building up a detailed picture of their targets using information found in DNS records, as well as on the web and from the site itself. This information helps hackers learn the hardware and software structure of the site, its capabilities, back-end systems and, ultimately, its vulnerabilities. It can be eye-opening to discover the detail a hacker can see about your website and its systems. The way the internet works means that nothing can ever be entirely invisible if it's also to be publicly accessible, and anything that's publicly accessible can never be truly secure without serious investment, but there's still plenty you can do. Now we're going to examine some of the steps you can take to ensure that any hacker worth their salt will realise early on that your web presence isn't the soft target they assumed it was, and to get them to move on. Robot removal Many developers leave unintentional clues as to the structure of their websites on the server itself. This tells the hacker a lot about their proficiency in web programming, and will pique their curiosity. Many people dump files to their web server's public directory structure and simply add the offending files and directories to the site's 'robots.txt' file. This file tells the indexing software associated with search engines which files and directories to ignore, and thereby leave out of their databases. However, by its nature this file must be globally readable, and that includes by hackers. Not all search engines obey the 'robots.txt' file, either. If they can see a file, they index it, regardless of the owner's wishes.
GIVEN UP BY GOOGLE: 'Robots.txt' files are remarkably easy to find using a Google query To prevent information about private files falling into the wrong hands, if there's no good reason for a file or directory being on the server, it shouldn't be there in the first place. Remove it from the server and from the 'robots.txt' file. Never have anything on your server that you're not happy to leave open to public scrutiny. Leave false clues However, 'robots.txt' will also give hackers pause for thought if you use it to apparently expose a few fake directories and tip them off about security systems that don't exist. Adding an entry for an intrusion detection system, such as 'snort_data' for example, will tell a false story about your site's security capabilities. Other directory names will send hackers on a wild goose chase looking for software that isn't installed. If your website requires users to log into accounts, ensure that they confirm their registrations by replying to an email sent to a nominated email account. The most effective way of preventing a brute force attack against these accounts is to enforce a policy of 'three strikes and you're out' when logging in. If a user enters an incorrect password three times, they must request a new password (or a reminder of their current one), which will be sent to the email account they used to confirm their membership. If a three strikes policy is too draconian for your tastes, or you feel that it may lead to denial of service attacks against individual users by others deliberately trying to access their accounts using three bad passwords, then it's a good idea to slow things down by not sending the user immediately back to the login page. After a certain number of failed attempts, you could sample the time and not allow another login attempt until a certain number of minutes have passed. This will make a brute force attack very slow, if not practically impossible to mount. Interacting with your website like a normal user will provide a hacker with a huge amount of free information about the way the site works. They will spend a long time reading the code loaded into their browser. The browser and the code (including HTML) served as part of each page is what's known as the client side of things. For example, one common technique used to keep track of user data is to send information about the user's session (their username and so on) to the browser and expect it to be sent back. In other words, the site has the browser keep track of which user is interacting by having it announce their credentials each time it submits any information. In times past, these credentials might have contained a whole shopping cart, meaning people could simply edit the values of cart items before pressing the checkout button, thereby managing to purchase items at rock bottom prices without the site owner realising anything was wrong. This led to the upsurge in remote shopping carts, where the only information handled by the browser is an encrypted cookie, which is passed to a remote payment handling system such as Google Checkout or PayPal. Perhaps worse is the use of obviously named, unencrypted variables in the URL, which are passed to a server-side script to tell it which user is interacting with it. Without appropriate checks, this can lead to serious vulnerabilities. When I was a network security consultant, one assignment was to assess the internal security of a company's network. I found unencrypted usernames and passwords going by on the network and headed for an internal time management system with a web interface. After using these to log in, I was dismayed to discover that the user's account number on the system was part of the URL. What happened if I incremented the account number by one? I got full read/write access to someone else's data. Sometimes, however, variables in URLs can be exploited in benign, useful ways. For instance, when searching for messages in a forum, you might be presented with a large number of pages and no quick way of going directly to one in the middle of the range. The URL might contain the page number or even the result number that begins the current page. Try modifying this and pressing [Enter] to see if you're taken to the page you want to access. There are also plenty of other pieces of information that a site might expect to receive from the browser verbatim, which can be manipulated or simply read for the useful information they contain. Many of these pieces of information are contained within hidden fields. All the hacker needs to do is edit the page's source code locally, re-read it into a browser and click the appropriate link to send it back to the server.
