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This certainly isn't the firsttime we've heard this rumor, but SmartHouse is reporting that Microsoft and Toshiba are working on an updated Xbox 360 with a built-in HD DVD drive. If that were all, we wouldn't bat an eye -- it's gotta happen sometime -- but there are some other, crazier aspects to this version of the rumor that set off some red flags: SmartHouse also claims that the new box will be Toshiba-branded and have dual HDTV tuners, electronic program guide capabilities, built-in wireless networking, and sport an "MP3 player" dock, which we'd imagine would be for a Zune. That's a hell of a box, right there, and while we've seen similar devices like Sony's PSX, they didn't exactly take the world by storm. Our money is still on a simple bump of the existing 360 to HD DVD, but get ready to hear a lot of about this rumor in the weeks to come.
DirecTV has filed a false advertising suit against Cox Communications over claims made on the Cox website. It all goes back to a Comcast-commissioned market survey (also under suit) which concluded that two thirds of satellite customers preferred the HD image quality of Comcast over DirecTV and Dish Network. Cox ran with the story, and put the results under the headline "Cable Wins the HD Picture Challenge" on the company's website. We agree with DirecTV -- that's a huge logical misstep. DirecTV sums it up nicely in their complaint: "...the picture quality afforded by Comcast's HD service cannot be deemed equivalent to that of Cox's HD service." Check out the link for more "he said, she said" action. We understand that DirecTV has to defend itself, and that lawsuits are part of big business, but we also think continuing to pump out moreHDchannels will have a far larger impact in the marketplace.
Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer is once again the top title this week on the Nielsen VideoScan charts courtesy of Home Media Magazine. There are a lot of changes in this week's list of top ten titles, as Knocked Up falls to six, from two, and new release Evan Almighty rises to number four. As we'd expect, most of the titles to rise to the top are new releases, but a few regulars for Blu-ray seem to keep up their steam, including 300 and Casino Royale. For the second week in a row, Blu-ray wides its lead (now 2.4:1 for the week), but we all expect that to change next week when the Transformers numbers hit, despite all of Blu-ray's two-for-one promotions.
Despite what we say, many people wait till the holiday season to buy and HDTV -- more specifically Black Friday. There are a few strategies that work, and Consumer Reports' Electronics Blog has a couple of pointers for this holiday season. While the theme to finding a bargain seems to 720p, they really seem to believe Plasmas might offer the better bargain. In fact, DisplaySearch believes you'll be able to find a 42-inch 720p Plasma for as low as $599 on Black Friday, which seems pretty crazy. This is not to say that there won't be any great deals on LCD TVs, but just like that normal debate goes, it's really about size since there aren't many Plasmas under 42-inches. No matter what you end up picking up, you can rest assured that although you missed another entire year of HD, you most certainly saved yourself some money.
The BBC have been testing a dedicated high-def station, which should end in November '07, to determine if they need a dedication high-def station -- hellz yeah, they do. BBC HD seems to have a mash-up lineup similar to Discovery HD Theater with shows from other BBC channels all merged into one dedicated mega-channel. Currently, BBC is taking 50% of their content from BBC One, 30% from BBC Two and the other 20% is coming from BBC's other digital channels making up the high definition station that will launch in 2012. The programming seems to be there and we sure know people want HDTV, so why the wait for the British digital switch-over in 2012? It doesn't sound like BBC HD needs more testing, cut through the red tape and just launch the channel to high-def starved Brits already.
Just in time for another season, Dish Network adds the National Hockey League Network to their always-growing HD lineup. NHL HD will sport 50 live regular-season games, classic games, documentaries, and how-to shows; we're wondering how much of the extra features will be in high-def however. The station is already live on channel 403 and 559 for subs with America's Top 100 package or the NHL Center Ice subscription respectively. This new station should calm rabid Hockey fans but they do hold Hockey's dirty, little high-def secret: the sport is, arguably, the best looking programming in high definition.
There's nothing we love more (okay, that's an exaggeration -- but barely) than blatant overkill, and this here prototype from PS Audio fits that description to a T. Granted, we fully expect audiophiles to blindly stand up for this thing -- even though no one outside of the company has a clue just how incredible (or not) the innards actually are -- but here's the skinny. This not-yet-named CD transport reportedly transfers audio tracks from standard CDs onto internal memory for as long as the disc remains inside; apparently, this design "nullifies any jitter" and "other possible audio degradation." Theoretically sound as this logic may be, we can think of quite a few other ways to listen to music stored on flash memory (or similar) without spending $2,000. Who knows though, maybe that wood is incomprehensibly exotic.
In case you hadn't heard, CRT sets are on their wayout, and LCD is the display technology that will replace them in popularity. According to to market research firm Displaybank, the LCD portion of TV shipments will grow from 38% this year to 66% by 2015. By our math, that's close to 2-out-of-3. Chalk that growth up to a blanketing of the market -- LCD already has the less than 50-inch market pretty well sewn up, and is already making inroads to larger sizes. We love us our plasma (even at less than 50-inch sizes), but on the showroom floor LCD's are compelling for many consumers. No matter how you slice it, consumers are going to benefit -- put the Displaybank numbers against DisplaySearch numbers on market value for LCD's, and you can see that LCD prices are going to come down even further.
