Finally announcing their first slate of titles, Disney puts forward some so-so movies. Disney’s Buena Vista Home Entertainment announced nine titles, with four due on September 19th and another five due on October 17th.

The first batch of titles are Dinosaur*, Eight Below*, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and The Great Raid. The second batch are Glory Road*, Haunted Mansion*, Gone In Sixty Seconds*, Dark Water, and The Brothers’ Grimm. Do these movies strike anyone else as, oh I dunno, boring? I can’t say that I’d like to own (or rent/rent again) any one of those movies. Come on Disney, let’s see some good stuff, like Pirates of the Caribbean!!!

But on a positive note, five of the nine discs will have exclusive content in HD. Those are the titles I marked with an asterix (*) above. The HD shorts will be call “Blu-Scapes”.

All titles will have an MSRP of $34.99.

First Disney Blu-ray Titles To Ship

CRT continues to hold the crown. CRT televisions still give the best picture quality, and that’s why my HDTV is a CRT set. Even with all the advancements manufacturers have been making with LCoS, LCD, DLP, and plasma, there’s still nothing that can out-do good old CRT when it comes to picture quality. Now Samsung has a new piece of technology that it’s bending to the picture quality purpose, and it might even make DLP give CRT a run for the money.

They’re using an array of LED lights as the light engine of a rear-projection DLP set instead of the regular UHP lamp with its required colour wheel (unless you’re going with a 3-chipper). An LED gives a better contrast ratio, better blacks, and more accurate colour. It also eliminates the rainbow effect. The postage-stamp sized LED array consists of 6 red LED’s, 6 blue LED’s, and 6 green LED’s.

Samsung has announced that it has started shipping its first 1080p DLP set with an LED light source to retailers. It is a 56″ rear-projection set with a resolution of 1920 x 1080, and its HDMI input does accept 1080p signals. Samsung’s HL-S5679W HDTV will list for $4,199. Quite expensive, I know, but I’m sure prices will come down.

Two other manufacturers getting into the LED game are NuVision, who say their product will ship by September, and Akai.

Samsung Ships LED DLP Set

Samsung has released theirBD player to the market, and for now it’s the sole standard-bearer for the BD format. Other players from Philips, Pioneer, Panasonic, and Sony are due to arrive in the fall. Mr. Norton from Ultimate AV took a look at Samsung’s offering, and gave it a good thrice-over.

As far as price goes, Mr. Norton does well to point out that Samsung’s not being unreasonable to ask $1000 for a new consumer electronics product. The first VCRs, DVD players, and CD players were more expensive, especially when you take inflation into account.

Something interesting that I haven’t seen reported elsewhere is the fact that the Samsung player will produce no output whatsoever on its component video outputs when a disc with ICT enabled is loaded into the player. This is contrary to the downconversion to 960 x 540 that is supposed to be standard.

Mr. Norton is quite thorough in the evaluation of this player’s features, so if you’re looking into buying this player, you have to read this review. I assume you’ll do that, so I’m just going to skip to the juicy stuff.

The juicy stuff being, of course, his thought on picture quality. And they go something like this. Picture quality on most movies he reviewed was okay - not as bad as many reports led him to believe, but not great either, often falling short of what HDTV is supposed to be. Then he hooked up a 1080p projector (versus the 720p one he’d been using) and the results improved across the board. But still nothing really spectacular. Well, except for Hitch on in 1080p. Which looked very good.

But the really juicy stuff came when he compared the Samsung player to a pre-release Pioneer player.

In every case, the Pioneer produced a more detailed image. The difference was not night and day, but it did make the difference between merely acceptable and superb high definition. While there were a few instances where I felt that the Pioneer might actually have been a little too sharp (it will take test patterns to determine if this was the case), overall it did not appear to be. Rather I was starting to see the same sort of resolution from Blu-ray on the Pioneer that I expect to see from a premium HD format, and which looked like it could, with top grade program material, equal what I’ve seen from HD DVD in image quality.

All in all, though, Mr. Norton was disappointed with with Blu-ray, which seems to the general consensus. Unfortunate for Sony and their fledgling Blu-ray format, things aren’t looking good for them right now.

Samsung BD-P1000 Blu-ray Disc Player

Some more HD trailers from Apple for ya. First up is The Prestige:

From acclaimed filmmaker Christopher Nolan (“Memento,” “Batman Begins”), comes a mysterious story of two magicians whose intense rivalry leads them on a life-long battle for supremacy full of obsession, deceit and jealousy with dangerous and deadly consequences.

The Prestige

Takes place in Madrid and its lively working-class neighbourhoods, where the immigrants from the various Spanish provinces share dreams, lives and fortune with a multitude of ethnic groups and other races. At the heart of this social framework, three generations of women survive wind, fire and even death, thanks to goodness, audacity and a limitless vitality.

Volver

A playful romantic fantasy set inside the topsy-turvy brain of Stephane Miroux (Gael Garcia Bernal) an eccentric young man whose dreams constantly invade his waking life.

The Science of Sleep

Digital Home Canada has a nice little article about how to choose an HDTV of the appropriate screen size. They factor in things like the size of your room, where you’re going to place your HDTV, how much space you have in that place, and how far you’ll be sitting away.