ON SHOW: Hidden variables embedded within a web page. What might these variables do, and what would happen if one was changed? Consider a field called 'Tries'. As part of on a login page, there's a good chance that this contains the number of login attempts the user has made. Resetting it to '1', '0', or something like '-1000' could provide the hacker with a way of bypassing a three strikes login attempt rule if the server only checks that the variable has a value above three. Fields that hold usernames and passwords are meat and drink to keylogging and other snooping software. Input box names Another vulnerability involved in having the client side keep track of the user's session is a web page that uses the same names for any input boxes each time. While it may be convenient for the site's users, who can use autocomplete for web input forms and select from previous input box values, if they wander away from their computer without locking the screen, anyone can select from these lists. If the browser also fills in passwords, an interloper can access pretty much any site where the user has an account. Banks have started randomising the names of input boxes to prevent this problem, but most privately owned commercial websites don't. Never ask client-side code to keep track of a user's session using unencrypted data. Instead, use an encrypted session cookie to store a session ID, and keep track of the session in a back-end database.
LIMITED INPUT: Decide which inputs you will allow in an input field rather than trying toguess everything that a user may enter – deliberately or accidentally Cross-site scripting vulnerabilities (or XSS for short) are a class of bugs that hint at how much ingenuity there is in the online security community. XSS vulnerabilities can allow malicious hackers to inject code into served web pages that in turn can steal server-side information. An XSS attack takes the form of a malicious link to a third-party site embedded in a hyperlink. It might be sent in spam or embedded in a site itself. This is possible because hyperlinks can contain parameters designed to pass information to the back-end server, such as the current session cookie. It's possible to supply the value for a variable using the | ||
| Posted: 22 Jan 2011 01:26 AM PST  Despite a number of serious attempts, the majority of German loudspeaker brands have hitherto had very little impact upon the UK marketplace. Canton, however, certainly has the muscle to change that, via its newly appointed UK distributor Computers Unlimited. The Canton catalogue might be exclusively speaker-oriented, but it's no less comprehensive. The hi-fi section alone comprises no fewer than eight distinct ranges and more than 60 models and the Ventos are close to the top. They consist of five stereo pairs, plus a couple of home cinema extras and sit just below the even more refined Reference models, with which they have much in common. The company headquarters is located in the small town of Weilrod in central Germany, but much of the production is carried out in its factory in the Czech Republic, helping to maintain competitive prices. This £1,200 per pair Vento 820 standmount is based on advanced cabinet work and drive units. The former is nominally available in four finishes – high-gloss black or white, satin silver and high-gloss veneer – though Computers Unlimited is only listing the highgloss black and white options. Enclosure engineering More important than the surface finish is the way the enclosure is constructed. By curving the sides and making the rear panel much narrower than the front, the enclosure is made inherently much more rigid (the 'eggshell' effect), while reflections are properly dispersed and standing waves in the horizontal plane are well distributed. The technique used to achieve the curved sides involves shaping six thin layers of fibreboard and gluing them together one-by-one to form a very strong laminated form. One factor that tends to distinguish the larger speaker brands like Canton is that they have the will, resources and motivation to design and make their own drive units. This doesn't necessarily confer an advantage over those that buy in drivers from OEM suppliers, but it does for one thing guarantee exclusivity. Canton has long favoured the metal diaphragms used by both drive units in this two-way design. The bass/mid driver used here is a 180mm unit with a 115mm diameter dish-shaped aluminium diaphragm. This shape, with its concave cover over the voice coil region, presents less obstruction to the tweeter output than the more conventional convex dust cover. It also features a radical new double sinusoidal 'wave' surround
