Thomas J. Norton

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3D Projector ReviewsProjector Reviews
Digital Projection Titan 1080p 3D
Thomas J. Norton  |  Sep 13, 2010
3D Digital Cinema Comes Home

Tell me you’ve never imagined what you’d do first if you won the lottery. Even if you never play and you know you have a better chance of getting hit by lightning than winning $10 million or (it’s a dream, isn’t it, so why go small potatoes?) even $100 million. Sure, if you take it all at once rather than in $5 million drabs over 20 years, that will drop to $50 million out of the gate. After Uncle Sam gets his cut, you’re down to $25 million. There goes your chance to buy the Seattle Seahawks.

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Audio Video News
Digital Rights Management
Thomas J. Norton  |  Apr 13, 2005  |  Published: Apr 14, 2005

Digital rights management (DRM) was one of the hottest topics to be discussed at the recent Digital Hollywood conference, held March 31, 2005, at the Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel in (where else?) Santa Monica, California. DRM is a key issue holding up the finalization of the specifications for both HD DVD and Blu-ray, the two competing contenders to become the next-generation optical-disc format.

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A/V Veteran
Direct to BD?
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jul 28, 2008
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A/V Veteran
Direct to Blu-ray
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jul 28, 2008

Living as I do in a suburb of LA, it's hard to avoid movie news. The local rag, the <I>Los Angeles Times</I>, is awash in it. Its theater listings take up an entire section of the paper, which on Friday and Sunday can feature huge, double-page ads for major releases. So if a movie opens to big notices and reviews, good or bad, it's hard to avoid hearing about it around here.

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A/V Veteran
Direct to Blu-ray?
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jul 28, 2008
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A/V Veteran
Direct to Blu-ray?
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jul 28, 2008
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CES 2011
DirecTV 3D
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jan 07, 2011  |  Published: Jan 08, 2011
Panasonic demonstrated 3DTV from a DirecTV feed, presumably using the using the side-by-side 3D technique. But while the images would likely satisfy the uncritical viewer, the pictures lacked that last spark of detail. The side-by-side technique discards 50% of the horizontal resolution, resulting in 960 x 1080 images.
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A/V Veteran
Disc vs. Streaming: Pros, Cons, and Quality
Thomas J. Norton  |  May 03, 2016
If you’ve been following my writing (I know there’s at least one of you out there somewhere!) you know that I’m a major fan of packaged media. With a Blu-ray or Ultra HD Blu-ray disc I only have to buy it once and it’s always there, on the shelf, ready to access whenever I want it and offering the best of the best in both picture and sound quality. And it won’t vaporize if I want to see it again but the streaming service decides to no longer offer it...
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A/V Veteran
Discovering YouTube
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jan 11, 2022
The so-called Golden Age of Television is a bit of a moving target, but is generally thought to have run from the early 1950s to perhaps the mid 1960s. Depending on where you draw the line it began with the first mega-hit sitcom, I Love Lucy, and ended with the launch of the original ( Kirk, Spock, Bones) Star Trek.

A key characteristic of that age was the limited number of channels available. There was no home video of any kind, no way to record a show and later skip the commercials, and (at least in the '50s) black and white viewing on an enormous 21-inch (or smaller!) screen. As primitive as all that sounds, television was then the hot new entertainment technology, and the ratings for the best shows (with their limited competition) were enormous by today's standards. We might laugh today at the TV options of that era, but remember that TV nearly killed off the movies. Audiences in 2100 might well look back at what we have today—and laugh.

Our current cornucopia of options now features 99-channels of cable (and nothing to watch!), content streamed from a range of services (and over $100/month to pay for them!), and an unlimited variety of physical video discs (and yes, physical media is struggling but still far from dead).

Then there's YouTube, a free service supported by advertising. Up until a few weeks ago I considered YouTube an Internet oddity devoted to cat videos and looney stunts...

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A/V Veteran
DIY "Calibration"
Thomas J. Norton  |  Feb 13, 2024
If you find yourself experiencing a flashback on reading this blog, you're not alone. Last summer I wrote a similar piece. But there's always new ground to cover, particularly on the subject of TV setup and calibration. Some of the material here is similar to that in the prior blog, but in other ways the results are different.

An accurate calibration requires that the calibrator be trained, have access to specialized test gear and PC calibration software (of the latter, Calman from Portrait Displays is the best known and most widely used)...

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