We just ran into a new Blu-Ray player problem. The problem manifests itself during the boot process where only a small window of the video is visible in the center of the screen. We tried to play Crank 2 on our Sony BDP-BX1 Blu-Ray player. The boot process appeared to work fine until the first full video scene is supposed to appear, which is a movie preview. Only about a 10 … [Read more...]

Sony, Samsung, Panasonic and other HDTV manufacturers appear to be positioning themselves for new 3D movie technology introductions in 2010. Several recent articles on consumer electronics web sites and news sites indicate that major television manufacturers are getting ready to introduce new 3D movie features for home theaters in 2010. At the 2009 Consumer Electronics … [Read more...]

Both the Wall Street Journal and Reuters report that several Hollywood movie studios are talking with management at Google's YouTube video viewing web site regarding the possibility of providing streaming video of Hollywood movies through YouTube. It appears that Sony, Lion's Gate, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Warner Brothers would like to explore the possibility of offering rental … [Read more...]

3D movies can be a special treat for anyone who loves special effects. The selection of 3D movies available on DVD and Blu-ray is very limited, because a 3D movie has to be filmed using special 3D cameras and techniques. Many people who view 3D movies are dissatisfied with the quality. Ghosting, loss of colors, strange flashes of color, and other anomalies are frequent … [Read more...]

The Digital Entertainment Group has reported that Blu-ray disc sales doubled for the first quarter of 2009, as compared to the same quarter in 2008. There are many reasons behind this. Consumers spent $407 million dollars on Blu-ray discs in the first quarter of 2009. Sales of Blu-ray players were also up 25% from the previous year. The reasons behind the jump in sales … [Read more...]

As American television broadcasts switch from analog to digital, some people are reporting reception problems where they can no longer receive broadcasts from weaker television stations. At the time of this writing, about one-third of the 1,800 television broadcast stations have already made the switch to digital transmissions in advance of the new June 12, 2009 deadline. … [Read more...]

There were some very hopeful 3D home theater technology demonstrations at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. I only had one day at the show and there were 2700 exhibitors. Fortunately, there were only a few areas that I needed to focus on and home theater 3D technology was one of them. 2009 could be the year that 3D technology for home theater and … [Read more...]

Liquid crystal shutter technology has been around for several years, but until recently was pretty much limited to CRT televisions due to high refresh rate requirements that could not be achieved with most LCD or plasma HDTVs. Today, both plasma and LCD televisions are available with high refresh rates, so the time is right for 3D home theater technology to play a much larger … [Read more...]

There is no question that Sony's Blu-ray high definition DVD won the format wars. But at the time when Toshiba decided to drop out of the fight and killed its HD DVD format, Blu-ray features were still in their infancy and did not add very much in the way of features beyond simple higher definition. The Blu-ray standard has evolved since then and both discs and players have … [Read more...]