The tweeter uses a 25mm aluminium-manganese alloy dome under a moulded phase compensator and a protective grille. A key feature here is that the dome and the voice-coil former are fabricated as a single continuous piece, avoiding any glue-joint weakness. A rear port provides reflex loading to reinforce the bass and a single terminal pair is solidly mounted through a metal plate. This leads to a high-quality crossover using tight tolerance components, feeding the tweeter at 18dB/octave. Although the tweeter has its own mesh protection, conventional fabric covered, wood-framed grilles are also supplied. These fit neatly into the driver frames, but are probably better avoided on sound quality grounds. No disgrace The Vento 820s were primarily fed from a system comprising a Naim NAC552 preamp with NAP500 and NAP135 power amplifiers, driven from Naim CDS3/555PS and Rega Valve Isis CD players, as well as a Magnum Dynalab MD106T FM tuner. Vinyl record players included a Linn/Rega hybrid and a Roksan TMS3/Artemiz, all using a Soundsmith Strain Gauge cartridge. Cables were from Naim, Phonosophie, The Chord Company, TM Systems and Vertex AQ, while the speakers were Blu-tack coupled to Kudos S100 stands. It's a tough task to bring a small standmount into the listening room in place of a very large floorstander, so it's very creditable that the compact Canton by no means disgraced itself. In fact, it stood up to such a stern test very well indeed. Some loss of bass weight and power was of course inevitable, but one was also immediately made aware of the bonuses that a compact and well-engineered standmount can bring to the party. No stereotyping Even though the port here wasn't ideally tuned to match the characteristics of our listening room, the bass end of the little Canton sounded clean and agile, while the sound as a whole showed excellent spaciousness and freedom from boxiness. The stereo image was simply spread around and between the speakers, combining good focus and coherence with no tendency to cluster close to the speaker boxes. Although one is naturally somewhat apprehensive at ascribing stereotypes to nations, German speakers do tend to have a slightly brighter balance than UK designs.
Indeed, it has been suggested that this might be related to the observation that speech in the German language has a rather harder edged character with more consonants than spoken English and the speakers are voiced to maximise intelligibility. Whatever the reasons, the Vento 820 standmount is indeed a little brighter than average and certainly doesn't take the more laid back approach that some UK brands adopt. However, it has an essentially sweet nature that hangs on in exceptionally well and the net result is that it somehow manages to sound bright and open without becoming uncomfortably aggressive. That said, wind the volume up a little too high and voices can take on a slightly edgy quality, though that will depend somewhat on the ancillaries which are used to drive it from further up the chain. The 820's slight tendency to over-expose the presence and top end might, perhaps, sail a little too close to the wind for some tastes, but to our ears that can be a positive advantage, as it helps to make detail clear and voices very intelligible, even when the system is operating at very quiet, late at night levels. Indeed, apart from its limited bass weight, there are few grounds for criticising the Vento 820. Colorations are well controlled, so that speech sounds clear, open and free from any boxy effects. The dynamic range is impressively wide and dynamics themselves show a decent degree of expression. Outstanding imaging However, its best feature is arguably the outstanding stereo imaging, which seems to make the most of the extra precision that's usually associated with metal-diaphragm drivers. Image focus is particularly good and this helped make it very easy to distinguish the different characters of pre, power and integrated amplifiers. At one point, during the auditioning, it was necessary to try some different speaker cables. This would normally involve re-introducing a pair of large and costly reference-standard floorstanders to the listening room, but the little Cantons proved comfortably able to discriminate between the cables, rendering the furniture rearrangement quite unnecessary. This is very fine little speaker, which both sounds and measures rather well. Even though it wasn't ideally matched to our listening room, its sound quality still did a great deal to justify the increasingly popular standmount approach. Related Links
