I’ve heard it from two sources now, and apparently the “never to be seen again” original versions of the Star Wars Trilogy, will be coming out on DVD. Looks they may be out as soon as September. How cool is that? Finally, the real versions of these classic movies. Too bad George ruined them forever with the crap he’s put out since. Bring on Yub Nub!
Panasonic was in town showing off some of their newest goodies. I was lured out of the HT Lab/Batcave with the promise of pie and punch. There was neither. They did have a cool demo of what they call HDAVI. This allows you, if you have all Panasonic gear with HDAVI hooked up with HDMI, to turn on all your components (DVD player, receiver, plasma), switch to the right inputs, and start a movie, just by pressing one button. Sounds cool eh? What would be really great is that if all consumer electronics companies adopted the same standard so that this would work with every component. Come on, a boy can dream can’t he?
One other thing that I want to talk about in this space is HD TV shows. While I won't force anyone to watch some of the movies I watch, I do however know good TV. One of the most distressing aspects of television watching is falling in love with a show, only to have it cancelled by an incompetent network (Firefly) or lack of viewers (tons of shows). So occasionally I'm going to put up a few shows that you should check out, if you haven't already. With few exceptions, they'll be HD, or at least widescreen. Trust me, if I'm watching them, they're worth watching.
I hope you all will join us, if you’re in LA, for the Home Entertainment Show 2006. It’s at the Sheraton Gateway next to scenic LAX. If you want to see me make a fool of myself, I’ll be leading a panel discussion on Saturday at 2:00.
HES2006 is over, but here are a bunch of shots from the show. I met a bunch of great people, and despite the labor Contributor John Higgins and I put into the show (with the HTGamer Gaming Pavilion), I can’t wait for next year. Check out the shots in our Galleries.
Hitachi has a line of products in Japan called WOOO. You read that right. The WOOO line of DVD Recorders with hard drives is about a stylish product I’ve seen. It looks like a BMW M1. The shot here is the version with a Blu-ray drive. I doubt we’ll see either here.
If you read the post below, it is obvious that I was in Germany, though I neglected to mention why. Every year, the IFA show takes place in Berlin. It is a truly gigantic trade show that encompasses a few dozen buildings. CES, every year in Vegas, probably has more booths. But the average size of each booth at IFA is much larger. Some of them are entire buildings.
I guess I should welcome you all to my blog. Does anyone actually read these things? I guess I’ll find out. Being the Video Editor, I’ll take this space to babble on about all things video. Certainly hardware will take up a big chunk of blog space, but I’ll also talk about HD program material, video games, and anything else you can put up on a big screen. I’ll try to make this space as informative and fun to read as possible, but seeing as I have a hard enough time being interesting once a month in the magazine, doing it once a week should be. . . well, we shall see.
While the flood last week wasn’t nearly as bad as the one in October, we decided to do what we should have done that time: The carpets in our testing lab were ripped out, and the floor painted a lovely shade of gray. So the lab looks a whole lot better, and there isn’t the worry about mold and such. The downside, all the computers, test equipment, phone lines, Ethernet lines, and the myriad of other cables that connected gear to gear and gear to stuff, all still need to be run and plugged back in. The bottom picture is our temporary storage (as in, the listening room). Despite the mess, that was only half the amount of stuff in the lab. Spring cleaning indeed.
It's 61 miles from our Studio to the Huntington Beach Hyatt where Mitsubishi was holding their line show. It's all highway driving, which in most parts of the country would constitute a drive time of about an hour. Thanks to the fickle nature of L.A. traffic, it took 2.5. A colleague who lives near our studio left 10 min later than I did, and it took him 3 hours. Gotta love it.
This is the first of a three part series where I get to write about two of my favorite things that I never get to write about: audio and cars. As more and more audio companies get out of the house, we’ll see more and more of this cross-pollination.
I've gotten a number of really good questions on my last blog post about 1080i and 1080p. Instead of burying the answers at the end of the comments in the last blog, I figured I'd post them here and answer them. I edited them down for space and stuff (sorry).
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