Tabla de contenidos para June 2023 en T3

OSMOSE The advent of MIDI Polyphonic Expression has opened up whole new dimensions (quite literally) to making music, allowing aspiring producers to control many forms of expression with each key press. However, while there are now a broad variety of MIDI controllers and software synths that will allow you to tap, glide and slide your way to a more expressive performance, we haven’t seen many stand-alone hardware synthesisers that can do the same. Until the Osmose. With a custom expressive sound engine designed by Haken Audio, the Expressive E’s Osmose comes packed with more than 500 presets, each of which includes customisable macros. Each of its 49 semi-weighted keys can then be tapped and pressed to trigger different sounds, shaken to deliver vibrato, stroked to bend pitch or even strummed.…

With the coronation of King Charles III, we’ve all been enjoying a bit of extra time off here at T3. I’ve spent so much time outside over the recent run of garden parties that I’ve upgraded my tan from translucent troglodyte to soiled linen. Although that might just be down to all the tea I’ve sloshed all over myself. Regardless, all of these back-to-back bank holidays have been a fabulous opportunity for us all to focus on improving our work-life balance and getting a bit more time outdoors. So, if you’re looking for stuff to keep you occupied over the upcoming spring bank holiday, we’ve crammed this issue of T3 with great gadgets for kicking back outside. Whether you fancy grilling up some food with friends, kicking back in the…

After spending a decade pleading with us not to buy OLED TVs, Samsung has just launched an OLED TV. To be fair, though, while Samsung’s OLED take still delivers the key advantage of every single pixel in the picture producing its own light independently of its neighbours, it does differ from ‘traditional’ OLED tech in two ways. First, QD-OLED TVs, as their name suggests, combine the organic materials that give us the O in OLED with the non-organic Quantum Dot colour technology previously only found in LCD TVs. Specifically, QD-OLED TVs pass a phosphor-emitted blue light through layers of Quantum Dots containing larger dots that glow red and smaller dots that glow green – an approach that offers more precision than regular colour filters. The second big QD-OLED difference is…

While today’s ultra-thin TVs might look great, they certainly don’t always sound great. Skinny bodies just don’t leave room for decent speakers. After years of TV audio systems often sounding like two tin cans and a piece of string, though, TV brands are finally taking TV sound seriously again. Sony, for instance, cunningly places actuators behind its OLED TV screens so that the screen itself becomes a huge forward-firing speaker. Sony also, along with Samsung, pioneered the idea of fitting detail speakers around the edges of their LCD TVs to create bigger, more precisely detailed soundstages. Perfect for the multi-channel Dolby Atmos soundtracks many TVs now play. The most exciting developments in TV sound, though, involve partnering TVs with external sound systems. Philips, for instance, partnered with hi-fi brand Bowers…

Everybody hates cables. The way they invariably get impossibly tangled and uglify the most glamorous TVs makes them nothing but a necessary evil. Except that they’re not actually still necessary. The past year has given us three ground-breaking TVs capable of delivering high quality pictures without any pesky video cabling. Panasonic kicked things off with a 55-inch OLED prototype at Berlin’s IFA show last September that weighed just 10kg and could be hung on a single wire like a painting. A book-sized external box wirelessly broadcast 4K pictures to the screen, leaving only the power cable running into the screen. Things got more real at January’s CES with two wireless TVs you will actually be able to buy. New startup Displace TV showcased a $3,000 55-inch 4K OLED TV that…

1 STARTRC SMARTPHONE SUN HOOD When you fly your drone in sunlight, reflections on your smartphone monitor can make it impossible to view the drone’s live camera feed or read any warnings that pop up on screen. Hence this is a useful buy. £14, amazon.co.uk 2 AUTEL 360˚ PROPELLOR GUARD If you plan to fly the Nano+ indoors or your first outdoor flight is near obstacles, consider these Autel prop guards. They come in pairs and simply clip on to the arms of the drone, providing robust protection for the propellers while also preventing injury if the drone is accidentally flown into someone. £20, autelpilot.co.uk 3 SANDISK EXTREME PRO MICROSD The Autel Evo Nano+ doesn’t ship with a microSD card so make sure that this is the first accessory you…