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| Posted: 22 Jan 2011 01:13 AM PST  Toshiba's 32CV711B seems tailor-made for what is shaping up to be a grim year of belt-tightening. This 32-inch LCD TV is available on the high street for under £400 and for considerably less online, yet it carries Active Vision video processing and a degree of multimedia flexibility, although there's no hi-def TV tuner. Of course, the 32CV711B isn't the only aggressively priced TV in Toshiba's range. In fact it's got a nearly bewildering set of entry-level models – some exclusive to particular retail chains – with only minor differences in spec. Particularly similar on paper are the AV713B series and the 32BV500, while stepping up to the 32BV700 adds a full HD resolution compared with the 32CV711B's 1,366 x 768 pixel count. The DV series add a built-in DVD player, meanwhile, and the LV series throws in an extra (third) HDMI. Stepping up even further to the RV series introduces a fourth HDMI, DLNA connectivity and a Freeview HD tuner. If you prefer edge LED backlighting to standard CCFL, then you'll need to make the leap up to the SL, VL and WL series, the latter of which introduces 3D on a Toshiba TV for the first time in the shape of the 40, 46 and 55-inch WL768 series. The 32CV711B isn't quite as humble as you might expect for its money; the main surprise is the ability to play JPEG photos or MP3 music files from USB storage devices. Multimedia options like this are usually among the first things to be axed whenever manufacturers contemplate creating price-conscious sets, but retaining them on one most likely to find a home in a second room rather than a living room makes a lot of sense. Teenagers, in particular, may appreciate the USB support if they're lucky enough to land a 32CV711B in their bedroom. Another unexpected plus is the presence of Active Vision LCD picture processing. Admittedly, it's a fairly basic version of this proprietary image engine, but its ability to improve colours, contrast and sharpness makes it a welcome inclusion. The 32CV711B's rather dated looking onscreen menus reveals that, remarkably, Toshiba has also managed to include a decent colour management system. This enables you to adjust the gain level of each of the red, green and blue colour components, or the hue, saturation and brightness of the red, green, blue, cyan, magenta and yellow colour elements. There are TVs costing twice as much that don't offer nearly this much control. Some might argue that this degree of fine tuning isn't really necessary on such an affordable set, but it adds no discernible premium and will be much appreciated by anyone particular about their pictures. Other impressive discoveries within an 'Advanced Video' submenu include noise reduction and colour transient improvement options, a game mode that really does reduce the TV's input lag time and the ability to turn the active backlight system on or off.
There are even a few fairly advanced audio options onboard, including a pseudo surround sound system, a bass booster, and a lip sync system that uses HDMI v1.3 technology to keep audio in line with the video signal. Though, as we'll discover later, these audio tricks prove rather less useful than the video ones. Looking elsewhere on the 32CV711B's spec sheet, however, finds a number of fairly key limitations. The native resolution is only 1,366 x 768, not full HD, for instance. The claimed contrast ratio of 12,000:1 looks pretty feeble, too, compared with the hundreds of thousands, even millions to one quoted by many LCD TVs these days – at least the ones that use some form of LED technology. Perhaps the single greatest disappointment, though, is the lack of a hi-def TV tuner, restricting out-of-the-box viewing to plain old Freeview. A paltry pair of HDMIs and absence of any 100Hz processing or DLNA/online capabilities, however, are par for the course at this price. All in all the 32CV711B's feature spec seems just a touch confused. While many potential buyers will appreciate the USB stuff, it seems likely that the same buyers would probably also gladly sacrifice much of the fancy picture tweaking in favour of a full HD resolution and a Freeview HD tuner. The set's glossy black bezel offset by a grey strip has a certain charm, but the build quality is very plasticky and lightweight and the chassis is also quite bulky by modern LCD TV standards.
