One of the coolest demos at CES this year was in the Sharp booth, where the company had set up a "video cube" with 64 thin-bezel, 60-inch LCD panels tiled together, forming five faces of a cube. One side was left open for showgoers to stand at a railing and stare in amazement at the shifting images in front, to the sides, and above and below them. Now, the company has installed a larger version of this system at the Huis Ten Bosch theme park in Sasebo City, near Nagasaki, Japan.
I just listened to episode 63 of your Home Theater Geeks podcast and heard that 3D may be making a move to 48 or 60 frames per second. Am I correct that this is a problem for Blu-ray because it cannot accommodate this higher frame rate? Does this mean we will soon see a new disc format?
Following yesterday's YouTube announcement, Google should have even more big news today - the Google I/O developer conference kicks off today at noon, with the license-free
Netflix, previously the bane of content owners, is now wearing a halo of approval. What changed? Netflix is now willing to part with more of its burgeoning revenue for content acquisition.
One notable example is Time Warner, whose CEO Jeff Bewkes once referred to Netflix as the Albanian army. As in: "Is the Albanian army going to take over the world?" Then Netflix paid Time Warner $200,000 per episode for 100 episodes of Nip/Tuck. Now Bewkes refers to Netflix with "fondness."
Last Friday, video guru Joe Kane visited Grayscale Studio, where Tom Norton and I conduct most of our display reviews, to show us his latest test patterns, which are designed for 3D displays. The images were generated by a VideoForge test-pattern generator from Audio Video Foundry and sent to an Accell HDMI switcher/splitter, which fed two flat panelsa Samsung UN55D8000 with active glasses and LG 55LW5600, which uses passive glasses. (Interestingly, the Accell switcher/splitter can pass 3D from the VideoForge, but not from a 3D Blu-ray player.) The results of these tests were very interesting, to say the least.
Sometimes, despite taking great pains to avoid it, one finds oneself having to go to the Internet for information. An inconvenience, to be sure, especially if one is trying to limit one’s exposure to ads for home mortgages that feature photos of hideously ugly deformed men, the kind you expect to see under freeway overpasses sitting in a shopping cart filled with rags and using a Ralphs Rewards card to eat generic franks and beans from a dented can. But if it’s trivia about Sid and Marty Krofft’s H.R. Pufnstuf you’re after (and I assume that represents more than 80 percent of Internet traffic), then you can be on and off in relatively short order and with a minimum of bother. (Oh, and I’ll spare you the searching. Yes, it’s drug inspired. And no, the Magic Flute was not killed in action in Vietnam.)