Hot on the heels of the first, and almost universally lame, generation of Blu-ray players, here's generation II. In the case of two of these players, the big news is a substantial reduction in price. Both are less than half of their predecessors. In the case of the other, the news is its fancy HQV processing, the same that's found in the excellent Toshiba HD-XA2. I have to admit, I get a certain amount of perverse amusement mentioning HD DVD in a Blu-ray review (and vice-versa).

Sony insists that I pronounce this TV's name correctly: Wega (Vay-guh). I think Wegg-ah is so much more amusing. Perhaps Wee-ga. If only Sony had gone all out and put an "e" at the end of Grand. I can hear the annoyance of salespeople everywhere as customers come in looking for one of them thar Grand-ee Wee-gas. It's too bad that the rest of the model nomenclature is hard to poke fun at. After all, how funny is KF-50XBR800? KF-50Exburrerr… never mind. Names aside, the TV itself is very hard to make fun of. Mostly.

Take a minute to look at the measurement box. Keep in mind that this is an LCD-based product. At 0.003 foot-lamberts, the VPL-HS51 is only 0.001 ft-L higher than the Yamaha DLP projector that's also in this issue. Not bad for a projector that's less than a third of the Yamaha's price. And did I mention it's an LCD? Impressive.