The HD-DVD drive should do 1080i over component unless the disc uses the ICT, which no disc will for quite a few years probably. For information on what format it is on the disc, check out here: http://www.highdefdigest.com/. Most likely, if it's on HD-DVD, it's in 1080p using the VC-1 codec. The HD-DVD drive should either interlace that for 1080i or scale it for 720p, depending on your output preferences.
Due to the Image Constraint Token (ICT) your new HD player will not play your movies at full resolution. (Because the HDTVs sold to date mostly have component inputs, and no HDMI input)
Quick, name one player that uses ICT? Anyone? That's because the studios agreed to not use it for quite a while (2010 or 2011 I believe), and even then they still may not. If you were an early adopter with only component inputs, but then you'll probably have something new with HDMI inputs, but this isn't a valid reason since it's not being used.
I'd rather wait for the price to drop on 1080p players.
Few TV's can accept 1080p (though I bought one that can), and unless you have a very poor quality deinterlacer in your system, you can deinterlace that signal just as well as the player can. Currently BluRay sends you 1080p, but really they are feeding 1080i, then a seperate chip deinterlaces that to 1080p, just like your TV would, it's not a native signal. This might be more important for games in the future where you might have 60 distinct frames per second, but when the source is 24 fps, you can get the exact same image if your TV deinterlaces correctly (and most do).
While many of the HQV tests from Silicon Optix are useful (the 2:2 and 3:2 cadence, the jaggies), some of those other tests (6:4, 5:5, 2:2:3:2) are so rare they really are almost never going to apply to users. Just because the video cards can detect obscure cadence you will never use, doesn't mean they will work better for you in day-to-day use. Also, there is a good market for a $2,000 DVD player out there. If you've spent $3-10,000 on a projector, a ton on your sound system, and your DVD player is the source for all of this, you're going to see all the errors on the screen much better than on your 20" LCD, much like you'll hear if it has poor audio better with your high end sound system. If you watch most things on your 27" Sony TV, or your monitor, it's not going to make a bit of difference. If you have a 50"+ screen and can notice all the slight MPEG compression artifacts in HD broadcasts, you're going to want to squeeze out all the detail you can from DVD and other lower resolution sources.
To myself, who I'd consider to be a reasonably serious athlete, I prefer the food pods to GPS for a few reasons. They're typically smaller, but most importantly, they aren't automatically destroyed by large buildings or tree cover. Living in areas where I would run on trails surrounded by large trees, or in downtown with large buildings, I would constantly lose GPS signals and so my distance, pace, and maps of my runs would be way off in areas. The foot pods can be calibrated by you on a track to make them accurate to your stride, and are +/- 1% after doing that typically, which is better than my GPS was by far. Now they have downsides as well (elevation gain typically isn't measured), but they're better than losing signal for some of us.
There will be a 15 second limit online, and as you have to type the answer, that doesn't leave you much time to Google anything really. I tried out for the college version (which has a cut-off higher than the 35 limit of the regular one, but uses the same test, since they can only take 15 people a year) and made it to the final level of cuts, but didn't get in. I've been waiting since then to get a chance to try out again so I will be doing this online next week.
Since Comcast (and many other cable companies) are starting to rent out dual tuner, HD PVR's for $10 a month or so, which is less than the cost of a monthly TiVo fee, I don't see why people are going to hassle making a PC to do this. If my box gets outdated, the cable company gives me a new one. If it breaks, new one. If I'm someone that doesn't pay for cable then odds are I don't care enough about TV to want a TiVo anyway. This is what will wind up killing TiVo, not free computer PVR's. Sure, the software isn't as nice, but with all the other benefits (not to mention not needing an extra box), I'm going to stick with it.
Re:Where are the Editor's Choice CRTs??
on
CNET's HDTV World
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The value option comes in as the Sony XBR tubes have aroudn 50% more resolution than any other Direct View CRT out there, and are universally reviewed as the best CRT's ever developed. Sure, a RPTV CRT can be larger, but it has the problems of RPTV CRT (bad viewing angles, convergence issues, also very heavy), I think the value comes in terms versus plasma in the same size, which will have far less resolution, worse contrast, etc... If you want the single best picture of almost any set, buy the XBR. Of course, if you want the absolute best picture, try to track down a Sony Qualia 006 before they stop selling them.
