It has come to my attention that there are those among you who are not tracking comments. This means that unless I point them out, you are missing new comments on old posts.
If you are browsing with either Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer 7, click “Comments” under “Feeds.” You should see something interesting. If you see a lot of stuff that looks likes computer code, you’re using a browser that doesn’t do RSS and you should get updated!
Johnny Chung Lee of Carnegie Mellon University has posted a bunch of amazing videos demonstrating his developments in display technology. The reversal of the roles of the Nintendo Wii remote and the sensor bar, to create 3-D effects is astounding.
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!
[flv:/Video/2008/JAN/HitlerDVD.flv 440 330]
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.
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.
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.
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.
