Some of interesting news I’ve read:

Sony, Toshiba, Hitachi join forces in display – Yahoo News

Sony shows wearable 3-D personal theater – Yahoo News

BBC News – Why spend £1,000 on headphones?

‘Star Wars’ breaks Blu-ray sales records | The Digital Home – CNET News

BBC News – What comes after HD for TV viewers?

For Home Entertainment Industry, a Bright Spot – NYTimes.com

A couple years ago you couldn’t grab a Blu-ray movie for under $30. If you did, it was a rarity. Finally the movie makers and marketers went back to their DVD marketing prowess with nice “buy me” pricing versus the high Blu-ray movie premiums they were trying to get away with before.

Now you can find movies even for as low $5, and not just the garbage movies. Great works like Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volumes and more can be added in all their studio master quality audio and video nirvana for just a few smackers.

What’s the huge deal? Blu-ray offers studio master quality video and sound quality. What that means is you can’t really get better quality, and thus you won’t need to ever re-purchase the movie unless time or wear forces a replacement.

We home theater nuts can be pretty snobby about audio quality. After all, why shouldn’t we be? We spend a great deal of time, money, and research learning how to eke even the tiniest amount of performance to get the most from our gear.

After all, audiophile grade speakers and CD transports make for some killer sound. Why would anything less be acceptable?

I had to deviate from common audiophile practices back in 2003. I actually researched audio compression codecs available in Apple’s QuickTime Pro at the time and found the  AAC MP4 audio format indistinguishable from CD playback. I was even able to fool myself with an A/B demo test.

Some of the news I’ve been reading…

FOXNEWS
Are 3D Movies Dying a Slow Death?

BBC
2D or not 2D, that is the question

CNET
What’s driving rise in music sales?
Why did SACD, DVD-A, and Blu-ray fail as music surround formats?

It’s understandable why may consumers would be gun shy about home theater. There’s a ton of misinformation out there, and questions I often get have answers people may not want to hear. What’s the best TV? What’s the best receiver? What’s the best speaker maker? What’s the best Blu-ray player? Aren’t media based formats dead because of streaming?

Like Avatar, Tron Legacy is a show stopper in picture quality. The sound is extremely bass heavy and spot on as well. The movie is a visual masterpiece in style and execution that greatly builds on the original due to obvious technical advances made since the first movie came onto the scene, but the new style also blends and compliments the old style as well.

Tron Legacy also has a slightly deeper storyline than the first Tron. With movies like The Matrix and others having come out between the Tron movies, Tron Legacy’s concept isn’t so “out there man”, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Tron has always been a bit of an odd duck. It has fantastically styled effects, and a storyline that many say was ahead of it’s time, I always thought it was normal for it’s time as it came out. Even though I was all of six when Tron came out, it was easy for me to see even then that it was a movie trying to cash in on the video game craze. War Games for me at the time was much more interesting.

What can I say. I never had to experience the racial strife of the 50s and 60s. I knew of Earnie Davis, but more as a distant person of history and record holder of football fame. I didn’t know about him. Growing up as a white minority in a pre-dominantly black neighborhood I’ve experienced black-on-white and white-on-black racism. It’s a deplorable and degrading act, no matter which side perpetuates such behavior.

The movie is simply a great biography movie, of a great man who helped usher in a new feeling of pride, and shattered ceilings for his community.

Entertainment is big business. Walk through any retail outlet with movies on Blu-ray or DVD, audio on CD, and more video games you can shake a stick at. The choices are virtually limitless. The selection is indeed so vast, one has to question the validity of it all.

With so much noise it’s easy to get lost in all but the most successful movies, music and games. Hundreds of mainstream movies were released in 2010. Add indie and foreign films, and that number crawls into the thousands. Taking into consideration just the hundreds of mainstream movies made in America last year, and you can see how it’s easy for new media creations get lost in the mix.

Overview
In the day and age of Blu-ray why on earth would one review a DVD? Simply put, DVD collections are still huge, and Jurassic Park has not yet been released on Blu-ray. What’s amazing is how well the 14 year old DVD technology holds up to today’s standards. Granted, with DVD’s lack of resolution compared to Blu-ray, medium and far shots don’t have a ton of detail, but close shots can look amazingly good.

Some of the news I’ve been reading…

APnews
Study tracks concerns about 3-D TV sets

CNET
Radiohead loves Web but sees shortcomings

Having a home theater today couldn’t be more of a cost saving entertainment mecca during harder economic times. A home theater can provide all of your entertainment needs with little need for much else (as long as you don’t mind becoming a bit of a TV junky).

