CoreHD

Sorry for the lack of posts. It’s been a busy couple of days.

A few issues I wanted to catch up with but first a statement: I’m against DRM. Any color of DRM, any flavor of DRM, and under any excuse. I also don’t really care what’s the industry’s latest justification to use it, or under what pretense anyone should accept it or support it.

Now for some news updates… we’ve got some good news and some bad news. We’ll start with the good.

Read the rest of this entry »

Early reports from the first owners of the brand-new 92U models (both 46 and 52-inch models so far) have posted initial evidence of existence of vertical banding on AVS. Looks like the banding plague started with the 62U line isn’t over… extremely disappointing news.

Come on, Sharp! For a unit that costs $1,700 more than the previous model this problem should have been gone by now.

More updates will follow as the story unravels.

If my post from earlier this week (HTPC: The Next Generation - Part I, the next part coming up very soon…) wasn’t enough to get you into checking out the HTPC arena, there’s some good news coming from Velocity Micro that you might find interesting.

Read the rest of this entry »

I swear I didn’t make up this silly name…

If you’ve been sitting on the fence waiting for the so-called “format war” to end before making your next purchase, you might need to wait just a little bit longer. While you’re waiting for a winner LG have (finally!) decided to make their move.

After several announcements and withdrawals, the company has started shipping the world’s first hybrid HD player in the US (LG’s press release). As expected from a cutting edge first generation unit, it’s still missing some fancy functionalists and has a pretty steep price tag ($1,200), but that didn’t stop the eager shoppers from cleaning out BestBuy’s virtual shelves in a matter of hours.

The guys at gadgetaholic got their hands on one of these and already posted their first impressions. Check out their review here.

Although your current home theater system might give you everything you wish for right now, and was doing just fine for the last couple of years playing DVDs, videos and your recorded TV shows, with new technologies just around the corner you probably started considering upgrading your system to the next level.

Read the rest of this entry »

RESPONSE TO REPORTS OF ATTACKS ON AACS TECHNOLOGY

January 24, 2007

AACS LA has confirmed that AACS Title Keys have appeared on public web sites without authorization. Such unauthorized disclosures indicate an attack on one or more players sold by AACS licensees. This development is limited to the compromise of specific implementations, and does not represent an attack on the AACS system itself, nor is it exclusive to any particular format. Instead it illustrates the need for all AACS licensees to follow the Compliance and Robustness Rules set forth in the AACS license agreements to help ensure that product implementations are not compromised. AACS LA employs both technical and legal measures to deal with attacks such as this one, and AACS LA is using all appropriate remedies at its disposal to address the attack.

Artwork: MPAA by ~Giboo on deviantART. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

If you’ve been sitting around waiting for LCD prices to drop some more, we’ve spotted a set for a pretty decent price: Newegg.com are offering the Westinghouse LVM-37W3 for $1,099 + free shipping.

The unit features 1920 x 1080 display to support a 1080p native resolution, 1000:1 contrast ratio, and 8ms response time. Nothing too fancy for this kind of price, but it does have a pretty decent upscaler for your non-1080p sources.

Note the unit doesn’t have a built-in tuner.

Due to popular demand and following some comments posted on the Sharp 2007 lineup post from last week, I’ve decided to shed some more light on one of the more interesting features of the upcoming HDMI 1.3 standard - “Deep Color™“. (damn… you can trademark anything these days )

But first - what is HDMI?

Read the rest of this entry »

With the AACS out of the way and the first unencrypted clones showing up across the web and on P2P networks, here are my own predictions of what coming up next…

Read the rest of this entry »

While the rivaling parties are still at it, and there’s no clear indication to who will be the emerging winner in the high definition optical media battle, behind the scenes things are getting warmer. It was just a matter of time, but it seems things just got a little bit more interesting in the Doom9 forums.

Read the rest of this entry »

OK, I know I’ve been bashing Sharp latest and greatest in my last post but I didn’t mean any harm. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a proud owner of a beautiful Sharp LCD myself and was eager to add another one (bigger, obviously) to my collection when the 62U were announced.

Well… with all that’s happened with 62U series I’ve decided to hold off until things clear up on the Sharp front… and now it seems they finally are.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret that the 62U series launched just a few months ago was intended to be an “XBR-killer”. With a promising spec and an attractive price tag, Sharp had everything (at least on paper) to take the lead in the 42-52″ 1080p LCD range, leaving its competition (especially Sony and Samsung) in the dust.

Well, guess what? … that didn’t happen.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, not like this was much of a surprise…

Following their October review (which they concluded stating this display to be “the best plasma TV around”), Sound & Vision Magazine, in association with Ultimate AV, presented Pioneer with the “Product of the Year” award for their exceptional 50″ Elite PRO-FHD1 plasma in last week’s CES.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ll be seeing some HD action coming from Netgear in Q1 2007…

Following their finalist spot on CNET’s Best of Show in Vegas last week, Netgear will start shipping their new streamer - the EVA8000 - in the next couple of months with an MSRP of $349.

Two questions still left open:

Read the rest of this entry »

Looks like the guys at AppleInsider popped the hood on the previously-announced iTV Apple TV, and things don’t looks that good…

Read the rest of this entry »

OK, this is my first post so bear with me… it might be long.

First - what’s the purpose of this site?

Basically, to set some order to the massive amount of information out there to do with HD, High Definition video & audio, home theater equipment, networking and streaming solutions, storage solutions and general geek gear, gadgets etc…

Read the rest of this entry »