I gotta be honest here - I didn’t really consider any of those things when I bought my HDTV. It’s a rear-projection HDTV that takes up a lot of space, which is made worse by the fact that I can’t push it against the wall because there are some shelves in the way that I don’t want to remove. (If only they were a foot shorter!)

When I went shopping for an HDTV, I considered things like technology (was it DLP, LCD, CRT, etc) and features (did it have an DVI/HDCP port, PIP, enough inputs, etc) and picture quality. Then I took a look at the price to see if it was within budget. Then I made sure I got the biggest dang HDTV I could afford that met all my requirements.

So I ended up with the 57″ Hitachi 57T500 CRT rear-projection HDTV. It’s a great set and I’ve been enjoying movies, games, and television ever since. I’ve never thought that it was too big or too small. I never thought that I’m sitting too close or too far. I never thought about how it fit the room. (Though personally I think it looks great.) So for me it’s been a pretty good experience buying my HDTV on a wing and a prayer, so to speak.

How did you decide what size HDTV to get?

Choosing the right size of HDTV

It’s amazing how the prices of HDTV displays, and LCD and plasma displays especially, have come down over the past couple years. But things aren’t dropping as fast as they used to.

For example, in the fourth quarter of 2004, the average 42-inch high-definition plasma TV cost $4,446, according to another research outlet, DisplaySearch. By fourth quarter 2005, that average price had dropped to $2,611, a 41.3 percent decline.

From the end of 2005 to the end of 2006, the average price of a 42-inch HD plasma display is expected to dip 22.9 percent, to $2,014. In dollar terms, a plasma TV shopper at the end of 2004 would have saved $1,835 by waiting one more year.

The conclusion in all this? It’s not that technology continues to mature and get less expensive as time progresses. Nope. It’s that if you bought a plasma in 2004, you should be kicking yourself now.

Price drop in HDTV sets is nearing bottom

I know it’s been a couple weeks since the HDMI 1.3 spec was released, but here’s the image of the regular HDMI connector along with the new mini-HDMI connector. I don’t think there’s any functional difference between the two, so I wonder why manufacturers don’t start using it exclusively.

HDMI’s mini-plug looks like this

If you plan to purchase an HD DVD player, a BD player, or a PS3, this HDTV might be of particular interest to you. It’s a 1080p display (using wobulation technology) that has 1080p inputs. Actually it has four. Two HDMI and two Firewire inputs. The WD-57731 DLP HDTV is in Mitsubishi’s 2007 lineup, and Ultimate AV takes a look.

There are some problems with the scaling ability of this set, but the reviewer seems to think that many of us won’t notice and therefore wouldn’t need an external scaler. On the other hand, the set does a lot of things right, and the image quality is quite compelling.

Ultimately, there’s more to this set than I mentioned here, and the reviewer ended up quite enjoying the picture quality of this set. Check out the full review for details.

Mitsubishi WD-57731 DLP Rear Projection TV

The Mitsubishi HC3000 has been on the market for about half a year, but Art Feierman over at ProjectorReviews.com decided to give it the once-over anyway. In the process, he discovered a projector that he really likes. The HC3000 is a Darkchip2 DLP projector with a 1280 x 768 resolution. For an MSRP of $2995, you get a Darkchip2 DLP, 1000 lumens of brightness, a 4000:1 contrast ratio, but no lens shift.

How’s the image quality? Mr. Feierman tweeked the settings of the projector a little bit, which resulted in a nice improvement in image quality. Hmmm… let’s see. What words did he use? Oh yeah! “Truly excellent”. Part of that comes from the fact that the dark levels on this projector are so good for a Darkchip2 device.

Mr. Feierman has done a lot of detailed projector reviews, so if he likes something, I think it’s a good idea to at least take a look for yourself. But first you might want to check out his full review.

Mitsubishi HC3000 Projector Review

First Toshiba delays HD DVD a couple times. Then Sony et al delay BD a couple times. Now it’s Toshiba’s turn again - they’re delaying the launch of their HD DVD recorder. The recorder will sell for about $3500 and will include a 1TB HDD.

Toshiba hasn’t been able to get all of the recorders components, so the prelaunch inventory isn’t as high as they would like. The delay, however, is a very small one - from July 14th to July27th. The machine’s model number is RD-A1, and there are no plans to ship the new machine outside of Japan (at the moment).

Toshiba delays HD DVD recorder launch

The last few days have seen murmurings about it, but Warner Brothers has finally said it loud. After nicely supporting HD DVD for several months, they are planting their feet firmly onto both sides of the fence now. They have announced four Blu-ray titles for August 1st. The titles are Good Night, and Good Luck (the only BD exclusive one), Training Day, Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, and Rumor Has it.

The four titles will feature a “seamless menu bar”, giving viewers the ability to enter menus without stopping the movie, hinting that it might make use of BD-J. The two dramas will have an MSRP of $28.99, while the comedies will go for $34.99. Who has the last laugh there?

Warner Home Video announces four Blu-ray titles for 1 August