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Author Archives: Stephen Dawson
Sony PS3 Gets DTS-HD Master Audio
A couple of weeks ago I was doing a piece on choosing your next Blu-ray player. I said, in short, that you’d be nuts to buy anything other than the Panasonic DMP-BD30 because it alone can do all of the … Continue reading
Posted in Audio, Blu-ray, Compression, Equipment
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I Love Warner Bros
I have previously whinged about region coding on Blu-ray. If you are considering purchasing a Blu-ray disc from overseas, particularly from the US, go first to the Blu-ray Region Code Info page and make sure that your contemplated purchase is … Continue reading
Posted in Blu-ray, Rant, Region Coding
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‘Frank the Bunny Rabbit is also a somewhat frightening character’
Universal kindly sent me Southland Tales today at my request. Since I simply love Donnie Darko, created by the creator of Southland Tales, Richard Kelly, I thought it would be great to review it along with the more recent Southland … Continue reading
Posted in Cinema, DVD
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The Ballad of Dwight Frye
Last night I watched, with one of my daughters, the 1922 version of Nosferatu. The picture quality wasn’t particularly good, yet it was still strangely powerful at certain points. My daughter, who has read Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, of which … Continue reading
Posted in Cinema, DVD, Music, Vinyl
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A suggestion for TV manufacturers
I have just reviewed two depressingly bad TVs. It occurs to me that some TV makers are simply not doing the obvious thing when designing a TV: standing the near finished design beside a good TV and comparing them. Of … Continue reading
Posted in Equipment, Testing
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Will Australian digital TV switch to MPEG4?
Last night I received a telephone call from a reader who wanted to know if Australia would be switching over to MPEG4 for its digital TV broadcasts. At the moment we are using MPEG2, the same codec used for DVD. … Continue reading
Posted in Compression, DTV, HDTV, Video
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How to wreck HDTV
Last night I watched ‘House‘ which I had recorded earlier on a HDTV PVR. Naturally I recorded the high definition version from my local station, Southern Cross 10 in Canberra, which broadcasts HD at 1,920 by 1,080 pixels. As I … Continue reading
Posted in HDTV, Video
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Yes, HD DVD is dead
Well, so that’s it for HD DVD. Just Google News on HD DVD, and you will see that its demise is official. Of course, it’s only Toshiba abandoning the format, but without Toshiba the format is nothing. Interesting parallels: Betamax … Continue reading
Posted in Blu-ray, HD DVD, Video tape
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Is HD DVD dead?
A couple of decades ago I read a slim volume called ‘The Limits to Prediction’ (I think, or something like that), which presented half a dozen papers on the art of predicting future events, and the success that was achieved. … Continue reading
Posted in Blu-ray, HD DVD
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Another example of lousy 576i deinterlacing
I’m reviewing a high definition digital TV receiver/PVR that, like most of them, doesn’t have the ability to output 576i over HDMI, nor to perform decent deinterlacing of it. To confirm my suspicions I took some photos. Having taken them, … Continue reading
Posted in DTV, Interlacing, Video
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