The company saying this is Silicon Optics, who makes the Realta scaler chip (featured in the $3,500 Denon 5910 DVD player), and is obviously trying to get people to use their chip, or buy a scaler based on their chip. Now, from the reviews I've read of the 5910, it's the best reasonably priced (under $10k) scaler on the market. It's amazing. However, when they say "Almost all other companies throw away this extra data and do it the lazy way" without naming the companies, I believe them as much as I believe those recent Apple benchmarks.
I'm almost sure their scaler will help with most sources you feed your 720p HDTV, what it can do with 480i DVD's is impressive enough that you would believe that. However, I doubt the problem is as bad as they say it is. Also, 1080p DLP sets are going to start hitting the market soon, and in a couple of years 720p will probably have been pushed out of the market mostly. Given what a scaler costs, I'd probably save my money to get the 1080p set in a couple years since the 720p sets still look great.
I have a 1080i set, but I considered a 720p DLP set since they looked amazing and only didn't because of cost.
First, I recall him getting a BMW convertable back then, not a Porsche. Second, that article definately takes a stab at Anand when it talks about how one site came up with a way to benchmark when people are running multiple apps at once (which Anand did), but then attacks them for not benching games. Had the person read Anand's blog on the site to keep up with what he was working on, he could have seen that Anand lacked the time to get all the benchmarks done over the weekend, did the ones he thought most important, and the gaming results went up yesterday or today.
I think it was well assumed that games would show no advantage on standard benchmarks since they don't spawn multiple threads, and every site that ran conventional benchmarks showed that on Monday. Today, however, Anand has those results, and then also tests games with thinks like Norton Antivirus and MS Antispyware running in the background, which many of us do have running when we game. On those, the dual core showed better performance.
Anand is the one site I always trust, it's too bad the article didn't have the guts to come out and name who they thought was being bought.
I'm fairly sure next gen displays are down to the $1,000-4,000 range you stated. My HDTV, with integrated tuner and a stand thrown in, ran me $1,800 and looks amazing. You can get an HDTV for under $1,500 easily now, even a nice, big RPTV one, and LCD/DLP sets are all well below your $4k mark. Even plasma sets come in below that. HDTV over cable runs me an extra $5 a month, so your price range there is a little high. SACD also fails not because of price (you can get SACD playback in a DVD player for under $200 easily), but because lack of media support, and because most people frankly don't care, or have good enough equipment to care. I might, but I admit I'm in the minority.
- When someone calls my cell phone, I can his a button to mute the stereo, answer the call, and use my car stereo (with a mic in the car) for taking the call so it doesn't distract me while driving.
- When Apple finally releases an iPod with Bluetooth, or something similar, just drop it into my car anywhere and start playing tracks off it like it was plugged in.
Those are two quick, easy reasons that I'd want bluetooth in my car, and I'm sure there are more.
Movie Studios are very, very good at hiding profits. Most people that have earned it, get a percentage of the gross, as getting a percentage of net profits can wind up being nothing. Winston Groom, who wrote Forrest Gump, was promised 5% of the net profits, if I recall correctly, and wound up getting almost nothing since Fox said the picture made no money in theaters (despite taking in around $300 million in the USA alone). So, he might have won in court, but with some creative accounting, he might not make too much money in the end.
I'm sure there will be lots of people saying that for a pure digital cable, there's no reason to spend much money on it. The only problem is that DVI, at least for home theater use, has no error correction built in and if you use a cheap cable with poor shielding in an interference prone environment, you can get "sparkles" on the screen where a pixel gets set to the wrong color because of interference. Now, there's a good chance it won't happen for you, but since you can order good quality, shielded cables online (ramelectronics.net has good quality DVI to HDMI cables), for cheaper than Monster at the store, you should buy something decent.
