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| Posted | Comment |
| roj Technology 11 August 2010 |
Kindle is now up for preorder at amazon in the UK (27th August). I nearly bought one when it was released in US but I wasn’t reading much then (too little sleep to read), but now I on the train most days I am reading a lot more so have preordered a Kindle as an early birthday present. Looking forward to seeing how these work, will also be useful in Brazil to save on carrying a load of book with me, well maybe still one or two for the beach! |
| roj Technology 11 August 2010 |
It’s been a quiet year technology wise - I let Flavia take the phone upgrade this year (a Sony camera phone), so I am still using my HTC touchdiamond and no new computer or AV upgrades either – although Flavia has just got a netbook! I have just bought a pair of wireless stereo headphones though for listening to TV / Films late at night when everyone else is in bed, what an improvement this is, sound is really good and I can turn it up enough to hear what’s going on, without waking up any babies! |
| roj Technology 25 February 2009 |
No w that the price of blu-ray players has reached the price of HD-DVD a year ago, and also are available as profile 2.0. I’ve gone dual format and bought a blu-ray player, the Sony BDP S350. I bought it just before Christmas to take advantage of the various free disc offers, in fact I ended up getting 8 blu-rays with it – one more free disc than I got with Toshiba HD EP30! So how is it? Well I like it, obviously the quality of the (picture) output is exactly the same as the HD-DVD, but the player is well built, has digital coax and optical audio outs (nice) and the sound quality is as good if not better then my EP30. For upscaling standard DVDs it’s probably not as good as the EP30, but Toshiba has always been better with DVD. However due to the S350’s quick boot up time (much quicker than the EP30) and the S350 taking the only digital audio connection to my home cinema surround sound setup, it is my DVD player of preference. I won’t be giving up my EP30 though, it’s a nice machine and I still have a lot of great HD movies picked up really cheap (eg. Blade Runner, 2001, Matrix, etc). I’ll buy a few favourites on blu and use it for rental, but won’t be building a collection yet. Prices of discs are coming down, but are still too expensive and we rarely watch films more than once. The only real question is where was this BD player a year ago? |
| roj Technology 11 August 2008 |
Well I've had my old SPV M700 (the rebranded HTC3600) mobile for a year so I was due an upgrade. I wanted to keep windows mobile and my sling player and I like HTC phones so I was thinking of getting the O2 XDA Orbit as an upgrade. That would require a switch of operators so I gave orange a call on the off chance they had a new phone coming out I didn't know about, and they did the HTC Touch Diamond, HTC's newest phone and one they are now putting their name to rather than allowing it to rebranded. This is a nice phone, windows mobile 6.1, 3MB camera, 3G+ and almost half the size of my SPV. I have the upgrade now and it really is a great looking phone, and good for browsing too (it has the new opera mini browser installed as its default browser). Funnily enough it came out on almost exactly the same day as the new iPhone, which also looks a good phone and I considered it for a minute, but settled on the new HTC. BTW HTC have installed its TouchFlo system on top of windows which allows the phone to really be used without a stylus (there still is one for when you want it). Its worth noting that HTC have been making touch phones for years, so this is not a iPhone rip off. The only negatives are that HTC decided not to add a SD slot for extra memory (4Gb is on board), and it still does not have a 3.5" stereo jack so you can't use your own head phones (you can buy an adapter but its not in the box). You can see the phone on orange here.
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| roj Technology 22 June 2008 |
I saw all the news about the Freesat launch recently, not immediately relevant to me because I have a skyHD box, the only new HD channel on offer via Freesat is ITV (which I never watch). However it did get me thinking about the spare satellite connection and my new powerful PC. I have tried DVB-T in the past in my PC and picked up a load of channels, but I ditched this once I got my Slingbox. However getting and recording HD (mostly BBCHD for now) via Freesat would be nice.