When we first clapped eyes on the LG G3 OLED at CES, we knew it was good then. Now it’s clear this set is gunning to be the best OLED TV you can buy. It even offers enough brightness to give Samsung’s QLED range a run for its money as one of the best TVs on the planet. You’ll need plenty of that though. At its smallest the G3 OLED is available as a 55-inch set, priced £2,600/$2,500. The ‘sweet spot’ size for many will be the 65-inch, priced at £/$3,300, which is what we’re reviewing here. The next largest size is a 77-inch model, priced at £5,000/$4,500, which starts to get into super-massive scale. Above this, the 83-inch model is a gigantic £7,500/$6,500. On top of this, it’s also…

Designed to compete with the best OLED TVs, the Samsung QN95C is a major evolutionary step for non-OLED technology. At its heart is an upgraded mini-LED backlight system and, combined with Quantum Dots for purer colours and peerless AI-enhanced processing, the result is a smart TV capable of superb images. The Samsung QN95C uses the company’s Infinity One design, which sports a contemporary finish and sleek styling. The Infinity Screen is bezelless, the build quality excellent, and the elegant angled stand provides solid support while having a smaller footprint for narrower surfaces. The most obvious difference from the earlier S95B model is that Samsung has dropped the One Connect Box, and instead builds the QN95C’s connections into the rear of the panel. Presumably this is for cost-benefit reasons, but it’s…

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FJÄLLRÄVEN ABISKO HIKE FOLDSACK Fjällräven’s newest backpack has been designed for travellers who need a little extra space, but who also value sustainability. Made from recycled polyester, the Abisko has a 25L capacity and a fold-over closure which has both a zipper and side straps for extra security. £145, fjallraven.com KOBO ELIPSA 2E Kobo’s new e-reader has a 10.3-inch glare-free e-ink touchscreen and ComfortLight PRO technology to reduce blue light and eyestrain. Its exterior consists of 85% recycled plastic, 10% of which is ocean-bound plastic. £349.99, kobo.com OAKLEY BXTR SUNGLASSES We’re loving the retro vibes of Oakley’s new BXTR sunglasses, the inspiration for which was Baxter Street, a legendary LA skate spot. £144, oakley.com…

1 SAGE FOODCYCLER If your compost bin is getting a bit much to deal with, the Foodcycler could be the ideal solution. It grinds up and bakes your food waste, turning into what Sage calls ‘EcoChips’. These vastly reduce its volume and smell, and can (after a while) be mixed with your existing soil to give it an extra nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus boost. £420, sageappliances.com 2 SENUA SOIL SENSOR Although the rain likely won’t allow your borders to dry out for even a second, you can never tell what the British weather is going to do to when summer comes around. If you’re trying to save water, as you should, a smart soil sensor is the best way beyond a deep finger poke to see just how little moisture there is…

1 SWAN COLUMN PATIO HEATER If you’ve ever cowered under a gas-powered patio heater on a cold evening you’ll know their effective range is limited at best, and most of that energy ends up wasted. Infra-red, though, provides heat to everything that light touches, and this super-elegant anodised aluminium column heater can blast out 2000W of pure glorious warmth. £215, swan-brand.co.uk 2 HUE IMPRESS OUTDOOR PEDESTAL LAMP Brightening up a path, highlighting a corner, just sitting there looking pretty; there’s not much the appropriately-named Impress lamp can’t do, at least in the realm of lighting. It can add a splash of colour or employ your choice of white shade, and it’s ready to work with Hue’s effects feature if you want to get fancy. £170, philips-hue.com 3 RUSTY BARREL BELGRAVIA COCKTAIL MAKING SET…

Predictably the makers of traditional OLED screens haven’t taken the arrival of QD-OLED lying down. Instead, brands including LG, Philips and Panasonic are introducing a new micro lens array (MLA) system onto some of their premium 2023 OLED TVs with the specific aim of rivalling the substantial brightness gains being achieved by QD-OLED’s second TV generation. In principle MLA is easy to describe. It simply involves adding an array of lenses just behind an OLED screen that better focus the light out into your room, resulting in more brightness without massively ramping up power consumption or increasing exposure to OLED screen burn. The tech also increases the angles from which you can watch TV without the picture losing colour or contrast. The tiny (as in, micrometer) size and quantity (we’re…

For home cinema fans, at least, arguably a TV’s most important job is delivering a deep, neutral black colour so that the dark scenes look convincing and immersive. Even TVs that manage this, though, typically then have their efforts besmirched by a problem: onscreen reflections. Many weird and wonderful reflection-reducing TV filters have come and gone over the years – including one based on the structure of moth eyes. Nothing before, though, has shown as much promise as the new Vantablack polariser appearing on some of 2023’s premium OLED TVs. The Vanta bit stands for vertically aligned nanotube arrays, and when first developed by Surrey NanoSystems in 2014 the original substance/coating these arrays was not only capable of absorbing up to 99.965% of visible light (measured perpendicularly), but could also…