The 32CV711B's onscreen operating system isn't significantly different to that employed by sets higher up Toshiba's range. Unfortunately, this system is starting to look and feel pretty dated and in this instance is harmed further by its need to liaise with an uninspiring remote control. The menus are essentially just a mass of white text against black backgrounds. This makes them consistently clear to read, but they are awfully dull. They're also a little intimidating at times, creating the feeling that it might have been a good idea to divide the features up into a few more sub-menus. The flimsy remote control isn't a total disaster once you've got past the unappealing impression it makes when clutched in your hand. For instance, it manages to keep the button count impressively low without leaving you confused over what you need to press to achieve a desired end. Its layout isn't bad, either, with most of the important buttons falling reasonably easily to hand. In the end, though, its cheap feel is the thing that makes the most lasting impression. One final little operating irritation concerns the set's electronic programme guide. Toshiba has opted to present its guide in a rather different way to most, with the channel list down the left side, and all the upcoming listings for the particular channel you've selected appearing vertically on the right. Initially this feels like quite an intuitive approach, until you realise that the TV has to switch channel every time you select a different channel on the listings. This both slows EPG browsing down and makes it impossible to keep watching or even listening to the channel you were on when you first called up the EPG. The 32CV711B's picture quality is similar to its features in that it's a real mixed bag. The first problem you spot is the appearance of some fairly noticeable motion blur, especially when watching standard-definition stuff. The screen's native response time is quoted at an unimpressive 8ms and it doesn't appear that the Active Vision processing does anything significant to boost this. The set's biggest weakness is something that's becoming alarmingly common across Toshiba's current LCD TV range: backlight inconsistency. While it doesn't affect sections of the picture as large as those seen with Toshiba's edge LED TVs, during dark scenes you can still clearly see as many as six patches of the screen that look markedly brighter than the rest of the picture. Thankfully, many of these patches on the review sample were restricted to the screen's extremities, but that certainly isn't to say they aren't still very distracting when they do appear and adjusting the set's backlight and contrast settings is not a satisfactory remedy. The 32CV711B further displays a rather limited approach to colours. Tones are quite bold and vibrant for a small-ish, entry-level TV and are also a little short on blend subtlety and range, resulting in images that occasionally look a trifle overripe. Still, the lack of a little subtlety doesn't seem a major price to pay for having the sort of basic picture vibrancy that will grab and hold the viewer's attention even in a very bright room. Motion blurring reduces quite a bit during HD viewing, enabling you to appreciate all that extra detail and crispness. This does not mean that the 32CV711B produces anything like the sumptuous hi-def clarity witnessed on the very best TVs around, though; there's still a marginal residual softness, even when there's not much motion going on in an image. Dark scenes, meanwhile, enjoy solid amounts of shadow detail for a budget 32-inch set, despite it being able to produce a respectable enough black colour – except for where the backlight inconsistencies show up. As with most LCD TVs, though, the picture suffers some pretty major reductions in both contrast and colour saturation if watched from much of an angle. The 32CV711B's pictures leave it tilted marginally towards the positive end of the quality scale, certainly if it's being considered as a second room set, but no TV that suffers from such blatant backlight issues can ever be given a wholehearted recommendation. Sound The 32CV711B produces a soundstage that's uncomfortably short of power and dynamic range. Even simple dialogue sequences struggle to convince, so compressed is the sound into a cramped middle range. So you can imagine how thin and generally unconvincing the sound quickly starts to become when pushed even slightly hard by an action sequence. Unsurprisingly, with so little raw power and range, the sound features noted earlier prove to be nothing more than just ways to make the soundstage sound even worse. Value If its low price, USB multimedia capability and bright, colourful pictures tick your boxes, the 32CV711B is a compelling option as a second-room set, but it doesn't pack enough of a performance or feature punch to become a truly satisfying main TV.
