The game shall change even more

Last week, Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai revealed the XBR-84X900, a 3D-capable Bravia TV with a very high 4K resolution of 3840x2160 pixels, at the IFA show in Berlin. Today, Sony has revealed that the price tag for this game-changing model will work out to roughly US$0.003 per pixel. Sounds cheap, but early adopters who want twice the resolution as ordinary HD TV will actually have to pay quite dearly for it. The US$25,000 price tag of Sony's massive XBR-84X900 obviously will deter ordinary buyers, but prices should drop over time as they have with HD, 3D, and flat-panel TVs in recent years. But the price of such an advanced piece of technology isn't the only thing. There's barely any video available that's shot in 4K, though there's a 4K YouTube channel, some movies and movie theaters are making the shift, and Sony's TV can upscale traditional 1080i HD video to 4K. And by some measurements, 4K resolution is too high to perceive unless you're sitting very close to the screen (which is bad for your eyes). So my advice would be to just hold off until the price goes down. And speaking of falling prices, robots are poised to make solar power systems even cheaper to set up. We all know that photovoltaic solar panels work best when they face the sun, and we all know that the sun moves (actually, the Earth rotates, causing the sun to appear to be moving). And it's straightforward enough to rig up computerised tracking systems to move them, but that siphons off some of the power the solar cells produce, it adds a lot of potential points of failure with moving parts for each panel, and there's also the expense of building racks strong enough to hold both the panels and the tracking mechanisms. But now, a company called QBotix has developed a way to adjust a field of solar panels to point at the sun without adding a drive mechanism for each panel. The firm's "QBotix Tracking System" consolidates all those drive mechanisms, and thus all those potential points of "moving parts" failure, into one small robot which moves through an array of dual-axis PV panels on a simple monorail, adjusting each panel in turn. And speaking of monorail, the 24th season of The Simpsons will be upon us later this month, and this season, fans in New Zealand will get to experience each episode within a week of its airing in America.