Hey, have you heard? On February 17, 2009, over-the-air broadcasters throughout this great land are ditching their analog signals and switching over to digital (the F.C.C. is making them do it). That means all analog (non-digital) TVs that aren't connected to satellite dish or cable will go dark - unless you take the right steps.
Blu-ray is Best Buy's "preferred format," the megachain said yesterday in a press release. Though HD DVD won't disappear from the shelves, the retailer will "prominently showcase" BD hard- and software in both brick-and-mortar and virtual stores.
Despite Toshiba's attempts to keep HD DVD alive by cutting prices on their players, the format received two crushing blows today. First, Netflix announced it would drop its support for HD DVD and offer only Blu-ray titles to those seeking to rent high-def discs. The existing stock of HD DVDs will continue to be made available until their life cycle is over.
At its best, home theater is all about making movies feel so real you'd swear you're there. And not just the wham-bam flicks; some of my best experiences have come from straight-ahead dramas. That was absolutely the case with Breach, a chilling portrait of FBI agent Robert Hanssen, the man who sold countless security secrets to the Soviet Union for over 20 years. Actor Chris Cooper's portrayal of the psychopathic traitor totally mesmerized me, but I also credit Paradigm's fifth revision of their Monitor Series speakers for keeping my attention glued to the screen. Every detail of the sound—from the claustrophobic acoustics of Hanssen's office and the whirring noise of his computers' cooling fans, to the dense traffic snarl of Washington, D.C. streets—were all so effortlessly presented that I never thought about the speakers. That's the Zen of it all. When everything's just right, you don't realize the speakers are there.
Chris Chiarella | Feb 11, 2008 | First Published: Jan 11, 2008
The meticulous effects auteur looks back on a career spent creating movie magic.
During a time when movies were made entirely by hand, Ray Harryhausen knew better than anyone how to make the most spectacular cinematic creatures come to life. Inspired, like so many, by the original King Kong, Harryhausen honed his filmmaking skills on a variety of short subjects before he tackled his first feature film, Mighty Joe Young, working alongside Kong's stop-motion maestro Willis O'Brien. For you kids reading at home, stop-motion animation is the painstaking process of moving one or more specially designed models a precise fraction of an inch for each frame of film. Do it perfectly 24 times in a row (which can take a full day or more), and you've created one second of a movie. Along the way, Harryhausen even invented the Dynamation technique to more realistically combine his creations with live-action backgrounds, and his work became the gold standard that continues to stoke Hollywood's collective imagination. His 1957 black-and-white, monster-attacks-Rome opus 20 Million Miles to Earth was colorized and released on Blu-ray disc, the first Harryhausen title in high def, along with a new DVD boxed set that adds colorized special editions of Earth vs. The Flying Saucers and It Came From Beneath the Sea, all from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
Netflix will drop HD DVD and stock its virtual shelves exclusively with Blu-ray discs, the rental service announced today. From now on it will buy new stock only in Blu-ray and will phase out existing HD DVD stock by year-end.
This week, instead of answering a reader question, I'd like to ask you a question. You can answer in one of two ways—either post a comment after this blog or send me an e-mail at <A HREF="mailto:scott.wilkinson@sourceinterlink.com">scott.wilkinson@sourceinterlink.com</A>.
Editor's Note: this review was originally written and prepared for the March issue of Home Theater. However, just as we were going to press, Fujitsu announced it would be exiting the plasma display market as of, you guessed it, March. We pulled the review from that print issue, but have decided to publish it here since Fujitsu's remaining plasma inventory will be available while supplies last. According to statements by Fujitsu it will offer service and support for its plasma products for several years.
LCD flat panels may be the hot ticket in the TV market these days, but plasmas shouldn't be counted out by any means. For example, they offer superior off-axis viewing and generally better black levels. Not only that, large plasmas are often less expensive than LCDs of similar size.