The 32CV711B's price-busting remit chimes nicely with the current state of the economy and it is passably attractive, if rather flimsily put together. But there are early signs of price-induced corner cutting as a hunt for connections throws up, among other things, a mere two HDMIs, and no Ethernet port. It's not all bad connection news, though, as the set does carry a D-Sub PC input and a USB for music and photo playback. The 32CV711B impresses with some aspects of its features too, particularly its delivery of a really pretty potent colour management system. But it also falls short in one or two areas, notably its lack of motion processing, its mere HD ready resolution, and lack of Freeview HD tuner. Pictures seem tailor-made for second room use, emphasising brightness and colour saturations at the expense of some of the subtleties you might be looking out for on a main TV.However, while pictures are mostly quite satisfying, there are colour flaws, motion problems, and worst of all, backlight inconsistencies, the latter of which can at times be really distracting. The 32CV711B hardly covers itself in glory with its audio, either, which is unusually weedy, even by the typically uninspiring standards of cheap LCD TVs. The net result of all this is that the 32CV711B isn't the awesome, all-conquering bargain it might first appear, but might still give decent service as a second-room set. We liked If you can see past the 32CV711B's rather unimpressive build quality, it's not a bad looking set for its money. Its pictures are bright and colourful and it's great to find such a cheap set able to play photos and music from USB devices. Plus, of course, it's cheap. We disliked It's a shame there are only two HDMIs on the 32CV711B, and that the set doesn't have a Freeview HD tuner. Backlight inconsistencies damage dark scenes too, HD pictures could look sharper and there's obvious motion blur, especially with standard-definition sources. Verdict The 32CV711B offers far more set up flexibility than your average cheap and cheerful TV, but also suffers from two predictable flaws: wince-inducingly underpowered audio and some very noticeable backlight consistency problems. Its colours and detailing lack subtlety too, and the set's connections only include two HDMIs. However, at least the picture is bright and colourful, facts that join with the set's solid multimedia features and aggressive price in making the 32CV711B a potentially decent option as a second-room TV. Related Links
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| Catch up: this week's most popular posts Posted: 22 Jan 2011 12:00 AM PST  iPhone 5 is going to be completely redesigned, invisible tanks are heading to the battlefields and the BlackBerry Storm 3 isn't so invisible now that images have leaked. These are just some of the top stories this week on TechRadar. Over in reviews, our in-depth look at Google TV proved popular as did our Motorola Flipout review and our updated Google Nexus S review. Read on for this week's most popular stories on TechRadar… Top five news stories iPhone 5 set to be 'completely redesigned' Clues about Apple's forthcoming iPhone 5 have been leaked online, claiming that the new device will have a new powerful CPU and feature another redesign. Engadget is quoting 'extremely accurate' sources in saying that not only will the new device land in the summer (in line with every iPhone launch for the past few years) but Apple will be looking to keep the iPhone 5 at the sharp end of mobile technology. To that end, we can expect to see Apple's new A5 CPU, an ARM Cortex A9 chipset, which will be multi-core, enabling much better battery life and even more power from the fruity phone. BAE to use E-ink to make tanks invisible Defence contractor BAE Systems has hatched a plan to cover British Army tanks with an E-Ink surface to make them practically invisible on the battlefield. The high-tech plan which effectively weaponises the tech behind our beloved Kindle reader uses cameras to take pictures of the surroundings and project the images onto the surface of the vehicle. The camera would continually snap images meaning that the tank's surface would be constantly refreshing making it practically untraceable to enemies and freedom haters across the globe. Awesome stuff, huh? Apple iPad 2 to launch on 9 February? Apple is rumoured to be preparing a launch event for 9 February to unveil the iPad 2, according to speculation kicked off by a leaked image of an iPad 2 containing exactly that date on the Home screen. Keen-eyed Apple-watching scouts over at 9to5Mac and Neowin suggest that the leaked image which shows the 9 February date on what purports to be a shot of the iPad 2 is good enough evidence to peg that date as the officially planned date for the reveal. BlackBerry Storm 3 breaks cover We hope you aren't bored of BlackBerry leaks yet, because here's another in the form of the BlackBerry Storm 3. BGR's source has certainly been earning his keep over the past two days, having unofficially unveiled the BlackBerry Torch 2, the BlackBerry Curve Apollo and BlackBerry Dakota over the past 24 hours. The latest leak, the BlackBerry Storm 3, arrives despite rumours of its demise and has the highest resolution display ever on a BlackBerry smartphone (800 x 480 