Going from some of the other comments, people seem to think you have it pretty easy doing the comic now, and even if that is the case, I'm sure it wasn't at the start. However, you've almost always managed to have the strip up, on time, and with news to go with it. Many other comics (PVP, for example) are chronically late and in a real job, they would be fired. How hard is it to be on time, everytime with the comic? How many hours a week would you say the comic, running the web site, the associated events, and such takes? Is it more than a standard 40-hour job, as I imagine it could be?
I spent two years in the dorms and they were two years I'd never want to give up. I didn't want to spend a 3rd year there and I moved off campus, but nowhere you ever live will be like the dorms will. There's always someone around to do something with, you continually meet new and interesting people, and you will almost never, ever, ever have such close proximity to that many women your age again. Move off campus after you've lived in the dorms and met people, it's great to live off campus, but living in the dorms is an experience I'd never give up.
I mostly read Cook's Illustrated, Sports Illustrated, Time, Outside, and Stereophile. There's other things I'll read that are somewhat less common (The Believer), but Cook's Illustrated is the best thing I read. Small, but no ads, very good recipies that are easy to make if you can follow directions, and good reviews of ingredients and cookware. Also, my GF enjoys it when I cook things from it, and far more fun than just eating pasta all the time.
John in the Morning is the best radio program I've heard, and because of kexp's amazing streaming archive, you can listen to the show from earlier that morning, or even just skip ahead to the one song you wanted. Since they archive their playlists online as well, with the time the song was played, you can easily find it and give it a listen. If you find you don't like John's show, kexp has programs each week dedicated to almost any genre of music. Oh, and no commercials either!
If you're going to complain about people not reading the article, perhaps you should read it more carefully and notice that it takes place in Portland, OR and not Seattle.
Ah, that's fairly recent then. However, it still shows the reason that other manufacturers are holding off on DVI, since many consumers will take it home, it won't work, and they'll take it right back to the store without bothering to check for firmware updates.
Samsung, for instance, makes their 931 player which has DVI w/ HDCP output and can upconvert to either 720p or 1080i with the DVI output (but only 480p thru the component outputs). However, the main reason I think other manufacturers are holding back is because while HDCP is a standard, it doesn't seem to work perfectly yet. The Samsung 931 won't work correctly in 1080i mode with Sony or Toshiba HDTV's currently, though I believe it does work in 720p mode with the Samsung DLP sets.
The reasoning behind using DVI and upconversion is that many HDTV's will upconvert 480p to 1080i or 720p internally (this is most common on DLP, LCD, Plasma, LCOS and other non-CRT technologies). By converting it internally before the digital stream is converted to analog, you should get a better conversion, or in theory you can add an external scaler (say an iScan or anything from Faroudja) and output a digital 480p signal for it to scale instead of an analog one.
The Bravo D1 is the first, and currently has better quality than Samsung, but it won't be the last for long. Popular rumor has Denon coming out with a universal DVD player (DVD, DVD-A, SACD) with DVI output (with HDCP) by the end of the year, but if the HDCP compatibility issues keep up, I wouldn't be surprised to see it be delayed. Of course, HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) is what I can't wait for. One cable the size of a USB connector that can carry an HDTV signal and 8 channels of audio, so long cable mess!
Part of the problem is where the QuesTec system takes the image to determine if it's a strike or a ball. If the ball moves significantly in the last 2-3 feet near the plate, it can disagree with what the call acually should be, since it doesn't track it any longer. So, if you have a wicked curveball that barely catches the plate at the last minute, QuesTec and the Umpire could easily disagree, with the Umpire being correct in this case. Until they fix this, I understand the problems with it.
Now I'm amazingly happy that I both work at a research lab with massive tanks of liquid nitrogen in our lab, and that I have a birthday on Thursday. I know what we'll be making for the the cake!
