Seems SED must be having some troubles. Toshiba has sent a sob story that they won’t have any at CES 2007. This doesn’t bode well. Could be because of all the LCD and Plasma prices crashing over the holiday maybe SED can’t be a competitor in this arena.
SED, we hardly knew ye!
Hello everyone! It’s been a lot of fun doing HDBlog this year, thank-you for reading. It’s Christmas time, and I’ll be taking about two weeks off from HDBlog.net for the holidays. So come back around January 5th or so, and you’ll see regular updates again!
Merry Christmas everyone, and have a happy new year!
One of my favourite shows to watch in HD is “Day Break”. It’s Groundhog Day with cops and bad guys, basically. And it’s a really really good show. I am majorly ticked that rating were so low that ABC decided to shelve it. Episodes were supposed to run until the end of December before going on hiatus, but now that’s changed. ABC plans to air the remaining produced shows on its website. Which just sucks. There are only a few good shows that I watch, like Prison Break, Heros, The Unit, and Day Break. Day Break was fast becoming my favourite show, too, and now it’s gone! Ga! It’s like Firefly all over again! Noooooooo!
Adam Baldwin - “Day Break” Tv Series is off ABC schedule
PS And no, I didn’t like Day Break just because Adam Baldwin from Firefly was in it. Though that was a nice bonus.
Digital TV Design Line has an in-depth article about laser light sources in projection TV’s. Like the one Mitsubishi will be introducing. If you’re interested in the technology, you might like to read it.
Why do we care about laser light sources? Well, they have a wider colour gamut, for one. Plus they’re brighter than traditional light sources as well, and will perform evenly over their lifetimes, instead of getting dimmer or changing their colour characteristics. Plus rear-projection displays will be able to be made much thinner than traditional ones, thanks to their “narrow composite beam angle”.
Exciting times indeed. I can’t wait see these HDTV’s.
I haven’t seen many reviews of the Philips BD player, which is weird. There have been tons on the Samsung player, of course, because it was the first. But the Panasonic and Philips were up next, and I’ve seen some mention of the Panasonic, but not much about the Philips. I guess CNET was reading my mind, because they recently took a gander at the Philips and gave it a 6.3 out of 10, or “Good”.
Basically, the Philips gets knocks for not doing what all the other BD players don’t do. It doesn’t decode TrueHD or DTS HD Master soundtracks. Plus, it’s expensive compared to the PS3 - the Philips goes for an MSRP of $1000, while you can get a PS3 with HDMI 1.3 for $500.
Other than some audio issues, the Philips is an excellent player. The picture quality is very good. It also has a good remote, and good DVD upconversion. So you can’t really go too wrong with this player. Except, well, the PS3 does the same for much less.
John Bitove has applied for a license to create an HDTV network in Canada. His HDTV Networks Inc. wants to create an HDTV network in eight markets: Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax. Thankfully, my city is in that list.
John wants to show Canadian, original Canadian, and foreign content on his network. All you need in one of those network areas is the ability to receive HD programming. I assume this means over-the-air.
So I have to wonder, will I finally be getting Smallville in HD?
Blue laser diodes, those little things that go in HD DVD and BD players, have been in short supply. So much so that Sony had to scale back the launch of the PS3 because they didn’t have enough blue laser diodes to go around.
There have only been two suppliers of blue laser diodes up until now, but that’s changing. Sharp is getting into the business too.
Sharp started mass-producing the diodes this month, at a rate of 150,000 per month. I have to wonder if any of those Sharp diodes will make their way into PS3’s …
First PS3, XBox HD DVD Add-On Sales Numbers The PS3 has supposedly sold about 197,000 units in North America at launch. And Microsoft has sold about 42,000 HD DVD add-ons for the Xbox 360.
“D-ILA” stands for Digital Image Light Amplification. I think… Well, I’m pretty sure the “D” is for “Digital”, at any rate. But the important thing you have to know is that D-ILA is JVC’a LCoS implementation, just like SXRD is Sony’s. LCoS is a good technology base upon which to build televisions, and Sony and JVC have been doing so now for a number of years.
Now JVC is coming out with some super-slim rear-projection televisions based on D-ILA technology, with full 1080p resolution. “The Slim HD-ILA series will include the 58W-inch HD-58S998 ($3,299.95 estimated selling price) and 65W-inch HD-65S998 ($4,199.95), with cabinet depths of 10.7 and 11.6 inches, respectively.”