While playing video games in high dynamic range is usually awesome, it can also be a bit of a mess. Not least because games don’t know the capabilities of your TV and so don’t know where to set their HDR output values to give each gamer the best results. Arguably the single most simple and effective approach to tackle this is Dolby Vision. Dolby Vision is already a much-loved part of the home video scene, and while it doesn’t work in quite the same way in the gaming world, the end results are the same: a more refined and consistent HDR experience. Dolby Vision gaming is currently available on Xbox Series S/X consoles, and PCs. It can either be built into a game’s graphics code or be automatically added at…

AUTEL EVO NANO+ £599, autelpilot.co.uk WE’RE IMPRESSED Large 0.8-inch CMOS sensor; amazing f1.9 aperture for low-light shooting; stunning 4K video; huge 50MP stills; three-way obstacle avoidance; under 250 grams. WE’D IMPROVE Not the fastest top speed in wind; not the cheapest small drone on the market. THE LAST WORD If you’re looking for a small, pocket-sized sub-250g drone that shoots phenomenal 4K video footage and aerial photos in practically any light, this is the model for you. It’s the perfect drone for amateur film-makers and an absolute shoo-in for travelling. DJI MINI 2 SE £309, dji.com WE’RE IMPRESSED Superb flight performance; Remote Controller is easy to use; 3-axis gimbal; level 5 wind resistance. WE’D IMPROVE No 4K or True Vertical Shooting options. THE LAST WORD At this price, the performance…

When Honor first revealed its Magic 5 Pro flagship, it proudly purported it to have the best camera in any Android phone. It even had DxOMark (an independent testing outfit) backing it up. But can it deliver on that claim? The Honor Magic 5 Pro’s display is massive, at 6.81-inch across the diagonal, but still avoids being unwieldy. But the most impressive part is just how bright this panel is. It’s easily among the more eye-searing displays we’ve seen in an Android device, yet it’s nicely balanced. The panel is also 120Hz, so makes for smooth visuals thanks to this high refresh rate. Although it’s not super-smooth in all instances. Regardless of whether it’s in variable mode or fixed at 120Hz, we found issues with specific apps presenting some ‘stuttery’…

The Sonos Era 300 and Era 100 are the company’s first brand-new smart speakers since 2017. While the smaller Era 100 is set to replace the existing Sonos One speaker, the Era 300 sits just below the flagship Sonos 5 model. But despite the fact the Era 300 costs £100 less than the Sonos 5, in many ways, this is a better speaker. There’s one thing to get out of the way with the Era 300, and that’s the shape. Unlike most speakers, it’s not cylindrical – instead, it’s hourglassed, as if someone tied a belt around its middle, so it’s thinner in the middle than on either end. And unlike the Sonos Five, you can’t sit the Era 300 on its side – it only sits with its longest…

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What do a public servant from New Zealand, a COO of a skilled nursing facilities W company from California and a hotel development manager from the UK have in common? Well, they all completed a 100-mile trek across the surface of a frozen lake in Northern Mongolia, slept in traditional nomad camps and endured subzero conditions. And those weren’t even the most challenging parts of the journey. During a prolonged heatwave last year in the UK, I signed up for Rat Race’s Mongol 100 (ratrace.com). At the time, the idea of being in a calm, cool environment sounded like a dynamite idea. I’m a decent runner and don’t mind the cold either; therefore, the Mongol 100 felt like the kind of thing I would be into. In hindsight, I was…

MicroLED technology is actually the least new of our featured cutting edge TV technologies. It’s had so many false dawns at so many CESes over the years that we’ve lost count. The problem being that while microLED screens are dazzlingly good, they continue to be so hard to make that only oil magnates can afford them. MicroLED delivers the TV holy grail of individually illuminated pixels that don’t depend on any organic elements. So you get the amazing local contrast, detail and subtlety benefits associated with self-emissive screens alongside the brightness and colour volume benefits – and then some – associated with LED screens, without having to worry about wearing the organic materials out. The problem is that the LEDs required for even large microLED displays are so tiny –…

