c|net reviews the Mitsubishi WD-62628 DLP rear-projection HDTV. It gives the TV a 6.9 out of 10.

It’s a monster at 62″ diagonal. To feed that 62″ screen, the projector has a 1080p DLP engine. However, it’s one of those wobulation designs that use a 960 x 1080 grid of mirrors. The light from array of mirrors is shifted slightly to produce the missing 960 x 1080 set of pixels. Thus a 1920 x 1080 grid of light is born. I have to say I’m not sure I trust this technology, but it seems to give good results.

The set has two HDMI inputs and two Firewire inputs. That’s great expandability that I wish every HDTV had. The set also has great blacks, something DLP is better at than competing LCD, and LCOS technologies. However, the set exhibits bad color decoding, bad image resolution, and the HDMI inputs don’t accept 1080p.

[via HTDude]
c|net - Mitsubishi WD-62628 Review

I’ve mentioned it on PS3Blog several times. The Xbox 360 has no HDMI output. Or DVI output for that matter. And Firewire/iLink/IEEE1394 never even comes up. (It doesn’t have that either.)

Nope, the Xbox 360, which does all its internal processing digitally and creates a digital image to display, converts that image to analog for you. Then you can do whatever you want with it. Like convert it back to digital again.

What’s that? If you have a CRT, analog may not be so bad. A CRT is an inherently analog device. But what if you have a DLP, LCD, LCOS/SXRD/D-ILA, or plasma display? Those are all digital. Gosh, it would be nice if they could have a digital connection to the Xbox 360 for the highest possible quality of signal and gaming experience.

But no.

Cost, of course, is the culprit. Only 10% or so of homes have an HDTV, so why bother with a connection that less than 10% of homes can use? But still, it’s a shame. It Microsoft really believed that HD was the next thing, like they keep saying, they could at least give us the best means by which to display it.

audio|video Revolution - What is missing from the Xbox 360?

Rogers Cable Communications says that it now has 100,000 households subscribing to its HDTV service.

I think I’m customer 57,634 or something like that. Yup, living in the great white north means that Rogers is my cable provider. I don’t have a choice if I want cable - it’s Rogers or nothing. At least if I wanted satellite I’d have a choice of two: ExpressVu or StarChoice.

Anyway, being a Rogers customer isn’t so bad. Except that I don’t get Smallville in HD this season. And my SA8300HD PVR often doesn’t record shows that were supposed to record. Other than those rather glaring and annoying problems, I’m pretty happy. Though I hear TiVo is much better than Scientific Atlanta PVR’s, I can’t use a TiVo with my Rogers Digital service.

Anybody else out there have Rogers?

Light Reading - Rogers Touts HDTV Success

U-Tech will be making HD DVD and Blu-ray discs, with volume production scheduled for the first half of 2006.

U-Tech cooperates with the Opto-Electronics & Systems Laboratories under the government-sponsored Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) in developing HD-DVD pre-recording technology and has acquired related technology from the US, the company indicated. For the Blu-ray format, U-Tech will be technologically supported by its parent company Ritek, Taiwan’s second largest maker of blank optical discs, U-Tech noted.

It’s good to know we’ll actually be able to buy the things once drives come out!

DVD-Recordable.org - U-Tech Plan Blue Laser Discs

HDTVExpert has a review of the Sanyo PLV-Z4 which has received much praise from other sources. It has some great up-close pictures of the projector, and a good review.

Mr. Peter Putman thinks highly of it:

The PLV-Z4 is one of the best HD-resolution LCD projectors I’ve ever tested and a big step up from its predecessors. Color quality is improved - it’s as good as the Panasonic PT-AE700U — contrast levels are up, and grayscale tracking is getting better. The dynamic iris has a lot to do with it, but so do the expanded color controls. Dynamic irising is all the rage now; numerous LCD projectors and some LCD rear-projection TVs have incorporated it to kick out better black levels.

HDTVexpert - Sanyo PLV-Z4 Widescreen Lcd Projector

Packet Switched Press unboxed their Xbox 360, put it through its paces, and wrote all about it.

In particular, they mentioned a couple thing you might find interesting:

My Videos: All our personal Windows Media files streamed flawlessly, but the bigger things to point out are these two…

• DivX and Xvid did NOT play
• 720p High Def Windows Media video (Friday Night Lights and Robots, downloaded from WMVHD.com) DID PLAY, and looked spectacular. The close-up of the robot below is actually only a small part of the full picture. Trust us, it looked very good (at least progressive scan DVD quality, if not better). This was perhaps the most pleasant surprise of the entire evening.

They have plenty of screenshots, so check it out.