As computer processing capabilities increase in home theater equipment, so does the lure of manufacturers to pile on odd interfaces and features that simply don’t work, can be awkward to use, and at their worst – are so complex that consumers simply live with components not setup correctly.

It’s an ever-moving pendulum in the consumer electronics world. There’s times when consumer electronics are just packed with quirky esoteric features, then manufacturers get a better at understanding of how people actually use their products, and pull back features to make their home theater components easier-to-understand and use.

The pull back is usually not voluntary, and is usually triggered through competition. Then companies attempt to follow suit and learn from the competition.

With flawless Blu-ray playback and DVD upconverting capabilities, the PS3 may have finally hit the entertainment mark by being perhaps one of the best home theater components you can buy.  Oh… and it plays next-generation HD games to boot!

I’m also a huge fan of the Wii and X-Box 360, but the PS3 transcends those (in a home theater sense) by being able to replace an upconverting DVD player and providing Blu-ray playback. I don’t even use the gaming aspect of the PS3 at all, as the games I have for the Wii and X-Box 360 feed my gaming addiction.

Most consumers know Blu-ray offers HD video quality, but it also offers HD surround sound formats that can have huge impact on the sound performance of your home theater. However, bringing these HD surround formats home can be a bit of chore due to complexity, connections issues, and just setting up the player.

Unlike standard DVD, where one digital audio connection serves all the audio formats, there’s more then one way to setup a Blu-ray player to integrate HD surround into your home theater.

It’s easy to caught up in the upgrade and improvement bubble wherein your home theater is in constant flux. This is especially true when it comes to Blu-Ray versus DVD now that HD-DVD is gone. For home theater nuts, it’s a never-ending love… until, that is, you reach your personal home theater nirvana.

The nirvana moment may never come unless you take a step back to realize how good the home theater you’ve built actually is. How good? Try way better than theater quality!

Blu-ray has won the high-definition DVD war. Honestly both HD-DVD and Blu-ray offered high-quality HD movies and it was a total shame that the war had to occur in the first place. The animosity of consumers in online forums was unprecedented as they argued for whichever format they “invested” in.

I was on neither side as I was willing to buy both HD-DVD and Blu-ray. About five times in the last year I was really close to buying a standalone Sony Blu-ray player. I did get an HD-DVD player, but I got it on the cheap at $150 (at the time the cheapest player was $299) as an X-Box 360 add-on.

These two high-definition DVD formats have been battling for a couple years now and after living with HD-DVD for the better part of a year I can honestly say I’m not impressed. The image and sound is better on HD-DVD than on standard DVD, but not so much so that I’m willing to spend 2-3 times as much on new releases for the benefit. At $30-$40 per new release movie, the value proposition just fails. With every movie not available on both high-def formats, I’ll be watching my standard DVD collection for a long time.

Created in the early 90s and released as a consumer product in 1996, DVD has been around a while. While 10+ years is a long time for any format, the standard-definition DVD format continues to offer astounding picture quality on both standard-definition TVs and large widescreen HDTVs. With all the talk and hype about Blu-ray and HD-DVD one would think that DVD will soon be obsolete, but that couldn’t further from the truth.

I recently jumped head long into the high-definition DVD format mix when I picked up an HD-DVD drive addition to the X-Box 360. I ran into absolutely no hardware issues as the drive worked flawlessly, but my experience with actually purchasing content was a major source of frustration.

Over the last year the industry has been touting 1080p as “Full HD”. Giving the false presumption that you’re not getting the entire HD signal or worse yet, confusing consumers into thinking that anything not 1080p isn’t worth getting.

There’s been a growing trend to have home theater equipment act like computers, which also imparts the lack of reliability, glitches, and incompatibility normally associated with the computer industry.

Consumer Alert!
CES happened and the format war has played out in the high-definition DVD market, with HD-DVD in one corner and Blu-ray in the other, each touting certain technological reasons why their format is better. At the show each group launched their product release dates and specs, and while everyone in the media’s focus has been on the format war, few have looked at the heavy-handed copy protection schemes employed by both formats.

HD-DVD will start popping it’s way out within a year, and what would a new DVD format be without the industry format war. On one side, you have the blue laser people who want to use an entirely new laser that writes and reads data lines that are much finer than the current DVD format. On the other side, are those who want to utilize the current DVD format’s laser combined with new compression technologies to fit more data on the current DVD format.