How Sony is trying to save the world

Sony is famous for a lot of things.

Most recently it's been the launch of the PS Vita and some disappointing financial results that have been getting the headlines.

But one thing Sony hasn't had much coverage over is its work to reduce its impact on the environment.

Of course, any manufacturer of oil-based plastic products creates a sizeable carbon footprint but Sony has become a shining example to other electronics manufacturers by committing to completely eliminate its negative effect on the environment by 2050.

The road to zero

The story starts at Sony's 25-storey, 124,041 square metre Osaki Home Entertainment HQ in Tokyo. Unbelievably, it only took a single year to build.

It's the very first building of its kind to use a natural 'bioskin' cooling system, and TechRadar was lucky enough to be invited to visit earlier today.

The bioskin is made up of a network of porous ceramic pipes that are made using soil. Rain water is collected from the roof of the building throughout the year and during the hot Japanese summer, the water is pumped back up through the pipes on the outside of the building.

The water penetrates the ceramic and evaporates from the pipe surface, which cools the surrounding air by around 2 degrees. This shields the building from the sun's intense heat and reduces the load on the CO2-producing air conditioning systems inside the building.

It's the kind of cutting-edge green-thinking that Sony is applying to many of its consumer electronics projects.

TVs made from old DVDs

Sony has also recently developed a new material for its products which is made from 99% recycled plastic. The material is called SoRPlas and is made from recycling old products.

Discarded DVDs are blended up and the metal film from their surface is peeled away. The optical sheets from discarded LCD TVs are also shredded and the resultant shrapnel is blended with the DVD fragments. The strength and stiffness of the recycled plastic can be manipulated according to the proportions of the mix.

This mix is then added to some dye and a very small amount of flame-retardant to make the plastic fireproof, and the resulting material is a plastic that's every bit as good as more 'fresh' plastic.

Using this method, Sony is now able to build products like earphones and its packaging from 100% recycled plastic. It's also now being used to build the bezels of some of Sony's TVs, while 80% of the plastic used in the HDRTD20V 3D camcorder is made from this SoRPlas material already.

Using this material means 77.3% less CO2 is produced compared to conventional plastic, and the aim is to use SoRPlas to replace as much plastic as possible across all of Sony's many factories.

The first step in Sony's 'road to zero' is to harness the environmental benefits of SorPLas to reduce the company's resource consumption by 30 per cent and its CO2 emissions 20% by 2015.

Life cycles

But the goal extends beyond manufacturing. Sony's ultimate aim is to include product life cycles into the zero-emissions plan, which means building energy efficient, environmentally friendly products and packaging.

That means recycled materials wherever possible, eliminating the use of hazardous mercury, developing more efficient solar cells, increasing power efficiency in products, reducing the size of packaging and developing more environmentally friendly battery technologies.

Sony has already ceased production of old-style LCD TVs, with 100 per cent focus on more efficient LED tech. This also means sets can be thinner, using less materials - and has the further effect of requiring smaller boxes.

The bio batteries are also very interesting - they feed renewable glucose and oxygen to natural enzymes to generate electricity. This tech is a way off being used in your everyday smartphone, but it's being developed and looked at very optimistically.

While the zero emissions goal is still very far away, it's initiatives and innovations like these that will make future generations wonder what kind of barbaric tree-hating gas guzzlers we really were.

Canon has said that even though compact camera sales are experiencing a general downturn, people are investing more in individual cameras purchased.

According to industry analysis, 2011 saw a 30% drop in the number of compact cameras sold, with smartphones with ever better cameras being pinpointed as the cause.

However, Canon, which though probably best known for its DSLRs, also manufacturers a wide range of compact cameras says these figures aren't worrying.

Canon UK's David Parry told TechRadar, "People are looking for different things in cameras now, a different design, a different look.

"They're looking for big zoom lenses in small cameras, that's what we're seeing and that's what people are asking for - they want big specifications, but they want them in tiny bodies."

Long zoom

We've seen a speight of compact cameras recently announced with huge optical zoom ranges. Where once the megapixel was king, now it seems marketeers have a new high number to push.

Canon's own IXUS 510 slots into its "stylish" range of cameras, but still manages to pack an impressive 12x zoom into its slim body.

Parry believes it is cheaper compacts that are really suffering. "What we're seeing is that people are investing more in digital compact cameras, the quantities might be going down, but the quality of what people are buying, the higher end cameras, isn't."

"At the moment smartphones aren't the answer to a good quality compact camera. They don't have the low light capability, they just can't capture the motion and they don't have the added features that you get from a quality compact."