So they’re not even a foot deep. For all you folks out there who were going to stand-mount your plasma or LCD anyway, this is a great, cheaper, alternative. (You can’t get a 65″ 1080p LCD or plasma for anywhere near $4k.)
The 58″ set is due to arrive in January, while the 65″ set will follow in March.
JVC also introduced a D-ILA projector, the DLA-HD1 (shipping in February at $6,299.95). It has a contrast ratio of 15,000:1, a 2x zoom lens (yay!), and both horizontal and vertical lens shift. It’ll be interesting to see how this piece of kit stacks up to Sony’s $5k VPL-VW50.
Blu-ray shot out of the gate like a dead rat. The Samsung player had a problem which made the picture quality well, not so good. Then came the Panasonic and Philips players which were decent, but were a bit high priced, like the Samsung. And the Sony BDP-S1 is too. Actually, the Sony PS3 is the only decently priced BD player out there.
So how does the new Pioneer player fit into all of this? Ultimate AV’s Shane C. Buettner has been really busy recently, just having taken a look at the Sony Pearl and PS3. Now he does a short-take on the Pioneer Elite BDP-HD1.
The Pioneer is a lot like the Sony. Neither plays CD’s. Neither decodes TrueHD or DTS HD Master. But they both play Blu-ray Discs! But the Pioneer also streams media from a PC connected to your home LAN, because the Pioneer has a network port.
So what’s the Pioneer advantage (besides the LAN thing)? The picture quality is fantastic, even on VC1 discs. (I mention that only because they seem to be slightly softer on other BD players than the HD DVD players.) Mr. Buettner even thinks that the Pioneer is worth the $500 premium over the Sony. But at $1500, I find that’s a bit like splitting rat hairs. Once you get into that price range, you know you’re going high end. And what BD really needs now is some affordable players.
We’ve already seen Ultimate AV’s Sneak Peek at the Sony VPL-VW50 “Pearl” projector. They thought it was a very good projector, though other sources have said that it’s many good qualities are outweighed by the lack of detail.
This projector can take the 1080p/24 HD signal on the HDMI input and display it at 96Hz. That means that this projector would work great with any of the HD disc players that can output 1080p/24. (That list does not currently include the PS3, unfortunately.)
But of course, the thing that I was waiting for in this review is how sharp they found the projector. Strangely enough, they found it to be quite good. Fortunately, they also included an explanation! If you turn on the OverScan function, which would “hide the outlines of the picture”, the resolved resolution went way down. This option is on by default. Interesting, very interesting…
To sum up, the VPL-VW50 is an excellent excellent projector. You can’t go wrong buying this thing, just remember to turn off the OverScan feature.
Ultimate AV was my favourite print magazine before it went web-only. The PS3 is currently my favourite console, sitting gracefully on the top of my equipment rack. So I ws wanted to know what Ultimate AV thinks of the PS3 as a Blu-ray player, and now I know.
First off, Shane C. Buettner of Ultimate AV notes how gorgeous the PS3 is, and of course I have to agree. Though I thought it was stubbier-looking than I expected, even after seeing tons of pictures.
Note that the PS3 decodes TrueHD to digital PCM, if you wish. Not so with DTS HD Master, however. If you want that track in full glory, you’ll need to use the HDMI 1.3 connector to a receiver or pre/pro that supports DTS HD Master. And…. none of them currently do.
While we’re complaining, the PS3 also doesn’t put out 1080p/24. Not a biggy, but it would have been nice. Note also that the PS3 can’t convert 720p up to 1080i. Which would suck if you had a display that didn’t accept 720p. (Of which there aren’t that many out there.)
But how does the video quality look? In a word: excellent. The PS3 is a very good BD player, which is nice to hear. Because the PS2 was only a mediocre DVD player, so people were wondering if the PS3 would carry the tradition.
Mr. Buettner also points out that 25GB BD + MPEG2 does not equal BAD. That’s what a lot of people have been saying about MPEG2, and it’s simply not true. MPEG2 films can look excellent in 25GB of space, it just needs to be done properly.
All in all, the PS3 is an excellent BD player, and I have to agree with Mr. Buettner on that.
Because the PS3 (which I hope to get mine today) has HDMI 1.3 in it, the PS3 is positioned to be “the” blu-ray player for a while. Really with the 60GB model having WiFi and card readers, plus USB plugins, and the possibility of homegrown device drivers to support almost any hardware, the PS3 really could be positioned to be the media hub in your home theater.
I know it will be mine for the next few years.
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