Author Archives: Stephen Dawson

Old Fashioned. Moi?

Posted on June 27, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

The other day, rather than regale my long-suffering family with yet another public policy rant, I knocked off an oped on a matter of high tech that has, unfortunately, become a political football. After shopping it around for a while, … Continue reading →

Posted in Admin, Computer | Leave a comment

Sloppy Post Production in Kingdom of Heaven?

Posted on June 17, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

When I was on the scrounge for Blu-ray discs last year (it’s difficult reviewing Blu-ray players when you don’t have any discs), I hassled various movie distributors until they shot a few my way. One company to come through was … Continue reading →

Posted in Blu-ray, Disc details, Testing | Leave a comment

Flicker

Posted on June 5, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

In my Canberra Times column this week I discussed 1080p24 as the ideal delivery standard for Blu-ray and HD DVD. Today I received an email on this, thus: I had never heard of 1080p24 or even conceived that it might … Continue reading →

Posted in Equipment, How Things Work, Video | Leave a comment

Do you call that a review?

Posted on May 18, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

Today I embarked upon a begging mission. I wrote to eight different purveyors of projectors and asked if they’d like to lend me one for at least several months. Odd behaviour? Here’s why. I shall henceforth be writing four HD … Continue reading →

Posted in Rant, Testing | Leave a comment

‘Dynamic Peak’

Posted on May 17, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

I’ve been reviewing a lot of subwoofers lately and for almost all of them the manufacturer quotes two power specifications for their built-in amplifiers: the continuous output power (sometimes erroneously labelled ‘RMS’), and ‘dynamic peak’ or similar words. The latter … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio, Rant, Testing | Leave a comment

A little bit of history

Posted on May 14, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

I rarely toss out old stuff that I’ve written. I have on the next to me, for example, photocopies of all my police notebooks from 1979 to 1985, and just about everything else I’ve written since. The same is true … Continue reading →

Posted in Computer, Value | Leave a comment

You can’t test everything

Posted on May 13, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

In my reviews I try pretty hard to find all the defects in a product that could reduce user convenience or performance, but, of course, I frequently miss stuff. Last night I was playing a CD of The Who’s Tommy, … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio, CD, Testing | Leave a comment

576i to the rescue

Posted on May 1, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

I mentioned below that ‘what we really need is a HD TV receiver that can either output 576i over a HDMI output (DVI outputs do a weird output when set to 576i, which isn’t compatible with all the displays I’ve … Continue reading →

Posted in DTV, HDTV, Interlacing, Video | Leave a comment

Proof of crappy video output from HDPVR

Posted on April 30, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

Below, my blog entry ‘We need a videophile’s High Definition Digital TV Receiver‘ puts the case that we are not getting all the picture we should be with standard definition digital TV, thanks to what I suspected was poor deinterlacing … Continue reading →

Posted in Interlacing, Video | Leave a comment

Dark Ads

Posted on April 29, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

Over the past couple of months, I’ve noticed that Canberra’s Southern Cross Ten TV station is doing something rather strange. In the usually black space of a few seconds between the end of a block of advertisements and the recommencement … Continue reading →

Posted in DTV | Leave a comment