"Canon plays in the higher end of the market, and we're still producing what we think are market leading cameras. There is nothing else like an IXUS camera out there, and that's where we're seeing the growth and the interest in the market."

Samsung has hinted that it may sell off its LCD TV making arm in order to focus on the more lucrative world of OLED TVs.

The news jives nicely with Samsung's earlier public mulling over the possibility of bringing its OLED display business, Samsung Mobile Display, in-house.

Play it off, keyboard cat

If you're staring sadly at your Samsung LCD TV and wondering where it all went wrong, we'll tell you: money.

LCD TV prices have steadily fallen over the past few years thanks to a flooded market and falling demand for LCD – it means that Samsung makes a loss on each LCD TV sold.

As if that wasn't bad enough, Samsung's LCD unit sales fell 10 per cent in 2011 due to lacklustre demand as well, so selling the entire unit off would make a lick of sense.

Much more enticing is the brave new world of OLED displays. Currently the darling of the smartphone and tablet world, OLED TVs are slowly but surely infiltrating the living room.

Samsung itself has a very lust-worthy 55-inch OLED TV heading to the UK in the second half of this year.

However, it is worth mentioning that Digitimes thinks Samsung will keep the LCD business and pump $6 billion into it in a bid to make it work. But, you know, Reuters v Digitmes. Who do you believe?

Now watch our video of the Samsung 55-inch OLED TV in all its glory while you mull that conundrum over:

The Hanns G HL229DPB monitor has a 21.5-inch screen with a 1920 x 1080 resolution and a 1,000:1 contrast ratio, all for the very wallet-friendly price of £89. But is it too good to be true?

As you might expect from an LED monitor, the HL229DPB's weight is pretty light, even by flatscreen standards. However, we were disappointed to see that for all its LED splendour, it's not much thinner than a standard LCD monitor, with a thickness of 48mm.

Less surprising is the lack of a HDMI port. The DVI input is HDCP compliant, which means if you've got a Blu-ray drive in your Mac you can use a HDMI-to-DVI cable to view Blu-rays on this monitor.

The buttons aren't ghastly to use, but not as pleasant as the touch sensitive icons found on other screens. It's not as good looking as Apple's own monitors, but it is a lot less expensive.

Of course, the most important question is how good is the image quality? Pretty good, as it happens. Throughout our tests colours were reproduced well, with gradients running smoothly, rather than the blocky juxtapositions of colours displayed by some cheap monitors.

As you'd expect from an LED monitor, contrasts between light and dark colours were very good. Text was impressive, even with small fonts. Viewing angles were also good.

Zynga, creator of the addictive FarmVille and Words With Friends games has released its Q4 earnings report showing huge growth, but also a net loss.

Q4 revenue hit US$311.2 million, a 58.9 percent increase on the same time last year.

Revenue figures for the entire year were even more impressive, showing a whopping 90.8 percent increase from 2010 to 2011 of $1.14 billion.

However despite this, the company posted a net loss which it attributed to expenses involved in the company's IPO and investment in new game development.

Pushing FarmVille, gaining users

Not that it's a cause for concern, as monthly active users hit the 240 million mark, up 23 percent from last year, and "monthly unique payers" climbed to 2.9 million.

It was recently discovered that Zynga is worth $445 million to Facebook which earns a cut of the Facebook credits used to buy items in games like Farmville.

Zynga is understandably optimistic about 2012, predicting yet more growth, although weighted towards the second half of the year.

Apple CEO Tim Cook took to the stage at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference last night to deliver the keynote speech.

During the speech he covered topics from Apple factory working conditions, to how he intends to run the company in the absence of late CEO Steve Jobs.

Company direction

When asked what he was determined to maintain now that Steve Jobs is no longer around, Cook said: "Steve grilled in all of us over many years that the company should revolve around great product, and that we should stay extremely focused on just a few things rather than try to do so many that we do nothing well. We should only go into markets where we can make a significant contribution to society, not just sell a lot of products.

"And so, these things, along with keeping excellence as an expectation of everything at Apple, these are the things that I focus on because I think those are the things that make Apple this magical place. We're always focused on the future. We don't sit and think about how great things were yesterday. I love that trait. I think it's the thing that drive us all forward."

Price competition

Responding to a question about tablets, Cook went into why Apple isn't in a hurry to start a price war with competitors, saying: "Price is rarely the most important thing. A cheap product might sell some units. Somebody gets it home and they feel great when they pay the money, but then they get it home and use it, and the joy is gone.

"The joy is gone every day that they use it until they aren't using it anymore. You don't keep remembering 'I got a good deal!' because you hate it!"

