Brian A. Thomas .com

I haven’t covered the developments in the format war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray for a long time.
Since I last covered it, Paramount and Dreamworks went to HD-DVD exclusive for 18 months after being paid a great deal of money. Then HD-DVD players went to $100 for a short period before jumping back to their normal [...]

Read Full Post »

Thinking about getting a HD-DVD player, or the recently launched Blu-ray player? Just hold your horses. None of the players currently on the market support HDMI 1.3, which is essential to getting the absolute best in audio and video from a player. The first High Definition player to feature it will likely be Sony’s Playstation [...]

Read Full Post »

There will be two versions of Sony’s PlayStation 3 when it launches in November.
Check the table below taken from Sony’s website (in PDF):

PlayStation 3

Product Name
PlayStation 3

CPU
Cell Processor

GPU
RSX®

Sound
Dolby 5.1, DTS, LPCM, etc. (Cell-based processing)

Memory
256MB XDR Main RAM, 256MB GDDR3 VRAM

HDD
2.5" Serial ATA

20GB

60GB

I/O
USB 2.0

x4

Memory Stick/SD/Compact Flash

No

Yes

Communications
Ethernet
x1/10 Base-T, 100 Base-TX, 1000 Base-T

IEEE 802.11 b/g

No

Yes

Bluetooth 2.0 (EDR)

Yes

Wireless Controller [...]

Read Full Post »

Sony’s Playstation 3 will launch in November. It was widely expected to be out in the United States here in November anyhow, so this is mostly just a delay for Japan, and an early present for Europe which probably normally would have had to wait a few more months. Didn’t they learn anything from the [...]

Read Full Post »

There has been lots of news on the HDTV front of late.
The big current news is that is is looking like date they will stop transmitting regular television signals and move only to high definition signals will be either 31 December 2008 or April 2009 (Yahoo! news). Originally, the end of 2006 was to be [...]

Read Full Post »

The Blu-ray disc format got another win today as Paramount Pictures announced they will release movies in Blu-ray as well as HD-DVD if no unified format comes out (which probably would be bad for consumers anyhow, just let Blu-ray win). Warner Brothers and Universal Studios are expected to make the same announcement soon (seems they [...]

Read Full Post »

I was going to post a link to a story tonight, but somebody beat me to it in the comments. You can get the link there, or here…
There is an op-ed piece at Ars Technica which talks about the financial aspects of the next generation of DVD formats. They admit fully it is an op-ed [...]

Read Full Post »