George Lucas In an S&V exclusive, George Lucas chats with his favorite princess (Carrie Fisher) about Star Wars on DVD, the future of movies, and girls (yes, girls)
Following the likes of Bang & Olufsen and Sony, Pioneer will open a retail store in the United States this August. The 32,000-square-foot company store, to be located at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, California, will offer Pioneer and Pioneer Elite components traditionally sold in the U.S. in addition to products currently available only in Japan. Pioneer intends for the store to be a testing ground for these and other new products. The company expects the retail outlet to provide it with consumer feedback that will "impact and enhance future product development."
21st Century Vinyl is better described by its subtitle: Michael Fremer's Practical Guide to Turntable Set-Up. The heart of the program is a series of segments in which Fremer turns three uncrated turntables into functional music machines. Along the way he encounters problems but keeps his cool. In so doing he sets a good example for 21st-century vinyl neophytes who are attracted to the musicality of vinyl but intimidated by the mystic art of getting a complex mechanical device up and running and sounding its very best.
We can describe all the colors in the universe, well, at least the colors of Fox, Disney, MGM, Warner Brothers and Universal, with but three primary colors: red, green and blue. That's how our projectors do it. Blind people have been asked to describe the colors they've never seen, and I think they need a lot of words to accomplish what three tint filters and a gain control can do. I hope they're not reading this. That last could be deemed offensive.
Panasonic has announced that starting July 1st, it will begin providing authoring services for studios producing Blu-ray titles (BD-ROM) at the Panasonic Hollywood Laboratory (PHL) in Universal City, California. Panasonic began authoring DVD titles for various studios in the U.S. in 1996, and has now installed state-of-the-art equipment to perform similar services for the Blu-ray platform.
There is a lot of misinformation, lies, and myths out there regarding the new HD on a disc formats. Both HD DVD and Blu-ray have their strengths and weaknesses. I’m getting enough emails on the topic that I figured I’d do a post full of truthiness about these new formats.
"Unlike pressed original CDs, burned CDs have a relatively short life span of between two to five years, depending on the quality of the CD," said Kurt Gerecke, a storage expert at IBM's German outpost, in an interview with Computerworld. Closer to two for off-brand cheapies, he added. Other estimates vary. I regularly use a CD-R of test tracks burned in 1999. Whatever their validity may be, these warnings apply only to dye-based recordable CDs. Prerecorded CDs are more durable (if they weren't there'd be riots) though no one really knows how long they will last. More bad news: Hard drives are also vulnerable. Their Achilles heel is the disc bearing, a mechanical part that wears out over time. Magnetic tape can last 30 to 100 years, according to Gerecke, though I recall some audiocassettes that didn't last a decade. Fortunately there's a hot new medium that freezes music forever in unchanging grooves of black plastic. The disc is read with a diamond stylus suspended in a web of magnets and can last a lifetime (or more) if treated carefully. It plays on all devices in the format, completely free of DRM. This format of the future is called VINYL. See tomorrow's blog for more details!
Reuters reports that Toshiba President Atsutoshi Nishida provided this bit of corporate wisdom at an annual shareholders' meeting: "We have not given up on a unified format. We would like to seek ways for unifying the standards if opportunities arise." Mr. Nishida may have brought up (again) the idea of a single, unified format due to the fact that initial consumer response to HD DVD has not been overwhelming. Perhaps he was engaged in a bit of wishful thinking after it became clear that Sony will delay the introduction of its BDP-S1 Blu-ray Disc player until sometime in late October. Maybe he was acknowledging the fact that most consumers couldn't care less which format becomes a de facto standard as long as there's only one format.