Factory working conditions

Working conditions at factories manufacturing Apple products has been a hot news topic recently, and Cook gave a statement about the company line during his speech.

Addressing a question on the issue, he said: "Apple takes working conditions very, very seriously, and we have for a very long time… Our commitment is simple: Every worker has the right to a fair and safe work environment, free of discrimination, where they can earn competitive wages and they can voice their concerns freely.

"Apple suppliers must live up to this to do business with Apple. If we find a supplier that intentionally hires underage labour, it's a firing offense."

This tallies with Tim Cook's recent email to Apple staff assuring them that he was taking the matter in hand and his invitation to the Fair Labor Association to inspect working conditions for itself.

Overview

If AMD's HD 7970 debut Southern Islands card arrived in a fancy tux heralding a bunch of world firsts (first PCIe 3.0 card, first DirectX 11.1-compatible), this HD 7750 turns up to little fanfare in a Burton polo shirt and trainers.

The new Graphics Core Next's architecture has already been shown off by the HD 7970 and those 4.3 billion transistors pack quite a punch, as it turns out, trouncing the very best of last generations' GPUs by around 20-30% at mega-high res.

The HD 7970 is also excruciatingly pricey though. At £440 its staggering performance and overclocking capability are out of reach to most gamers.

The HD 7750 should arrive hitting the right side of £80, making it an altogether friendlier proposal, and these new-gen AMD cards boast some excellent power efficiency by shutting off all but one core when your system enters power save mode.

But what's this HD 7750 missing out on to hit that price point? Does it still make high-res screens sing?

Benchmarks

We put the HD 7750 through its paces in the super-taxing Heaven 2.5 benchmark at a gigantic 2560 x 1600 and stressed every nanometre of its circuitry in the most demanding DX11 games at 1920 x 1080.

The HD 7750 bested Nvidia's rival sub-£100 card, the GTX 550 Ti, but came a cropper against the HD 6770.

DirectX 11 tessellation performance: Heaven 2.5: Frames per second: Higher is better

AMD HD 7750: 9.4
AMD HD 6770: 8.0
EVGA GTX 550 Ti: 8.9

DirectX 11 gaming performance: Frames per second: Higher is better

DiRT 3

AMD HD 7750: 28.64
AMD HD 6770: 36.83
AMD HD 6850: 42.62

Shogun 2

AMD HD 7750: 20.33
AMD HD 6770: 25.85
AMD HD 6850: 32.0

Metro 2033

AMD HD 7750: 11.67
AMD HD 6770: 10.33
AMD HD 6850: 15.67

Just Cause 2

AMD HD 7750: 26.13
AMD HD 6770: 26.19
AMD HD 6850: 34.14

Verdict

Our opinions on this freshman 'Cape Verde' chip are dependent on UK pricing. If the $95 US price converts somewhere near the actual exchange rate without too much mark-up, it'll be available at £80 or less, and if that's the case you'll be getting some great performance returns for your outlay if you skipped a generation or two in your graphics card upgrade schedule.

If that UK price falls closer to the £100 mark though, it'll be a misfire, rather than one of those classic AMD bargains you wait for with each new gen's advent. The HD 7750 is quicker than its big Nvidia rival, the GTX 550 Ti, and its predecessor, the HD 5770 - but not the HD 6770.

General performance is limited primarily by a slender 128-bit frame buffer, however the die-shrink down from 45nm to 28nm and increase in transistor count that comes with it gives this Southern Islands card a definite edge in tessellation-heavy tasks. It's apparent in its strong Heaven 2.5 score, but in non-synthetic benchmarks the performance gain from the new architecture isn't as noticeable.

Overclocking the HD 7750's a mixed bag, too. On the one hand, it handles big core and memory clock increases smoothly and without crashes - we had ours cranked up to 900 MHz on the core clock from the 800 MHz stock setting without any glitching or hangs.

The downside though, is that we didn't really achieve a whole lot of performance increase by doing so – it only reported a 0.1 FPS increase when we ran the Heaven 2.5 benchmark. That, along with general performance, is likely to change as the 7700 series' drivers mature though.

We liked

We'll get a better idea of the HD 7750's true worth when firm UK prices arrive, AMD's drivers optimise and third parties get their overclocking mitts on it, but at present all evidence points to a strong budget card that'll appeal to anyone playing at 1080p or lower, and keeps an eye on power efficiency.

We disliked

We're hoping there's more potential under the bonnet for overclocking performance than we were able to extract with the early drivers, since AMD's flagship 7-series card the HD 7970 overclocked so damn well.