pixels) in a 3.7-inch form. Sky makes key changes to HD EPG Sky has made major changes to its channel order with HD channels swapping onto their SD slots for subscribers to the HD package and the eagerly anticipated Sky Atlantic given a high profile spot. The Sky EPG has been given a major overhaul, including an HD channel swap and moves for some of the most popular channels. The HD channel swap will mean that Sky+HD subscribers will see HD channels on the key early numbers rather than the SD versions. Top five in-depth articles iPhone 5 rumours: what you need to know iPhone 5 rumours are flying thick and fast. Will there be a rush release to erase memories of the iPhone 4's antenna problems? Will the 5th generation iPhone deliver ultra-fast mobile internet? Will it ever end up on Verizon in the US? Let's raid the iPhone 5 rumour fridge to find the tomatoes of truth amid the stinky stilton of baseless speculation. iPad 2 rumours: what you need to know The internet loves Apple and it loves ill-founded speculation, so it's hardly surprising that iPad 2 rumours were flying before the first iPad even reached the UK. With only weeks to go before its expected unveiling the iPad 2 release date, specs and price are still closely guarded secrets, but that doesn't mean there aren't some juicy rumours, inspired guesses and possibly even Apple leaks to consider. Reports suggest Apple is also expecting massive demand for the new device and has ordered six million units per month. Here's our pick of the latest iPad 2 rumours. Top 12 best tablet PC iPad alternatives This year is going to be the year of the touchscreen tablet, of that there can be no doubt. While tablet PCs have been around for yonks, only now are they becoming the desirable, usable and functional devices that we've always wanted them to be – and it's about time too. The iPad is currently the most obvious example of how tablets are going mainstream, but that's not to say that all tablets released from now on are guaranteed to be super awesome. Like Angry Birds? Then you'll love these games If you're one of the many thousands of iOS device owners who's become thoroughly addicted to bombarding kleptomaniac pigs with psychotic birds, it means two things. First, you're a person of good taste; Angry Birds is one of the finest iOS games around. Secondly, it suggests you're a fan of artillery games and physics-based puzzlers, given that Angry Birds is a hybrid of the two. (Either that or you just have a thing against cartoon pigs, or can't stand to see any kind of injustice when it comes to our avian chums, in which case you should probably lay off the games for a bit and go and have a lie down.) Luckily, when you've exhausted Angry Birds by three-starring every level, there are similar games on the App Store, along with titles more squarely positioned as artillery shooters or precision physics puzzlers with a decidedly destructive bent. Can AMD's eight-core Bulldozer crush Intel? Can AMD's upcoming Bulldozer processors possibly compete with the latest second-generation Intel Core chips, the bonkers-quick CPU otherwise known as Sandy Bridge? Bulldozer isn't due out until later this year but we can now give you the beginnings of an answer: yes, no and maybe. If that sounds like a non-answer, bear with us. Bulldozer promises to be the most revolutionary CPU architecture in living memory. Its design fundamentally challenges the very concept of a CPU core. Even with full architectural disclosure, estimating performance is tricky, bordering on impossible. However, intentionally or otherwise, AMD has let slip a few metrics which can help piece together a picture of performance. Top five reviews If the UK devices don't have significant improvements and the Android Marketplace, we say wait for another version or two. At this point, it's too much Google and not enough TV. The 40-inch 40PFL9705 is an expensive TV and is closer to the spec of the stunning £4,000 58-incher 58PFL9955H than it is to supermarket cheapies We just feel like the overall Motorola Flipout package could be a lot better - perhaps the Motorola Flipout 2 (if it ever appears) will manage to iron out some of the kinks. Updated: If you love Android in its purest form, then the Google Nexus S is the phone for you. If you like it a little more feature rich, check out the HTC range Panasonic may be the world's most vociferous supporter of plasma, but it still does a nice line in LCD. Unlike its mainstream LCD rivals, the TX-L32D25 uses an IPS (In plane Switching) panel. Also reviewed this week: Audio systems AV Accessories Desktop PCs Chillblast Fusion Challenger review Graphics cards Gigabyte HD 5770 Silent Cell review Zotac GeForce GT 430 Zone Edition review Hard Drives OCZ IBIS HSDL 240GB SSD review Headphones Keyboards Laptops BullGuard Internet Security 10 review Laptops Memory Corsair Vengeance 8GB DDR3 1600MHz review Mice Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. 9 review Mobile phones Nokia X3 Touch and Type review Motherboards Sapphire Pure Black X58 review Processors Software Kaspersky Internet Security 2011 review Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security 2011 review Speakers Storage Kingston HyperX MAX 3.0 120GB review Televisions 
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