Video: 4
Audio: 4
Extras: 3
After one of the best season-ending cliffhangers ever, Battlestar Galactica returns for a second season. Of course, calling 10 episodes a season is a bit of an overstatement. If you are a fan of sci-fi at all, you need to check out this show. It's one of the best-written shows on TV and is truly excellent television. Amazing everyone, the second season was even better than the first. Hyperbole? Not even close.
I've got four 1080p projectors in for testing for the June issue. Look for a bit of a preview in a few weeks. In the mean time, I figured I'd add some irrelevant off-topic filler.
Video: 3
Audio: 4
Extras: 3
Amazingly, the first time I saw this movie was just a few months ago. What can I say? I’m a Batman kind of guy. Superman is campier than many of the more serious comic-book adaptations of late, but, compared with other comic-book movies of the time (and for many years after), it’s downright somber. It holds up well and is still the quintessential Superman movie. Covering the last days of Krypton to the time when Superman saves Earth from a toupeed Gene Hackman, it’s quite a film. It’s not least recognizable for its excellent score, which earned John Williams one of his 4,383 Oscar nominations.
To test your display's performance, you'll need not only specialized test generators and measurement devices, but also actual video material. After all, just because a display measures well doesn't mean it's anything you want to look at. For that matter, there are no objective measurements for things like scaling and deinterlacing. For consistency, we try to use the same or similar test DVDs (and now HD DVDs) for our testing in each display review and in our video Face Offs. If you want to see how your TV stacks up—or you wonder what we're talking about every month—here are most of the test discs we use and why we use them.
Well, no one saw this coming. We’re not that far into the format war between HD DVD and Blu-ray, and LG has come out with the BH100, a player that plays both formats. So, is that it? Format war over? Hardly.
Sony had their line show on Tuesday. Continuing the sick joke from previous years, it was in Las wasn't-I-here-last-month Vegas. Instead of Caesars, it was at Paris.
Well, better late then never. Here’s my review of Pioneer’s PRO-FHD1 1080p plasma. It’s probably the best looking flat panel you can by, at least for right now. It’s also $8,000… Impressive none the less. Read about it here.
Tired of getting beaten up by LCD's marketing machine, Pioneer said, "Fine, here. . ." and released to the world the ultraexpensive but gorgeous PRO-FHD1 plasma. Sure, it's 8 grand, but it's 1080p and offers impressive performance across the board.
If you scoured all of the details on the recent HDMI 1.3 release (and who didn't?), you may have noticed the inclusion of xvYCC and Deep Color. These are two different things that together will theoretically make displays' color more realistic. The short version is this: Deep Color increases the available bit depth for each color component, while xvYCC expands the overall color gamut. Sure they do, but why?