If it doesn't work out that way, this card still offers enough stock performance over its peers to make it worth a look.

Overview

AMD showed its hand first in this year's GPU arms race with Nvidia... by turning it into last year's arms race.

While Nvidia has kept shtum about its upcoming new 'Kepler' architecture and looks to do so until Spring, AMD stole the march and released the first of its new 7-series cards, the AMD HD 7970, a few days before Christmas 2011.

That sure was odd timing, but it taught us a lot about AMD's new Southern Islands architecture, specifically the 'Tahiti' chip. It's fully PCIe 3.0-supported, uses a 28nm manufacturing process to pack more transistors onto a PCB than ever before, and apart from offering very quick DX11 game frame rates, it's a highly energy efficient beast.

When your system drifts off into standby, the Tahiti card switches itself all but off too, minimising power draw.

The HD 7970's whopping £440 price made all those neat features all but irrelevant to the gaming masses though, so we're putting our hopes on this HD 7770 to deliver the best bits of the new AMD architecture for a more palatable price.

The 'Cape Verde' chip that this HD 7770 is built around makes full use of the new Graphics Core Next architecture like its big bro, with ZeroCore power efficiency in tow and a solid 1,000 MHz core clock. If it can offer a slice of the HD 7970's performance for this price, it's on to a winner.

Architecture, technology and specifications

The Graphics Core Next architecture is a bold move from AMD in that it represents a move away from the VLIW instruction used in 6-series cards towards a GPU-processing-friendly SIMD vector processor.

The previous processor type was great for graphics processing, but not suited to general purpose GPU computing - AMD left that side of things up to Nvidia and its CUDA cores.

Graphics Core Next is a u-turn on that philosophy though. GCN allows up to 16 data elements to be processed in a single clock cycle.

Grouping data before it runs through the vector processor is really efficient when dealing with general processing tasks - but the bad news for games is that you won't notice that difference in Battlefield 3 - the strengths of this architecture are wider-reaching than that, even as far as the professional market.

GCN also understands advanced languages like C++, meaning that in the long run, it'll be easier for developers to make use of the 7-series cards for complex programs.

The performance improvement from this architecture comes from passing data through a ton of compute units, which all work on the same operation until it's completed, and the resulting compute performance of this HD 7770 card is impressive at 1.28 TFLOPS.

It's built with ten compute units rather than the HD 7970's sixteen, but that's still enough to demonstrate a marked performance increase on last generation's equivalent model. And with AMD and Nvidia now adopting similar stances in their design, it's becoming an increasingly straight battle between the two - no hiding behind the blurred lines of CUDA cores and stream processors.

So the number of compute units and the simplified SIMD instructions they perform give AMD's 7-series cards the brains, but the clock speed is still the brawn of the operation. And at a world-first 1,000 MHz, it's fair to say the HD 7770 has brawn in check.

Benchmarks

We tested the HD 7770 with the most demanding DX11 around at 1080p, and with the Heaven 2.5 benchmark at 2560 x 1600 to really test its limits. It fared reasonably, demonstrating why it's more expensive than the HD 7750 and keeping in the same ball park as the pricier but older HD 6850.

DirectX 11 tessellation performance: Frames per second: Higher is betterHeaven 2.5

AMD HD 7770: 11.9
AMD HD 6850: 12.5
EVGA GTX 550 Ti: 8.9

DirectX 11 gaming performance: Frames per second: Higher is better

DiRT 3

AMD HD 7770: 41.73
AMD HD 7750: 28.64
AMD HD 6850: 42.62

Shogun 2

AMD HD 7770: 30.77
AMD HD 7750: 20.33
AMD HD 6850: 31.86

Metro 2033

AMD HD 7770: 13.00
AMD HD 7750: 11.67
AMD HD 6850: 15.67

Just Cause 2

AMD HD 7770: 31.18
AMD HD 7750: 26.13
AMD HD 6850: 34.14

Verdict

Many of the HD 7770's new features won't be noticeable right away. The underlying architecture is a big step forward for AMD that programmers and developers will find attractive, but for gamers looking to get playable frame rates out of DX11 games at 1080p its benefits aren't as obvious.

We're expecting the HD 7770 to enter at around the £100 point, which means it's going up against Nvidia's 550 Ti. While we didn't see it outperform the Nvidia card by the 100% AMD implied, it does hold a clear performance advantage, in addition to the subtler features under its bonnet.

Our sticking point though is that it was outclassed in every benchmark we ran by the previous generations' darling; the HD 6850. With just £20 difference between the two cards, we'd have liked to have seen a closer battle between the two.

