Month: March 2022

Enlarge / LG’s prior 8K OLED TV (pictured) started at $19,999.99. (credit: LG)

8K TVs aren’t that popular yet. There’s limited content to watch on them, and it can be hard to tell the difference between 4K and 8K resolutions in a home theater setup. But perhaps the most obvious obstacle is price. And if you throw OLED into the mix, the price tag becomes astronomical. LG’s current 8K OLED TV proves that with a starting price of $20,000. The company’s 2022 models will be a bit less expensive, though they’re still out of reach for most consumers.

After announcing the Z2 series of 8K OLED TVs in January, LG said on Monday that the TVs will release in April, coming in at $12,999 for the 76.7-inch TV and $24,999 for the 87.6-inch model. That’s $7,000 cheaper than 2020’s ZX 76.7-inch 8K OLED TV and $5,000 cheaper than the 88-inch class.

LG’s upcoming Z2 lineup is pricey, but the sets are among the only options if you want 8K in contrast-rich OLED. B&O’s 8K OLED TV starts at $18,125 for 65 inches. Samsung’s 8K TVs use a Mini LED backlight, but the 2022 Neo QLED is $6,500 for an 84.5-inch model. The 74.5-inch version, meanwhile, costs $4,700.

Enlarge (credit: CDPR | Aurich Lawson)

The Witcher is coming back. No, there won’t be a new TV series, novel, virtual card game, or other project affiliated with the popular Polish fantasy series. Today, CD Projekt Red confirmed that its tentpole video game series will continue with an entirely new adventure game.

The news arrived on Monday via an image of the game series’ trademark wolf medallion covered in snow, with glowing eyes peeking through the frost. The announcement included a four-word tagline: “A new saga begins.”

“Decided from the earliest possible phase”

The teaser image was quickly followed by an official CDPR press release, which confirms that the game studio will be using Unreal Engine 5 to develop the new game, as opposed to the internally developed REDengine used in prior Witcher games and 2020’s Cyberpunk 2077. The press release says that the company will continue REDengine development to support ongoing CP77 expansion content, patches, and other updates.

Enlarge / The F-150 Lightning will be offered as a SuperCrew cab with a 5.5-foot bed. (credit: Ford)

When Ford announced the F-150 Lightning, the company’s first electric pickup truck, the automaker pledged that the Lightning’s $40,000 base model would travel 230 miles on a full charge—and that the extended-range model would reach 300 miles. Not too shabby for a 6,500 lb truck with a not-insignificant drag area.

It turns out that at least one of those numbers was conservative. Ford said today that the base Lightning model did reach its predicted 230 miles under EPA testing and that the extended-range model sailed past estimates to reach 320 miles.

“We are laser focused on continually improving our energy consumption efficiency for Lightning, and the team is really happy to deliver these results for our customers,” said Linda Zhang, the trucks’s chief program engineer.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg | Margrethe Vestager and Thierry Breton)

Andy Yen has big dreams for ProtonMail, the secure email service he founded in 2014 that now has 50 million users worldwide. One day, he hopes, it could be a rival to Gmail, the communications behemoth owned by Google, which boasts over 1.5 billion users.

But he says Proton can never be a true competitor to Google while the Internet continues to be an unregulated Wild West. “We grow based on the goodwill of tech giants,” Yen says from his head office in Geneva. In fact, he says, the same goes for his company’s very existence. “Tech giants could today remove us from the Internet with zero legal or financial repercussions.”

Like Proton, many companies across Europe are pinning their hopes on the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the EU’s first overhaul of the rules that govern competition on the Internet in 20 years. It is one of two major pieces of technology legislation in the works in Brussels; the other is the Digital Services Act (DSA), which will cover areas such as privacy and data use.