That's called Photo Radar, and when I last lived in Portland, OR, it was legal there (I don't know if it has been challenged in court yet or not). Basically, the cops set up a machine at a place that people speed a lot, as you go by it tells you your speed, and if you were going way too fast, it also took your picture and then you get a ticket in the mail in under a week. No one is there to witness it, so it's basically the effect of something tracking you and automatically giving you a ticket.
This seems strangely familiar, hmmmm... I guess if you just got back from The Matrix Reloaded and have been waiting in line all day, you might not realize, so I'll let it go this time.
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The HD-DVD drive should do 1080i over component unless the disc uses the ICT, which no disc will for quite a few years probably. For information on what format it is on the disc, check out here: http://www.highdefdigest.com/. Most likely, if it's on HD-DVD, it's in 1080p using the VC-1 codec. The HD-DVD drive should either interlace that for 1080i or scale it for 720p, depending on your output preferences.
Due to the Image Constraint Token (ICT) your new HD player will not play your movies at full resolution. (Because the HDTVs sold to date mostly have component inputs, and no HDMI input)
Quick, name one player that uses ICT? Anyone? That's because the studios agreed to not use it for quite a while (2010 or 2011 I believe), and even then they still may not. If you were an early adopter with only component inputs, but then you'll probably have something new with HDMI inputs, but this isn't a valid reason since it's not being used.
I'd rather wait for the price to drop on 1080p players.
Few TV's can accept 1080p (though I bought one that can), and unless you have a very poor quality deinterlacer in your system, you can deinterlace that signal just as well as the player can. Currently BluRay sends you 1080p, but really they are feeding 1080i, then a seperate chip deinterlaces that to 1080p, just like your TV would, it's not a native signal. This might be more important for games in the future where you might have 60 distinct frames per second, but when the source is 24 fps, you can get the exact same image if your TV deinterlaces correctly (and most do).
While many of the HQV tests from Silicon Optix are useful (the 2:2 and 3:2 cadence, the jaggies), some of those other tests (6:4, 5:5, 2:2:3:2) are so rare they really are almost never going to apply to users. Just because the video cards can detect obscure cadence you will never use, doesn't mean they will work better for you in day-to-day use. Also, there is a good market for a $2,000 DVD player out there. If you've spent $3-10,000 on a projector, a ton on your sound system, and your DVD player is the source for all of this, you're going to see all the errors on the screen much better than on your 20" LCD, much like you'll hear if it has poor audio better with your high end sound system. If you watch most things on your 27" Sony TV, or your monitor, it's not going to make a bit of difference. If you have a 50"+ screen and can notice all the slight MPEG compression artifacts in HD broadcasts, you're going to want to squeeze out all the detail you can from DVD and other lower resolution sources.
To myself, who I'd consider to be a reasonably serious athlete, I prefer the food pods to GPS for a few reasons. They're typically smaller, but most importantly, they aren't automatically destroyed by large buildings or tree cover. Living in areas where I would run on trails surrounded by large trees, or in downtown with large buildings, I would constantly lose GPS signals and so my distance, pace, and maps of my runs would be way off in areas. The foot pods can be calibrated by you on a track to make them accurate to your stride, and are +/- 1% after doing that typically, which is better than my GPS was by far. Now they have downsides as well (elevation gain typically isn't measured), but they're better than losing signal for some of us.
There will be a 15 second limit online, and as you have to type the answer, that doesn't leave you much time to Google anything really. I tried out for the college version (which has a cut-off higher than the 35 limit of the regular one, but uses the same test, since they can only take 15 people a year) and made it to the final level of cuts, but didn't get in. I've been waiting since then to get a chance to try out again so I will be doing this online next week.
Since Comcast (and many other cable companies) are starting to rent out dual tuner, HD PVR's for $10 a month or so, which is less than the cost of a monthly TiVo fee, I don't see why people are going to hassle making a PC to do this. If my box gets outdated, the cable company gives me a new one. If it breaks, new one. If I'm someone that doesn't pay for cable then odds are I don't care enough about TV to want a TiVo anyway. This is what will wind up killing TiVo, not free computer PVR's. Sure, the software isn't as nice, but with all the other benefits (not to mention not needing an extra box), I'm going to stick with it.
