News worthy of comment has been slow. So, here are some quick shots. Chime in if you have anything on any of these quick shots to the solar plexus.

$199 HD DVD Players- With the HD-A3 about to hit stores, Toshiba is clearing out the HD-A2 for just $199. Is this the magic price point, as some suggest? Or does the wild success of the iPod, iPhone, the Nintendo Wii (just to name a few) and other $250 and up CE devices mean that $199 isn't what it used to be?

x.v.Color- Awesome. I loved it when I heard this was coming. Another set of color standards for display manufacturers to completely ignore.

Lousy HD catalog releases- Are we already at the point at which Mobsters is worth putting on HD? Glad that one beat Citizen Kane to HD. Ok, I know one man's flop is another's cult hit, but damn, this movie isn't even a has been it's a never was.

(In related news, those who are looking forward to this can only hope that December's HD DVD release of Time Cop is just the beginning of a re-examination of the phenomenon that was Jean-Claude Van Damme. I treasure his entire catalog.)

HDMI 1.3- How glad are we that we waited for this? The jury's still out, but so far, we've got non-existent video features and audio features that are currently of dubious worth. Nothing like holding the industry hostage over, well, nothing much so far.

Fox and DTS-HD Master Audio- After a hiatus, Fox is back in Blu-ray. While the image quality is constistently spectacular, the only hi-res audio tracks on Fox Blu-ray Discs are encoded in DTS-HD MAster Audio. That might be be cool, except there are no players that can decode DTS-HD MA at full resolution. A few AVRs have shown up with onboard decoding, but so far there are only one or two players spec'd for bistream output. What the heck would be wrong with doing TrueHD for now and catching up with DTS-HD MA when there's actually hardware??

Season 2 of Heroes- Wow, how quickly the mighty fall. My wife and I got hooked on season 1 on HD DVD like we haven't been hooked by a TV show since Sopranos season 1. Like, "honey, can you watch one more" at 1am hooked. That was brilliant, especially for network TV. Season 2, not so much. Boring trips way backward in time, bigger plot holes, new forgettable characters, and powers that are well, a little too familiar. I hope this picks up soon.

Spider-Man 3- Proving the universal truth that the better the transfer is, the worse the movie. Spidey 3 is technically brilliant on Blu-ray. But on the movie, superhero flicks live and die with their villains. This has Topher Grace as Venom. Nuff said.

OK, not quite enough. There's enough of the emotional grounding and exhilirating Spideyness that made the first two Spider-Man movies so unique in the superhero pantheon to remind us of what this could have been. But Kirsten Dunst sings.