Samsung lowers HD plasma prices

Posted on February 15, 2005 by Stephen Dawson

For the first time I can recommend a plasma display that retails for less than $AUS5,000. For years I’ve been whining about the 852 x 480 pixel resolution of so-called ‘standard definition’ plasmas as being unsuitable for Australian, Indian and European viewers, since our standard definition PAL system uses 576 vertical pixels.

Now Samsung has lowered the prices on its high resolution plasma displays. The 42 inch (107cm) 1,024 by 768 pixel model, PS42P4H, now has a recommended retail price of $AUS4,999. It’s a pretty good set too. Here’s what I wrote about it last year in a mini-review for Rolling Stone magazine (when the RRP was $AUS7,999):

This plasma TV from Samsung features a common high resolution for 42 inch panels (this one measures 1,076mm diagonally): 1,024 pixels across by 768 down. The frame surrounding the display area is about as thin as it’s possible to get, making for a compact installation. It has a built-in analogue TV tuner and plenty of inputs. Two sets of component video for DVD player, plus composite video, S-Video, a computer video socket, and DVI for the best quality from DVD. Located on the side are convenient A/V inputs.The picture was excellent. Rich colours, good constrast ratio, no evident ‘burn-in’ and good handling of both video and film-sourced DVDs. But leave the Digital Natural Image engine (DNIe) switched off if you’re watching 4:3 movies. This circuit stretches the dynamic range of the picture for greater contrast, but also applies to the grey bars on the sides of the screen in this mode, making them pulse disconcertingly in brightness.

Samsung has also lowered the price on its 1,366 x 768 pixel 50 inch (127cm) model, the PS50P4H, to $7,999, or the same price that the 42 inch model was just six months ago.

Posted in Equipment, Value, Video | Leave a comment

Iron Chef

Posted on February 8, 2005 by Stephen Dawson

Certainly Iron Chef is a quirky show. It appears each Saturday evening on Australia’s SBS TV station. Even better is the information tag provided for this on digital TV:

This is not a program for learning how to cook. It is a feverish competition among world-class chefs “with the over-the-top appeal of pro wrestling”. This week’s secret ingredient: Carrot.

Posted in DTV | Leave a comment

Minor MP3 player problem

Posted on February 8, 2005 by Stephen Dawson

One problem with hard disk based MP3 players is gaps. You know those CDs where the music is continuous, even across the boundaries between tracks? When you play back an MP3 album in track order on an MP3 player, there are short pauses between each track.

At first I thought it was the player I happened to be using (the 60GB Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra), but then I closely examined the MP3 files themselves. It seems that all of the MP3 encoders I use add a little silence at each end of each track. The worst case I’ve found so far is 0.057 seconds at the start, and 0.127 seconds at the end, producing a brief but noticable gap nearly two tenths of a second in length. Another encoder only added 0.027 seconds at each end. Still a pain.

Maybe that’s a reason to use some other competing format, such as WMA.

Update (26 February 2010): Of course, as I was unaware at the time, MP3 uses fixed-length frames to hold the data. So unless the data just happens to coincide with the frame length, you get gaps. Gapless playback is a bodgy after-the-fact correction for this inherent problem.

Posted in Audio, Compression, Portable | Leave a comment

A great review of The Passion of the Christ

Posted on February 7, 2005 by Stephen Dawson

As a professional writer, I can’t help but feel skittish about the world class amateur writing appearing so prolifically in Blogs these days. Take this review of Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ for example. None of the reviews I read in the old media come close to the depth and erudition of this one. Don’t stop there. Read the more about all sorts of stuff on The Currency Lad.

I’ve been startled about how few people seem to get The Passion. Traditional Catholicism placed enormous weight in the redemptive power of Christ’s sacrifice.

I remember an interview decades ago with the makers of Superman: The Movie. They made the point that, with The Six Million Dollar Man appearing on TV screens every week, Superman’s exploits had to literally world turning. And so it is with the pain and suffering of Christ. For Gibson’s emphasis on Christ’s suffering to carry any weight, it had to obviously exceed the suffering of characters routinely appearing in modern movies. The heyday of religious movies pre-dated graphic Peckinpahishness, and so could be more restrained while remaining shocking.

Posted in Cinema, Rant | Leave a comment

Apple iPod Arrogance?

Posted on February 6, 2005 by Stephen Dawson

Busy doing reviews of hard disk based portable MP3 players. You know the thing. The Apple iPod and its competition. Except for one small problem.

Apple, here in Australia, has a policy of not providing review samples of the iPod for the purposes of comparative reviews. Only for standalone reviews.

Why? With Apple’s current market dominance, it’s probably not interested in assisting in giving the competition any exposure. From this reviewer’s point of view, though, it simply means that:

  1. iPod is going to miss out on a couple of reviews (actually, three because one of my editors says that we’ll replace a planned iPod standalone review with something else); and
  2. I find myself unable to recommend iPod in preference to, say, the 60GB Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra, with which I’m presently mightily impressed.

