David Vaughn

Price: $250 At A Glance: Elegant design • Plethora of streaming options • Fast startup and loading of Blu-ray Discs

Sony single-handedly won the format war with its timely release of the PlayStation 3. Up until the PS3 hit the market in November 2006, HD DVD was beginning to gain the upper hand with disc and player sales. But the vaunted game station changed the marketplace virtually overnight and signaled the beginning of the end for the red-laser format. Fast-forward almost six years, and the PS3 is still the most-owned Blu-ray player on the market, although the standalone units have closed the performance gap and in some cases, surpassed the powerful game system.

Price: $300 At A Glance: Now bitstreams Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio • Fast and reliable Blu-ray playback • Built-in Wi-Fi for Web interactivity and firmware updates

We’ve reviewed Sony’s PlayStation 3 twice in Home Theater (March 2007 and May 2008). Since Sony has provided many updates to its software and hardware, it deserves another look. When it originally launched in November 2006, the Blu-ray format was on the ropes due to its lackluster titles and handicapped first-generation players. Even die-hard supporters were wobbly in the legs, and they pinned their hopes on the delayed game system as the format’s savior.

Their hopes were ultimately redeemed. The PS3 effectively ended the format war—even though it took Toshiba more than a year to wave the white flag. For more than three years, the PS3 has dominated the landscape as the best Blu-ray player on the planet because of its incredible speed, rock-solid stability, and constant updates.

When soldier Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) wakes up in the body of an unknown man, he discovers he's part of an experimental government program called the "Source Code" that enables him to assume another man's identify in the last eight minutes of his life. Armed with the task of identifying the bomber of a Chicago-bound commuter train, Colter must re-live the incident over and over until he can solve the mystery and prevent an even deadlier second terrorist attack.

I was eagerly looking forward to giving this one a spin, and it more than met my expectations. It's nonstop action from start to finish, and Gyllenhaal has great screen presence as the troubled hero. Not only was I wildly entertained, but the DTS-HD MA audio track is outstanding and worth the price of admission all by itself. But don't get your hopes too high for the video encode, which isn't anything to write home about.

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/southpark.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>In the twelfth season, the boys from <i>South Park</i> follow the presidential election from the primaries through the new president-elect's acceptance speech, they help Britney Spears disfigure her body, and try to get the country of Canada back to work when it strikes for more money. The best episode during the season is "Elementary School Musical," when Stan realizes he'll lose Wendy forever unless he adopts the latest fad hitting the school&#151;singing (think <i>High School Musical</i>).