Artificial intelligence has long been a cause of equal fascination and fear for us puny humans, with recent Chat-GPT shenanigans putting it right back on the current news agenda. While AI is also a big deal in today’s TV world, though, don’t panic: the way TV AI works doesn’t mean it’s going to start ordering your electrical appliances to kill you. It’s all simply about improving picture and sound quality. Honest. In fact, AI in TVs doesn’t even really mean they actually learn anything. When TV brands mention AI processing, they’re really talking about banks of neural networks analysing different types of content in distant labs, and the results of all that learning then ending up on the chips inside your TVs. That doesn’t mean, though, that AI’s impact on…

Whether it’s capturing breathtaking landscapes, video footage of your holiday, or even inspecting the tiles on your roof, modern camera drones offer unparalleled ways in which to capture crisp 4K video and high-resolution images without your feet moving an inch. With another warm summer just over the horizon, now is the time to consider buying yourself that camera drone you’ve always wanted but perhaps kept putting off because of all the legal hoops you need to jump through in order to fly it. Well, don’t let the spectre of official licensing rules dissuade you because today’s sub-250g drones – like the trio of keenly-priced, high-flying titans we’re looking at – are exempt from the majority of regulations so you can fly them almost anywhere. Sub-250g category drones are not only…

When the standard Autel Evo Nano came out, it blew us away with its smooth flight characteristics and unbelievable camera. The Evo Nano+ is the exact same drone bar the camera, which puts it in a whole other class when it comes to shooting aerial videography and photography. Before we get to flight performance, we should address an issue that has had some critics in a bit of a tizz – namely the Evo Nano+’s ability to fly in strong winds. We can appreciate their concern to some degree because we know what it’s like getting a drone back in a headwind. But this titchy thing only weighs 249g – how could it possibly fly efficiently in a gale where tree branches are in full sway? Wind aside, what’s this…

WHAT IS THE SUB-250G CATEGORY? The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority has many laws that forbid the use of most drones without official permission, usually in the form of a Flyer ID and a Pilot ID. In the process, the CAA also created a sub-250g weight category for smaller camera-carrying drones as they don’t pose a threat to people below. This means you can fly any sub-250g drone over people, cities, towns, tourist attractions, beaches and parks. CAMERA QUALITY IS EVERYTHING Aside from basic flight performance, the most important element of any drone used for shooting video and stills is the quality of the camera and gimbal. We can’t stress enough how important it is to choose a drone with a decent camera and ideally a mechanical 3-axis gimbal because without…

With the Samsung Odyssey Neo G7, we’re looking at a contender for one of the best 4K monitors on the planet right now. The first flat gaming monitor Samsung has produced using mini-LED technology, it’s a whopping 43 inches – which is plenty of screen estate to make any game look fab. Samsung has gone for a really small stand here, which limits what you can do with the monitor in terms of positioning. On the plus side, there’s a small footprint on the desk you’re going to be using it on. We’re fans of the small blue lights in each bottom corner, though we’re less enamoured with the mass of white plastic around the back. The Odyssey Neo G7 certainly scores highly in terms of how many port options…

Finally, an AMOLED Forerunner! The Garmin Venu 2 proved that Garmin watches could have AMOLED displays without sacrificing battery life, so we’ve long wondered when we would get to lay our hands on a Forerunner with a modern display. It’s not perfect, but the Garmin Forerunner 265 shows a lot of promise and retains the best qualities of its predecessors. The main difference between the Forerunner 265 and its predecessor, the 255, is the AMOLED touchscreen display, a first in Forerunners. It’s 1.1 inches with 360 x 360 pixels resolution or 1.3 inches with 416 x 416 resolution and is protected by a Corning Gorilla Glass 3 lens. It is not only beautiful to look at but makes it easier to read the watch in broad daylight. Another difference is…

DJI INSPIRE 3 While the price may have you confused, the DJI Inspire 3 is not a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft – it’s actually a drone aimed at professional cinematographers. Essentially a full-blown cine-camera strapped to a drone, its full-frame Zenmuse X9-8K Air Gimbal Camera can record up to 8K/25fps CinemaDNG video, 8K/75fps Apple ProRes RAW and uncropped full-frame 4K/120fps ProRes RAW video. It offers 14+ stops of dynamic range, enabling you to capture lush HDR footage with scintillating highlights and rich shadows. And its new Waypoint Pro function enables you to meticulously choreograph flight routes and shots, meaning you can easily shoot repeatable scenes or even mimic 3D dolly shots while manually controlling speed. Its gimbal even allows you to shoot 360º panning shots and obstruction-free 80°…