The value option comes in as the Sony XBR tubes have aroudn 50% more resolution than any other Direct View CRT out there, and are universally reviewed as the best CRT's ever developed. Sure, a RPTV CRT can be larger, but it has the problems of RPTV CRT (bad viewing angles, convergence issues, also very heavy), I think the value comes in terms versus plasma in the same size, which will have far less resolution, worse contrast, etc... If you want the single best picture of almost any set, buy the XBR. Of course, if you want the absolute best picture, try to track down a Sony Qualia 006 before they stop selling them.
The company saying this is Silicon Optics, who makes the Realta scaler chip (featured in the $3,500 Denon 5910 DVD player), and is obviously trying to get people to use their chip, or buy a scaler based on their chip. Now, from the reviews I've read of the 5910, it's the best reasonably priced (under $10k) scaler on the market. It's amazing. However, when they say "Almost all other companies throw away this extra data and do it the lazy way" without naming the companies, I believe them as much as I believe those recent Apple benchmarks.
I'm almost sure their scaler will help with most sources you feed your 720p HDTV, what it can do with 480i DVD's is impressive enough that you would believe that. However, I doubt the problem is as bad as they say it is. Also, 1080p DLP sets are going to start hitting the market soon, and in a couple of years 720p will probably have been pushed out of the market mostly. Given what a scaler costs, I'd probably save my money to get the 1080p set in a couple years since the 720p sets still look great.
I have a 1080i set, but I considered a 720p DLP set since they looked amazing and only didn't because of cost.
I think it was well assumed that games would show no advantage on standard benchmarks since they don't spawn multiple threads, and every site that ran conventional benchmarks showed that on Monday. Today, however, Anand has those results, and then also tests games with thinks like Norton Antivirus and MS Antispyware running in the background, which many of us do have running when we game. On those, the dual core showed better performance.
Anand is the one site I always trust, it's too bad the article didn't have the guts to come out and name who they thought was being bought.
I'm fairly sure next gen displays are down to the $1,000-4,000 range you stated. My HDTV, with integrated tuner and a stand thrown in, ran me $1,800 and looks amazing. You can get an HDTV for under $1,500 easily now, even a nice, big RPTV one, and LCD/DLP sets are all well below your $4k mark. Even plasma sets come in below that. HDTV over cable runs me an extra $5 a month, so your price range there is a little high. SACD also fails not because of price (you can get SACD playback in a DVD player for under $200 easily), but because lack of media support, and because most people frankly don't care, or have good enough equipment to care. I might, but I admit I'm in the minority.
Reasons why I might want Bluetooth in my car:
- When someone calls my cell phone, I can his a button to mute the stereo, answer the call, and use my car stereo (with a mic in the car) for taking the call so it doesn't distract me while driving.
- When Apple finally releases an iPod with Bluetooth, or something similar, just drop it into my car anywhere and start playing tracks off it like it was plugged in.
Those are two quick, easy reasons that I'd want bluetooth in my car, and I'm sure there are more.
Movie Studios are very, very good at hiding profits. Most people that have earned it, get a percentage of the gross, as getting a percentage of net profits can wind up being nothing. Winston Groom, who wrote Forrest Gump, was promised 5% of the net profits, if I recall correctly, and wound up getting almost nothing since Fox said the picture made no money in theaters (despite taking in around $300 million in the USA alone). So, he might have won in court, but with some creative accounting, he might not make too much money in the end.
I'm sure there will be lots of people saying that for a pure digital cable, there's no reason to spend much money on it. The only problem is that DVI, at least for home theater use, has no error correction built in and if you use a cheap cable with poor shielding in an interference prone environment, you can get "sparkles" on the screen where a pixel gets set to the wrong color because of interference. Now, there's a good chance it won't happen for you, but since you can order good quality, shielded cables online (ramelectronics.net has good quality DVI to HDMI cables), for cheaper than Monster at the store, you should buy something decent.
