I remember when I was nine years old, we got to go see Superman in the theater. When I was that young, going to a movie was a big thing, and it was cool that Superman was such a great movie. The next Superman movie was very good, but the rest weren’t that great.

Now comes Superman Returns. I had seen Batman Returns and it was a Batman movie that I actually liked (unlike all the others). To be honest, I liked Superman Returns but I thought it could have been a lot better. Ah well.

High-Def Digest is reporting that Superman Returns is coming to HD DVD and BD. It’s a 1080p/VC-1 transfer. The HD DVD gets a DD+ soundtrack, while the BD only gets DD.

In the “interesting news” department, the HD DVD will be a combo DVD and HD DVD disc, and will retail for a cool $39.95.

The BD version will be Warner Brothers’ first dual-layer 50GB release, which is cool. And the retail price is $34.95.

Superman Returns on November 28th.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s… ‘Superman Returns’ on Blu-ray, HD DVD

Lots of recent projectors have been getting high contrast ratios by using a dynamic iris. That means the iris changes size depending on what is displaying on the screen, putting out more or less light. This gives the projector a wider contrast ratio, meaning the difference between the darkest dark and the brightest white is greater. This improves the quality of the video in a way that is clearly visible.

Now JVC has created a projector with a 10,000:1 contrast ratio without an iris.

By revising lens and other optical designs, the company realized the high full on/off contrast ratio. JVC prepared a dark room assumed as a home theater room and emphasized its development’s higher picture quality and, in particular, improved “black reproduction” aimed at preventing black from showing gray, in comparison with the company’s current product inside the room.

JVC used 3 D-ILA chips at 1080p resolution in their prototype projector. But I’ve been thinking. If they can pull off a 10,000:1 contrast ratio without a dynamic iris, just imagine what they can do if they do use one?

JVC Demonstrates Projector Achieving 10,000:1 Contrast Ratio without Using Aperture

Look, there is all this talk out there that there isn’t going to be a combo player. There are rumors of contracts that state that they can’t make players for both formats. Yada-Yada-Yada

There WILL be a combo player and this format war won’t go down like betamax/VHS.

Why?

Unlike Betamax/VHS the two formats competing use the same standard disk, also 95% of the parts for each of these players can be identical. This format war is almost all done through software.

Now how will this play out? One of the formats will see the writing on the wall, my vote is it will be HD DVD, but who knows. What most likely will happen is that a couple of studios will back out of the format. Once that happens I think the HD DVD camp will amend their contract to allow a combo player. The other camp will see lots of $$$ through a combo player and not having a format war, and they will capitulate. This will be similar to the DVD-R+R-RW. Eventually, most DVD drives today can read all the formats and most consumers don’t know the difference between DVD-R and DVD+R.

So will this happen tomorrow? No. Lets take a walk. This year will have limited availability of players and software on both sides. Next year will be the big push with name brand players. 2008 will be the year of cheap players for both camps. By this time the market penetration will be felt and I think we may see the first combo drives in 2009, maybe CES 2010.

No go on combo Blu-ray, HD DVD player: LG — Electronics NEWS - about-electronics.eu

Internet has been down since Saturday. (Dang Rogers!) I’m typing this from work (tsk tsk).

Sorry about that.

I’ve always been a fan of The Fugitive. I like seeing someone outwit other people, especially when it’s Harrison Ford. Plus, it is one of the very first DVD movies I bought, so I watched the movie a lot, just taking in the great picture quality that DVD afforded at the time.

So I think it’s great that The Fugitive is coming to HD, and High-Def Digest did a review of The Fugitive on BD. (It’s already available on HD DVD.) How does the VC-1 transfer look? To sum up: it looks decent, but nothing to write home about. If you look at the HD DVD review of The Fugitive, similar comments were made about the picture quality.

Anyway, I already own this movie on DVD, so I don’t plan to re-buy it on BD unless they come out with a new version with even better picture quality. Well, maybe not even then. But I’ll certainly rent it so that I can enjoy Richard Kimble outsmarting the US Marshals in HD.

Blu-ray Review: The Fugitive

The new JVC DR-MV7S DVD/VHS combo player will apparently let you upconvert your previous VHS collection to 1080i or 720p. My question is this: why? VHS is like, what, 360 lines of resolution? Who still watches VHS tapes anyway? I actually packed away my VCR a little while ago because I never used it. (Though I had to lug it out again to tape F1 races for my cousin.)