It's worth mentioning that AMD's drivers tend to get better results from any given card after a few months of refinement, so further down the line we might see more parity in the benchmark figures between the two cards.

As with the HD 7750, the HD 7770 didn't impress in its overclocking performance the way AMD's high-end HD 7970 did. That £440 card maxed out AMD's overclocking software settings before crashing; the same can't be said here.

We managed to add on another 50 MHz to the core and memory clocks which yielded a modest increase in our benchmark tests, but it wasn't a reliable runner with those settings - glitches and crashes kicked in after a few minutes. Hopefully we'll see the full extent of the HD 7770's potential when the third party manufacturers release their beefed-up versions.

The 7-series might not all deliver staggering performance and overclocking, and that's to be expected given their wildly different pricings, but there is one feature that consistently impresses across the range - ZeroCore.

This is power-efficiency taken to a happy extreme – when your system enters a long-idle state, the HD 7700 along with all 7-series cards completely powers down the fan, 3D engine, compute units, shaders – virtually the whole card. The only activity going on comes from a small bus control block, which simply lets your computer know that the card still exists and no-one stole the GPU while it's been asleep.

We found it to be fast-acting, and dramatically reduced power draw when our system went idle.

We liked

This HD 7770 brings AMD's new architectural features to the budget audience with reasonable success.

Its GCN design and ZeroCore power efficiency make it a compelling argument to choose new over old, but it doesn't quite blow the best of the 6-series cards out of the water in plain old gaming performance.

We disliked

The HD 6850 can't do the 7-series cards' tricks, but it can render Metro 2033 frames quicker, and that makes the HD 7770 a tricky one to recommend.

As a stock card, it doesn't offer anything outstanding, but aftermarket companies might yet yield some impressive performances out of it.

The price of calling mobile phones from your landline will fall by a whopping 85 per cent by April 2015, a legal tribunal has confirmed.

Following years of arguments between phone companies and regulators, the Competition Appeals Tribunal (Cat) has decreed the scale of the cuts, knocking up to £800m off Britons' phone bills.

The cuts, which will continue to happen progressively over the next three years will see the cost-per-minute rate fall from 4.18p to 0.65p. Costs have been falling since April last year.

The final figure is even lower than the recommendation made by Ofcom, who welcomed the ruling, saying it would "reduce significantly termination rates which will bring competition and consumer benefits".

Wrangling

In the wake of the tribunal's verdict, Vodafone itself has warned that landline providers BT and Virgin may not be so keen to pass the savings onto its customers.

In a statement, the network said: "The fixed-line operators have merely pocketed previous reductions in mobile termination rates, instead of reducing prices for customers. BT, meanwhile, has actually increased its line rental prices three times over the past year and a half."

The company, which called the cuts "Draconian" says poorer customers will lose out as a result.

It says it will have to compensate for lost revenue by removing subsidies for pay-as-you-go handsets.

A new television service called Aereo will give viewers the opportunity to watch live broadcast television networks over the internet on devices like the iPad and laptop computers.

Aereo will begin a trial in the New York City area on March 14th and will allow live HD streaming of major networks including ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, PBS, CW and a host of local channels.

The $12 a month service aims to help people end dependence on expensive cable contracts and free network television from the 'closed circle' enforced by cable providers.

It is able to legally stream the live TV over-the-air directly to your devices thanks to tiny thumbnail-sized antennas (one per user), which are stored together in a company data center.

From there you can use the HTML5-designed Aereo.com website to view content on tablets, smartphones and even on the big screen with devices like the Apple TV and Roku set-top boxes.

Remote DVR functionality included

The service will also give users the opportunity to record 40-hours of shows from the TV guide with their own personal remote DVR that again doesn't require a set-top box or a cable subscription.

The service is primarily aimed at the casual TV viewer who has no desire to pay over-the-odds for cable channels like HBO and ESPN and is happy with the network offerings.

"If you have this and you have Netflix, you absolutely have the ability to not have a standard cable subscription," said Chet Kanojia, Aereo founder and CEO.

So, instead of paying over $100 a month for a cable TV package, viewers will soon be able to take advantage of Netflix, Hulu Plus and Aereo for around $30 a month.

One of the key backers Barry Diller told the New York Times: "Anyone will tell you, whether it's Amazon or Hulu or Apple, that they can't get enough programming that people want to see to – so to speak, 'break the chain' — because all of the programming is controlled within the circle.

"[Aereo] pries over-the-air broadcast television out of that closed system," he added.

New Yorkers can register their interest in the service at Aereo.com.