How about they were just identical twins? They can sleep with the other sister and they'll never know the difference, at face value.
Going from some of the other comments, people seem to think you have it pretty easy doing the comic now, and even if that is the case, I'm sure it wasn't at the start. However, you've almost always managed to have the strip up, on time, and with news to go with it. Many other comics (PVP, for example) are chronically late and in a real job, they would be fired. How hard is it to be on time, everytime with the comic? How many hours a week would you say the comic, running the web site, the associated events, and such takes? Is it more than a standard 40-hour job, as I imagine it could be?
I spent two years in the dorms and they were two years I'd never want to give up. I didn't want to spend a 3rd year there and I moved off campus, but nowhere you ever live will be like the dorms will. There's always someone around to do something with, you continually meet new and interesting people, and you will almost never, ever, ever have such close proximity to that many women your age again. Move off campus after you've lived in the dorms and met people, it's great to live off campus, but living in the dorms is an experience I'd never give up.
I mostly read Cook's Illustrated, Sports Illustrated, Time, Outside, and Stereophile. There's other things I'll read that are somewhat less common (The Believer), but Cook's Illustrated is the best thing I read. Small, but no ads, very good recipies that are easy to make if you can follow directions, and good reviews of ingredients and cookware. Also, my GF enjoys it when I cook things from it, and far more fun than just eating pasta all the time.
John in the Morning is the best radio program I've heard, and because of kexp's amazing streaming archive, you can listen to the show from earlier that morning, or even just skip ahead to the one song you wanted. Since they archive their playlists online as well, with the time the song was played, you can easily find it and give it a listen. If you find you don't like John's show, kexp has programs each week dedicated to almost any genre of music. Oh, and no commercials either!
If you're going to complain about people not reading the article, perhaps you should read it more carefully and notice that it takes place in Portland, OR and not Seattle.
Ah, that's fairly recent then. However, it still shows the reason that other manufacturers are holding off on DVI, since many consumers will take it home, it won't work, and they'll take it right back to the store without bothering to check for firmware updates.
The reasoning behind using DVI and upconversion is that many HDTV's will upconvert 480p to 1080i or 720p internally (this is most common on DLP, LCD, Plasma, LCOS and other non-CRT technologies). By converting it internally before the digital stream is converted to analog, you should get a better conversion, or in theory you can add an external scaler (say an iScan or anything from Faroudja) and output a digital 480p signal for it to scale instead of an analog one.
The Bravo D1 is the first, and currently has better quality than Samsung, but it won't be the last for long. Popular rumor has Denon coming out with a universal DVD player (DVD, DVD-A, SACD) with DVI output (with HDCP) by the end of the year, but if the HDCP compatibility issues keep up, I wouldn't be surprised to see it be delayed. Of course, HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) is what I can't wait for. One cable the size of a USB connector that can carry an HDTV signal and 8 channels of audio, so long cable mess!
Part of the problem is where the QuesTec system takes the image to determine if it's a strike or a ball. If the ball moves significantly in the last 2-3 feet near the plate, it can disagree with what the call acually should be, since it doesn't track it any longer. So, if you have a wicked curveball that barely catches the plate at the last minute, QuesTec and the Umpire could easily disagree, with the Umpire being correct in this case. Until they fix this, I understand the problems with it.
Now I'm amazingly happy that I both work at a research lab with massive tanks of liquid nitrogen in our lab, and that I have a birthday on Thursday. I know what we'll be making for the the cake!
That's called Photo Radar, and when I last lived in Portland, OR, it was legal there (I don't know if it has been challenged in court yet or not). Basically, the cops set up a machine at a place that people speed a lot, as you go by it tells you your speed, and if you were going way too fast, it also took your picture and then you get a ticket in the mail in under a week. No one is there to witness it, so it's basically the effect of something tracking you and automatically giving you a ticket.
This seems strangely familiar, hmmmm... I guess if you just got back from The Matrix Reloaded and have been waiting in line all day, you might not realize, so I'll let it go this time.