Ah well. I figure that JVC wanted to make an upconverting DVD player with a VCR built in for all those legacy tapes. Since they were using the same video circuits, they figured hey, why not upconvert the VHS tapes as well?

Still strange.

JVC VCR Lets You Shine Shi… Uh, VHS

Panasonic has announced the world first Blu-ray Disc (BD) recorders that can play back regular BD Video (movie) discs. Why the proviso? Well, Sony’s actually been selling a non-compatible BD recorder for years in Japan. So Panasonic’s new BD recorders are something of a new breed. The new models are the Panasonic DIGA DMR-BW200 (with 500GB internal HDD) and the DMR-BR100 (200GB HDD). Both can record HD on BD-RE rewritable discs and dub from the built-in hard-disk drive (HDD) to BD discs. These devices support many formats, too. “The DMR-BW200 and DMR-BR100 support a variety of media including HDD, BD-RE, BD-R, DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-R DL and DVD-RW for recording, and HDD, BD-RE, BD-R, DVD-RAM, DVD-R, +R, DVD-R DL, +R DL, DVD-RW, +RW, DVD-Video, BD-Video, music CD, CD-R and CD-RW for playback.”

Bad news, though. They will be available November 15th in Japan. (No price was mentioned.)

Doh!

Panasonic DMR-BW200 and DMR-BR100 Blu-ray Disc Recorders Announced

I was browsing at my local Best Buy this evening, and lo and behold, what did I find? One Sony BWU-100A Blu-Ray Internal 8x burner! And for the low low price of $749. Actually, while I say that in jest, I find it to be not a terrible price considering: A) The Samsung BDP-1000 player in the next section over costs $1000 and can only play Blu-Ray discs, and B) That as a computer storage device capable of 50GB backups, that price compares quite favorably with tape drives that can cost thousands of dollars. I was very tempted to pick one up, but I remember picking up my first DVD burner for $349. A year later they cost $80, so I feel like I should learn my lesson. Still, it was tempting, and also very nice to see on the shelf.

DirecTV has been sued in a class action lawsuit over the picture quality of their HDTV package. As many of you know, in order to conserve bandwidth, DirecTV’s HD resolution has been down-rezed to 1440 or 1200 before it is recompressed and sent out to the satellite. The complaint argues that DirecTV violated their promise of “astonishing” picture quality when they began this practice in 2004. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Technically these resolutions are still considered HDTV, but the complaint deals with a pretty subjective judgment of whether the picture quality is as good as DirecTV promised when Mr. Cohen first subscribed in 2003.

Via TVPredictions.com

We’ve known for a while that Philips will be releasing a Blu-ray Disc (BD) player this year, along with other BD players from at least Samsung, Panasonic, Pioneer, and Sony. The BDP9000 player will have a suggested retail price of $999, like the currently available Samsung player.

What we haven’t known until now is the release date. Well, maybe! The press release linked below says that the Philips BD player will be “available in third quarter”. Hmmm… Third quarter? That’s July, August, September. So the third quarter is actually almost over! Does that mean we’ll be seeing the Philips player on the market soon?

Philips Offers Consumers Its Blu-ray Disc Player For Ultimate HD Home Entertainment

At the CEDIA expo, lots of 1080p projectors were shown off. For a review, check out this CEDIA 1080p projector page at Projector Reviews. One 1080p projector fighting it out with some of the new ones from Panasonic and Sony is the Optoma HD81. Ultimate AV has recently reviewed Optoma’s HD81 1080p DLP projector. This projector has a retail price of seven grand, and comes with an outboard video processor.

The projector has a manual focus and manual zoom, but no lens shift. That makes placing the projector a bit hard, which I find odd for a $7000 projector. The projector reviewed was actually a pre-production unit, so maybe some of the problems encountered by Mr. Norton will have been fixed in the production run. See the articles for full details, but he had problems like the on-screen menu freezing up, strange video settings, and more.

The projector had some good picture quality points going for it, with great optics. But the auto iris mode seemed to have problems as well. Even with all the problems however, Mr. Norton found that the picture quality was the best of all Optoma projectors he’s seen.

Optoma HD81 1080p DLP Projector