The C Seed N1 Television
Televisions keep getting bigger, but this one is actually better too
A friend of this column made a lot of money in the early part of this century with a chain of stores selling affordable gadgets. He was worth some $200 million at one point. Then he got locked in a legal battle, lost, and went bankrupt.
In his prime, he had a massive country estate, two Porsches, an assortment of other classic cars, and the largest TV you could buy at that time—one of those elephantine rear-projection models. Broke, he moved into a tiny apartment and traded his 84-inch Sony for a 14-inch portable.
During that fallow time, Jon (who ultimately built a second retail empire and ended up richer than he’d ever been) liked to say that sitting close to a small TV was pretty much the same experience as viewing a supersize one from far away.
But in this column’s view, big is better. And large televisions are increasingly becoming the norm. The growing—and rather good—TCL brand, from China, sells an 85-inch now for just $900. A British company, Titan Screens, offers a 370-inch monster—flat, but markets it as larger in height and width than four baby elephants. The Titan Zeus costs a reported $1.6 million. But, like all huge TVs, when it’s off, it’s just a vast expanse of dark gray.
C Seed, a 15-year-old TV manufacturer that’s based in Vienna but has a showroom in Beverly Hills, takes a radically different approach, with TVs that fold up electronically when you’re not watching. Their latest N1 range includes a 103-inch model, at $236,000 (plus $10,000 for installation and project management); a 137-inch one, at $283,000; and a 165-inch one, at $362,000.
It needs pointing out that the price of the 165-inch would be more than enough to buy a sizable house on several acres in some parts of the United States, but C Seed TVs are not your standard gray oblong. Though their claim to be kinetic sculptures may seem a little overblown, when you see an N1 in action, it’s not an unreasonable description. They are extraordinarily beautiful, something that can’t be said about many TVs.
In the dormant position, an N1 looks like a minimalist aluminum bench. Press the button and, in 60 seconds or so, the bench rises to a vertical 7.8 feet and unfurls silently and spectacularly, transforming into a flat 4K microLED TV with no visible joints between its five constituent panels. The giant, glare-free TV can also be rotated 180 degrees left and right to whatever position suits at a given moment. It has a built-in speaker system with twin 100-watt speakers, making additional amplification unnecessary.
If you need a discreet outdoor TV, C Seed can help out again. Your columnist has seen C Seed TVs by the pool of an apartment complex in Huntington Beach, California, and on the Greek island of Mykonos. They are truly awe-inspiring, disappearing fully underground into their own concrete bunker when not in use.
In case anyone thinks these are just scaled-down stadium screens, be assured they are proper TVs. Stadium displays typically have a “pixel pitch” of 6 to 10 millimeters, meaning each of the pixels is well separated from each other. C Seed screens contain millions of far-smaller pixels that are microscopic distances apart.
The Unistellar Odyssey Pro Telescope
A telescope you might actually use, because it does the hard part for you
We would guess that there are an awful lot of unused telescopes in basements and storage units around the world. Your columnist has tried astronomy many times since about age 11 and has never quite been taken by it.
Beyond the thrill of seeing the moon up close, which always delivers, getting even a glimpse of red from Mars or a hint of Saturn’s rings seems to require so much skill, knowledge, and luck as to be unattainable by anyone other than a professional astronomer or a lucky dilettante.
The French digital telescope–maker Unistellar wants to make astronomy accessible to more. As one of their founders, Laurent Marfisi, tells AIR MAIL, “These are instruments that allow people curious about the stars but with no expertise to live the emotional, aesthetic, philosophical journey that astronomy is.”
Accordingly, Unistellar’s telescopes are equally suited for planets and deep-sky targets. They point themselves at whatever heavenly bodies you select on an app, transmitting the images they gather using Nikon optics to your nearby smartphone or tablet, so you can even leave your telescope outside in the cold while you stargaze wirelessly from indoors. Their software corrects for the visual interference of urban light pollution.
Still, their $4,899 eVscope 2, which we featured last summer, is not quite as plug-and-play as it could be. Perhaps realizing this, the Marseilles-based company has produced a new, substantially cheaper model, the Unistellar Odyssey Pro, at around half the size and weight.
After a couple of weeks with the Odyssey Pro, we would say it’s mission almost accomplished. But still not quite. Astronomy is damned hard, and Unistellar’s telescope is very good—it’s a huge accomplishment to make a telescope that can render images from something as bright as the moon and faint stars alike. The updated app does indeed act, in Marfisi’s words, as “a celestial co-pilot that will tell you what’s most interesting to view.”
Yet even now, many users will find it a slog to get images as colorful and clear as those on Unistellar’s Web site. You still need, really, a darker sky than can be found in a city or suburb. You still need to wait for the right weather. And you need a considerable amount of patience. Even waiting for the Odyssey to lock on to a selected target takes longer than you’d think. And if you’re freezing in a field on a clear winter night, that seems longer still.
The Odyssey is a magnificent machine, but we have a feeling many will still end up in closets and garages. So we recommend taking advantage of Unistellar’s 30-day money-back guarantee. Order when you know you’ll have time to play. Hope you’ll be fortunate with the weather. And stick with it if the first results you get are so-so. They will improve, and you may get to live the emotional, aesthetic, philosophical journey that astronomy is.
Google Hum to Search
Find the source of that nagging song you can’t stop humming
Your correspondent is regularly told that he hums unidentifiable tunes much of the time. While often not conscious of this, I have sufficient self-awareness to question the earworms as they burrow through my cerebellum. Often, it’s a tune I don’t even know I know.
Fortunately, Google unveils new miracles on a regular basis, typically without drawing much attention to them. One that was launched a few years ago but that we’ve just learned of is humming into Google search.
You want to know what that annoying song you can’t keep out of your head is? Then open the Google app on your phone. Touch “Identify Song.” Then hum, whistle, or sing. Even going “dum di dum dee dum” can work.
The latter can be the best. The “humming into search” feature identified one of the most dee-dum-able tunes of all time, the theme to the 60s TV show Bonanza, in seconds. Humming the grand finale to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture worked well. As did whistling the Beatles’ “She Loves You.” And singing “Light My Fire” while fudging on lyrics I couldn’t quite remember.
Surely one of technology’s greatest triumphs.
Bowers & Wilkins PX7 S2e Headphones
Over-ear headphones that look good enough to put you off getting earbuds
You would think over-ear headphones are kind of … er, over, given that there are so many superb, and less ridiculous-looking, in-ear models. Yet the number of people who still wear them might surprise you.
Granted, a sound system clamped onto the skull can sound marvelous and be less physically taxing on the ear canals.
Anyway, if over-ears are your thing, look no further than this fabulous and almost stylish model from the upscale English makers Bowers & Wilkins.
Their PX7 S2e headphones—snappy name, chaps—sound gorgeous, connect easily via Bluetooth, and look handsome, especially in their adventurous new color, forest green.
They are light, comfortable, and have enough battery life to last on the longest of long-haul flights. And did we mention that unlike on a subway train, over-ears are aesthetically acceptable on a flight, even when moving around the plane?
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer for the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology