I know how he feels. I too wanted HD-DVD, and not Blu-Ray, to win the format war. This must have come from England or Europe, where Woolworth’s stores still exist. Caution: Bad language alert!
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Category: Tech
New Tech, Old Tech
There’s Gizmodo, and there’s Engaget. They’re easy to confuse. Can both survive? Dunno, but my friend Tom has pointed out an item on Engaget about Ultra HDTV. I knew there was a good reason to not jump straight into 1080. Go to the link and see how pitiful the resolution of my 720p projector looks, compared to 33 megapixel video.
At the other end of the hi-tech spectrum is the lowly, long-lived vacuum tube. They’re still made, of course, for guitar amps and very expensive, esoteric hi-fi pre-amps and power amps. Here’s an amazing video of a triode tube being made the old-fashioned way, by hand. I’m embarrassed to admit that at the moment I can’t name the tune of the piano music, despite the fact it’s played multiple times in a chopped up repeating loop. Sounds like Gershwin.
Project: Projector
With disappointment I have abandoned the Sanus (that’s a lousy name for a company) shelf I was using for the Panasonic PT-AX200U video projector. A photo of the projector as it was is at this link. Click the small picture to enlarge and see how it now is, sitting on a Da-Lite projector stand. The Sanus TV shelf is a very good piece of inexpensive hardware that’s available at any Target store, but my mounting scheme didn’t hold up. It’s now going to be used to get the computer monitor off my desk, but this time it will be properly anchored with bolts to a wall stud.
The Panny 200U continues to amaze and delight. I’m especially pleased with being able to enlarge 4:3 material to fill up the screen, 80 inches diagonal. Looks super, man!
But what are the projector’s faults? It must have some. Yes, it does. As I said before, two of them are common in projectors using 3LCD technology.
- Color uniformity of bright white
- Panel alignment
When there’s a large area of bright white — the ice of a hockey game, for example — the left edge is a bit reddish and the right edge has a green tint. As far as the alignment goes, with three separate LCD panels it isn’t perfect. I wouldn’t expect it to be, especially in a projector in this price range, but it isn’t a problem, because you have to make an effort with test patterns or the on-screen menu to see where the convergence is off. Neither of these minor issues is a reason to complain. In my life I’ve gone from black and white TV and vinyl records, to Dolby Digital and HDTV. Every technology has its strengths and weaknesses, and no product is perfect. I think this projector is a great deal for the money.
A major factor in favor of the Panasonic PT-AX200U is that it’s free of the screen door effect that plagues LCD projectors, like the 1024×768 3LCD Hitachi units I see at the office. Unlike minor panel misalignments, the screen door effect is very obvious. Eliminating it results in the 200U having an image that looks very much like watching a movie, which is what I want. Some projector fans may think the picture looks a bit soft, but my guess is their idea of image sharpness is actually due to seeing the outlines of the pixels. These are perhaps the same people who feel Clear Type (sub-pixel) fonts in Windows XP look fuzzy.
But somebody at Panasonic must have been worried about potential complaints about softness, because somewhere in the video processor there seems to be some edge enhancement. I really dislike edge enhancement. It appears only selectively, so it isn’t a simple always-on thing, like the old Scanning Velocity Modulation circuit in regular TV’s. Some of the better TV sets let you disable SVM, and I sure wish the PT-AX200U had a way to turn off its edge enhancement circuit.
The Great Escape — Inside Tunnel Harry
Here’s something fascinating and cool that my sister Jean pointed out. It’s an interactive Flash animation from the NOVA TV show Web site, about the real-life Great Escape. I missed the program, which I can see was a mistake.
If Hillary Can Make A Comeback…
The big upset last week was Hillary getting whupped in Iowa by Barack. Well, New Hampshire has put Hillary back in the running!
Another big upset last week was Warner Bros. pictures abandoning Toshiba’s HD-DVD format in favor of Sony’s Blu-Ray. Yet last night, and again tonight, Toshiba advertised HD-DVD on The Colbert Report.
I don’t know if there’s any hope for my favored format (no, I don’t own an HD player), but at least there’s still some fight left in ’em at Toshiba! Or maybe they were just too depressed to remember to cancel this week’s ad campaign. 😉
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GOOD BAD AND LOUD
Dennis Rogers has pointed out that Rolling Stone magazine has an article called The Death of High Fidelity, about one of the negative effects that the influence of MP3 audio has had on the audio quality of recorded music. I featured something about this last summer at this link.
Not to get too nerdy-techie, but there are two forms of compression involved here. There’s the compression of the audio signal, that makes everything have the same loudness, and there’s the digital compression that is used by MP3 and other audio formats to reduce file size. They are two very different things.
Matt Mayfield, who I’m assuming is the guitarist in the recently-disbanded band Moses Mayfield, has a video that I’ve grabbed from YouTube, with an excellent explanation of what audio compression and loudness are all about.
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