Movie-goers in Dallas, Indianapolis, Riverside, California, and San Diego, you can go ahead and color us officially envious. Your lucky cities will soon host a total of 54 CineAlta SXRD 4K digital cinema systems from Sony, with an unspecified mix of 10,000 lumen SRX-R210 and 18,000 lumen SRX-R220 models planned to shock and wow customers at four AMC locales. The units were unsurprisingly crafted specifically for use in (home?) theaters, and will be paired up with Sony's LMT-100 Media Block servers. Barring any unforeseen disasters, installation should begin next month in the aforementioned areas, and holiday crowds should be enjoying a delightful visual experience before the year's end.
Earlier this month, we noticed that fence-sitters in the drawn out format war could play both sides by picking up the towering m9000t with an HD DVD / Blu-ray combo drive built right in. For those still wondering if it's worth the coin, ComputerShopper managed to sit it down and answer that very inquiry. For starters, the hardware in this "entertainment PC" was said to be mighty robust, and all around performance seemed to exceed expectations. There were no complaints when watching high-definition films, and while this thing wasn't exactly built for gamers, it managed to pass a Company of Heroes test with flying colors. The only notable dig on this otherwise solid machine was the unfortunate lack of "couch-friendly peripherals," but for under $1,500, the Pavilion Elite m9000t was still deemed "an excellent choice."
Hard core HD DVD fans have known for sometime that they can obtain otherwise exclusive Blu-ray titles via overseas websites like Amazon.co.uk; but we were still surprised to see the Wall Street Journal pick up on it. It's not that we don't think people are doing this, but we wonder how many. Sure, early adopter types won't have any problem ordering a title online and paying a bit more for it, but in the grand scheme of the format war, how big of deal is it? The WSJ doesn't know either, but does a great job of describing the reason (distribution rights) for the loop hole and some of the more popular ways (xploitedcinema.com) to do it. Meanwhile, we'll just keep our count to the titles available the average consumer at his local retailer.
Paramount has reacted quickly, delaying and recalling its not-so-specialJack Ryan Special Collectors Edition HD DVD boxed set that shipped without any of the special features listed on the box. While some may appreciate a minimalist style, presenting only the movies without the interruption of minor elements like, a menu, this was taking it a bit far. No word yet if the discs will be reissued with the missing features, or if those boxes will be returning with certain lines conveniently blanked out.
A standalone HD DVD player for less than two Benjamins? From a manufacturer that we've heard of? We've been waiting for that day for some time now, and while there have certainly been wild claims by less popular foreign outfits and even price hiccups that have paired certain players with a (temporary) sub-$200 pricetag, it's about time for entry-level units on the whole to settle beneath the barrier. If a number of reports circling the web are true, we just might see it happen in the not-too-distant future, which isn't all that shocking considering how HD DVD player prices have been (expectedly) falling in recent months. Apparently, a $198 Toshiba HDA2-W has been noticed in Wal-Mart systems, and you won't color us surprised if it's joined by a few other name brand alternatives in time for the holiday rush. Of course, it remains to be seen if buyers will be willing to forgo the extras that higher-end units are blessed with in order to simply have a player that understands HD DVD, but historically speaking, money talks (the loudest).
Sounds crazy right? Seriously, how could a fiber optic network be out of bandwidth? In most networks, the last mile (in this case fiber) is the bottleneck, but despite what Verizon has told us, it appears there is a bottleneck further upstream -- at least according to a very well respected long time member of the AVSForum. Although Verizon is one of the first providers to bring fiber to the home, just like most cable co's, its television network is a QAM system. One of the biggest differences is that Verizon uses two Super Head Ends for the entire country where all the signals -- except locals -- are collected (via fiber and satellite) and then sent to various video hubs through the US and finally to central offices in each Verizon FiOS market. The problem lies in the the video hubs and central offices -- some of them can only support 103 QAM channels, which is considerably less than the 135 channels available between your local central office and your home. We have no idea why Verizon would build the core of its network this way, but we are lead to believe that a plan to upgrade is currently underway, and since it's Verizon's policy to deploy new HD channel nationally, everyone has to wait until the upgrades are completed. This is not to say that FiOS is already completely out of bandwidth, but we believe Verizon is feeling the pinch and is trying to reallocate bandwidth from analog channels to digital -- just like cable. We for one are just glad that Verizon dosen't do what most providers do, and re-compress the HD programming to find more bandwidth. Of course since Verizon isn't talking, there's no way to know if this is true, but it makes sense when you think about the number of HD channels added in the past six months while every other provider is adding channels in record numbers.
**UPDATE** Verizon wasn't happy when we said "Verizon isn't talking", because they did respond to our email requesting information. What we meant is that they wouldn't tell us what needed to be upgraded and only said "it's just a matter of adding new equipment to increase capacity", which we already knew. What we didn't know, and they wouldn't talk about is, what exactly was needed to increase capacity and when? You can read the full rebuttal on their site.
This certainly isn't the first time we've heard this rumor, but SmartHouse is reporting that Microsoft and Toshiba are working on an updated Xbox 360 with a built-in HD DVD drive. If that were all, we wouldn't bat an eye -- it's gotta happen sometime -- but there are some other, crazier aspects to this version of the rumor that set off some red flags: SmartHouse also claims that the new box will be Toshiba-branded and have dual HDTV tuners, electronic program guide capabilities, built-in wireless networking, and sport an "MP3 player" dock, which we'd imagine would be for a Zune. That's a hell of a box, right there, and while we've seen similar devices like Sony's PSX, they didn't exactly take the world by storm. Our money is still on a simple bump of the existing 360 to HD DVD, but get ready to hear a lot of about this rumor in the weeks to come.
What we're watching: CBS premieres a new "musical drama" 
