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.
If you remember this post you’ll recall the flood our studio suffered 6 months ago. Well, it happened again. So forgive me if I don’t post for a while. In the mean time, please go Vote and post some pictures in the Galleries. Do check back later in the week though, as I’ll be posting a first look at Toshiba’s HD DVD player.
One of the several local electronics stores within throwing distance from our studio is a chain called Fry's Electronics. It is a nerd's heaven, a kind of Best Buy, CompUSA, and a local computer repair shop all thrown in a Cuisinart. Every week, the much-heralded Fry's ad announces what loss leaders they will have on sale that week. This could be a $99 computer, a $20 hard drive, a $1,000 plasma, or really anything that they have only two of that they can sell quick and use to sucker people into coming to the store. Their regular sales can be pretty good, too. For example, this home-theater-in-a-box, complete with a subwoofer and a progressive-scan DVD player, was only $60. They also had an interlace-only model for $47, but I mean come on, this is a home-theater-in-a-box we're talking about here. Lets not be cheap.
We are proud to announce the second new feature this month: Reader Galleries. Here you can post pictures of your theater, comment on other peoples, and more. Thanks to the people who posted over the weekend so we had a few theaters up there already. Go check it out!.
The results of our first vote are in, go check it out. While you’re there, vote on the next question of the week. Also, check back on Monday, we’ve got new site feature to unveil, and it’s really cool.
Every once in a while, a new technology pops up that is so cool and so different that it has to create its own market. Sharp's sexy-sounding two-way viewing-angle LCD technology is just such a thing. It allows for diverse and unique uses that were previously not possible—or at least difficult.
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.
Forget these teeny-tiny 1080p TVs. It's time for high rez on a big screen.
I've been saying it since the first 1080p displays hit the market: There's no need for 1080p on a screen smaller than 65 inches. Your eye just can't resolve that kind of detail at the distance just about everyone sits from their TV. Resoundingly, no one cared. Where that level of detail is really useful is with projection. With a screen of 90 or 100 inches, you can use every bit of detail you can get. Texas Instruments was pretty candid about not needing to rush in to a 1080p front projector chip. After all, where was the competition? At CEDIA 2005, Sony forced their hand. OK, I honestly don't know if Sony's announcement had anything to do with TI's timeline, but I found it interesting that, at CEDIA, there were no 1080p DLP front projectors, and, at CES three months later, there were a half dozen. Sony's bombshell was their announcement of the VPL-VW100 LCOS 1080p front projector. At $10,000, it's a full $2,000 to $3,000 less than the 720p DLPs. Projector sales are 90 percent numbers, and 1080p is a big one.
Ok, I lied in my last post because I didn’t think this would happen this week. But it did, and it’s cool. I am proud to announce a new feature to HomeTheaterMag.com: Voting! No, you can’t vote your favorite editor off the island, but every Friday we’ll have a different question for you to sound off on (“off on,” that sounds weird). So go check it out, and vote away. Next Friday, I’ll post the results, along with a bunch of your comments and a new question. So make sure you write interesting and funny comments along with your vote.