Packet Switched Press - REVIEW: XBOX 360, media-centric features

Taking a page from the politicians, the DVD Forum decided to try to make everyone happy and just made things worse in the process:

Re-recordable HD DVD discs will be branded ‘HD DVD-RW’, the DVD Forum confirmed at its most recent steering committe last week. But in a move which would seem to be calculated to win support from as many firms as possible, the Forum also said re-writeable discs will be branded ‘HD DVD-RAM’. They were originally supposed to be called ‘HD DVD-RW’.

Okay. So we have two formats where we had one. They’re really just the same underneath, right? Well…

The disc that was formerly called HD DVD-RW is largely founded on DVD-RAM, whereas the format that will now be known as HD DVD-RW is more basic and, we understand, more suitable for a dual-layer version.

Huh? Just pick a format, man! What’s up with this? At least Blu-ray makes it a little more clear: BD-ROM, BR-R, and BD-RE. No BD-RAM there, thank goodness.

The Register - DVD Forum approves twin rewriteable HD DVD formats

Optoma’s 50″ plasma HDTV has an MSRP of $3,749. For the dough you get 1366 x 768 pixels, which works out to about a third of a cent per pixel. Is it worth just over a third of a cent per pixel? Depends. It doesn’t have an HDMI input, just a DVI/HDCP one. While adequate, it’s not what we expect of a display these days. Things get better, though, so maybe that 1/3 cent isn’t wasted. The good news is that 1/3 cent per pixel is actually in the affordable range when you’re talking plasma.

The Optoma PD50A plasma television is, as we mentioned, quite possibly the least expensive 50-inch plasma display on the market (street price). For users with digital sources it’s almost a no-brainer, unless you’re a stickler for D65 color temperature and a perfect color profile. In that case, you’ll need to spend quite a bit more money to get this much television. For the rest, the Optoma represents a plasma display that is large, attractive and will be quite impressive to your friends. If it were priced higher my reservations would be greater, but for a street price under $2500 you can’t really go wrong.

Audioholics - Optoma PD50A Plasma TV Review

For the first time ever, the Grey Cup championship will be broadcast in high definition television.

Digital Home Canada - Grey Cup to air in HD on CBC

HD Beat is endeavouring to put together an HDTV Media Center PC for less than a thousand smacks.

The closest I ever came to a Media Center PC is my VAIO desktop with a tuner card and PVR software. I used it for a little while. I sent the audio and video over cables to my TV in the other room. There was no direct line of sight for my remote, so I set up something to bounce the signal off of. (The VAIO came with a remote.) It actually worked, though it was a bit of a pain to always aim the remote just so. Once Rogers offered their own PVR to us Canucks I switched an the experience has been much for the better. And thus ended my media center experiment.

But the next generation of consoles threatens to bring it back. Since I’ll be buying one anyway, if the PS3 can stream content from my PC I’ll have to start thinking media again. Although I guess the PC in this case would be more storage than media center.

HD Beat - HDTV Media Center for Under a Grand
HD Beat - Sub-grand WMCE 1: the base system
HD Beat - Sub-grand WMCE 2: more memory and better graphics
HD Beat - Sub-grand WMCE 3: add the HDTV tuner card

Apple has put up an HD trailer for the movie Lady in the Water.

Cleveland Heep rescues a mysterious young woman and discovers she is actually a narf, a character from a bedtime story who is trying to make the treacherous journey from our world back to hers. As Cleveland falls in love with the woman, he works together with the tenants to protect his new fragile friend from the deadly creatures that are determined to prevent her from returning home.

The trailer contains lots of banding, and tells you almost nothing at all about the movie! But it is by M. Night Shyamalan.

Apple - Lady In The Water

If you only want to record 16 minutes of video, you have several options available to you. 1080/24p (over 60i) for example. Or 1080/30p (over 60i). Then there’s always the good old 1080/60i. All recorded using DVCPRO HD on a P2 card.

What’s this?

It’s info about the Panasonic HVX200 camcorder from the Japanese website.

According to the Panasonic Japan website on the HVX200:

-1080 line, progressive CCDs - this is different from what I assumed by a longshot, I’ve been assuming they’d use 720p imager and uprez so as not to numerically upstage their much more expensive Varicam $65,000 720p camera (even though Varicam has beeter glass, pro outputs, etc.).

-720 and 480 res footage will be downsampled from this larger imager - Graeme, thoughts on contrast and detail in that context?

-Analog to Digital signal processor (A/D DSP) is 14 bits with an internal precision of 19 bit

-variable frame rates (for fast/slow motion through over/under cranking) is only available in 720p (but could you use built in downconversion to copy over FireWire as DV downconvert or somesuch?) adjustable in 11 steps from 12 to 60 fps (drat, hoping for slower, but can do that in post I suppose)

-Variable frame rate has to be recorded to P2 or external disk

-Yeah, HD can be downsampled from P2 to internal DV cassette (nice!)

HD For Indies - Latest Info on the HVX200