LATEST ADDITIONS

It’s $999, has HQV processing, plays Blu-ray and HD DVD. What else do you need to know? Oh, the model number probably. BD-UP5000. Look for it before the end of the year. What a coincidence it’s the same price as the product in the post below…

Released just last week, DVDO’s iScan VP50Pro is the first THX Certified scaler. It also has HDMI 1.3, and will accept and spit out just about every resolution you can imagine. Along with deinterlacing of 1080i and below, there is also mosquito noise reduction, detail enhancements, and just about every other goody you’d expect from a scaler. It’s $3,500.

Shane already nailed the Epson Cinema Pro 1080 UB ("Ultra Black") demo. It was amazing to see this kind of performance from an LCD. I'll add that Epson might be claiming a 50,000:1 contrast ratio, but that's with what has to be an awfully aggressive auto-iris in play. Kevin Miller, whose work continues to amaze, flew without a net using the chipset's native contrast ratio of 4,500:1, which is pretty outstanding on its own.

THX is working a new connect-the-world project, code named Blackbird. Having seen how easy it is for the general public to mangle their picture and sound with all the new toys they've been acquiring recently, Blackbird presents a solution for the three cardinal sins of home theater, by sending metadata in the form of control signals through HDMI to all Blackbird enabled devices in the chain.