Market dominance doesn’t last forever. Apple really ought to remember that.

Posted in Audio, Equipment, Portable, Rant, Testing | Leave a comment

Mythbusting Killer CDs

Posted on February 5, 2005 by Stephen Dawson

Two high speed frames: there then gone Since it started up on SBS here in Australia a few weeks ago, I’ve been keenly watching MythBusters. Scientists the guys aren’t, but I do like the way they just whip up a test rig from whatever they have laying around. In case you haven’t seen it, each week the two chaps take about three urban legends and put them to the test. Will a mobile phone ignite a petrol station? No. Will eating several poppy-seed buns make you show positive on a narcotics screening test? Yes.

Last week the final segment was testing the Killer CDs myth. Will CDs blow up from centrifugal forces if spun too fast? Well, of course. Anything will blow up if spun too fast. The picture to the right shows two sequential frames from a high speed camera they used to record the demise of a damaged CD (it had been microwaved!).

Unfortunately, they left the impression that a 52x CD ROM drive actually works at 52x. In fact, it works up to 52x, and generally much slower, because it is designed not to go much above 10,000 RPM.

You can read my analysis of this issue here.

This episode of Mythbusters will be repeated on Monday (7 Feb) at 5pm.

Posted in How Things Work, Testing | Leave a comment

Sorry!

Posted on February 5, 2005 by Stephen Dawson

No excuses, but I’m back for the time being.

Posted in Admin | Leave a comment

Changing servers

Posted on November 27, 2004 by Stephen Dawson

This Web site is now located in the United States on the servers of Hosting Matters. Previously it was here, in Australia, with Bigpond Hosting. The service from the latter was excellent, but it is simply much, much cheaper ($US11 vs $AUS66) for much greater bandwidth (19GB vs 2GB) to go offshore. I hope that the service remains as good there.

Posted in Admin | Leave a comment

Subwoofer or receiver crossover?

Posted on November 15, 2004 by Stephen Dawson

Peter has written with the following question:

I bought a Yamaha RX-V450 receiver matched with Polk RM6000 speakers and Polk say to wire the speakers through the subwoofer and not use the subwoofer outlet from the receiver. Encel store say to use a subwoofer cable and set all speakers to small. What do you think?

This type of question comes up from time to time, and the answer is that it all depends on the receiver.

In general, it’s best to use the home theatre receiver’s crossover for bass, because this can operates at line level (and, in many cases, in the digital domain). Such crossovers are easier to implement, and are less like to audibly degrade the sound than a passive, speaker-level crossover in a subwoofer.

But there is a problem with subwoofer/satellite systems. Small satellites will often be pretty useless for producing sound below around 200 hertz. Home theatre receivers with fixed subwoofer crossovers use 80 hertz, which means that there will be low output in the octave between 100 and 200 hertz.

An increasing number of receivers allow the crossover frequency to be changed. If there’s a setting of 200 hertz, this should be selected and the speakers wired up conventionally. Otherwise, wire the front two satellites through the subwoofer. When setting up the receiver, tell it that the centre and surround speakers are ‘small’, the front stereo speakers are ‘large’, and that you don’t have a subwoofer.

Note, though, that even with this wiring scheme, any bass between 80 and 200 hertz that’s on the centre or surround channels will not be properly reproduced. Only Bose, I think, provides crossovers for all five or six channels in its subwoofers. So, really, the best solution is to choose a receiver with a flexible bass crossover in the first place.

Posted in Audio, Equipment | Leave a comment

Digital TV bitrates in Canberra

Posted on November 2, 2004 by Stephen Dawson

Vince writes:

Could you place (or give a link) on your blog the local TV stations bit rates that I have variously seen in your articles to the Canberra times?

Why not? First, though, I should note that the following figures were derived from some ad hoc recordings I made of digital TV broadcasts between September and November this year. There’s no guarantee that they’ll be the same next month. Indeed, the rates could conceivably be changed on a daily basis: higher rates in the evening and so forth.

The figures were obtained simply. Just record a chunk of a broadcast using a Topfield TF5000PVRt digital TV receiver, then look at the information it provides: program length in minutes and file size in megabytes. Divide the latter by the former and make appropriate adjustments to convert to megabits per second, and you have the answer. The figure includes the audio, the subtitles and any data validation/decoding material

By way of comparison, DVD’s have a top rate of just under 10 megabits per second (Mbps), and of the 500-ish titles I’ve measured, the average for a movie ranges from a high of 8.84Mbps (The Day the Earth Stood Still) to a low of 2.8Mbps (the Force Video version of Metropolis) The great majority are in the range of 4 to 7 Mbps.

Finally, all these come from the Tuggeranong retransmission tower in the South of Canberra. No telling what the figures may be elsewhere.

(Table over Fold)

Continue reading →

Posted in Codecs, Compression, DTV, HDTV | Leave a comment