A bit of research later and I can see that if I get a DVB-S card I should be able to pick up Freesat, and for now that will include the HD channels, one day they plan to broadcast the HD over DVB-S2 but for now are on DVB-S. So I need one which will run with Vista 64 and two I narrow down on are the Hauppauge Nova S2 (DVB-S and S2 about £70)) and the Pinnacle 7010i (dual DVB-T and dual DVB-S about £35). The latter seems to be a couple of years old and is PCIe instead of PCI, but I have a spare PCIe port and I manage to pick one up from Play.com for £32 (they’ve now sold out and these are hard to come by). It installs a treat, Vista gets the drivers for me as soon as I boot up. I don’t bother to run the enclosed software, but instead try (a buy for about £10) a copy of DVBviewer, which is pretty easy to use and can scan about 500 video and audio channels over satellite). I can’t watch the HD channels because none of my H.264 codec (I had Nero and ATI) work, so I try (and buy for about £7.50) the Coreavc H.264 codec and I then pick up beautiful BBC and Luxe HD channels, the latter seems to have pretty average content, but BBCHD is worth the license fee alone. ITV HD at the moment still eludes me but I’m not losing sleep over it! I found 2 pretty helpful threads on getting this all running, one on avforms and one on digitalspy. |
| roj Technology 22 June 2008 |
Well I finally got around to upgrading my PC, now that I want to do some video editing with my HD camcorder, and play some of my HD movies on my PC (and actually not notice how slow vista is) I need an upgrade. A new AM2 motherboard (ASUS), dual core (AMD) processor, PCIe Graphics card (ASUS), Toshiba HD-DVD rom drive, some DDR2 memory (Samsung) and a new PSU (quiet IT colors 550W) later and I've practically got a new PC. So I buy a new (ASUS) case, stick all my old hardware and my XP HDD (I had a dual boot PC) in it and I have a working XP PC, using my KVM I can then start playing around with my new kit in my old Lian-Li case. Once put together I decide its time to upgrade to Vista 64 (ultimate) SP1 as well (I was running Vista x86). The PC build and O/S install is the easiest I've ever done (my 5th plus helping a few friends out now and then). The only problem I had with Vista 64 was none of my wireless adapters worked, rather than buy a new one I decided to ditch wireless and get a set of homeplugs and upgrade the whole home network to used the existing electricity cables. This is a great result, so easy and now all the PCs have network a stable access at 83Mbps. The whole PC build / upgrade cost only £200 with another £60 odd for 3 homeplugs. I now also have two PCs which is handy if you’re running something long and intensive (like HD movie conversion). |
| roj Technology 11 March 2008 |
Well BluRay has won the war but at the moment HD-DVD players are selling like hot cakes, and the HD-DVD films in some countries (eg. Australia and Germany) are outselling (or at least matching) BluRay titles. So what's going on? Well since Toshiba (and then Microsoft) announced they will stop producing HD hardware the price of the players has plummeted, but canny consumers have realised that they can buy into HiDef very cheaply and wait for BluRay to finish their players and get them to an affordable price. Remember there is still no guarantee BluRay will replace SD (standard definition) DVD before the next big thing (HD downloads etc) comes along. Because for many ordinary users (who are only just thinking of getting an HiDef capable TV and an upscaling SD DVD player) the difference between HD and SD isn't perceived to be that big.
For someone who has had SkyHD for nearly 2 years I can see the difference and enjoy watching HiDef consent, but I will only pay a small premium on SD content for it. Ie. HD-DVD. You can now get a Toshiba EP30 on Play.com for under £50, it still includes 2 films and an HDMI cable (its fine don't be tricked into buying an expensive imitation, the signal is digital, ie. 1's and 0's), but they also offer one with 7 free films fro £70. Amazon will surely respond with an offer to match. The UK HD software market has not seen price drops to match the hardware, but with HD-DVD you can buy discs from anywhere and the US (Amazon.com and deepdiscount.com), Germany (Amazon.de) and Australia (dvdcrave and ezydvd) all have title from £5 (in some cases cheaper than the SD DVD equivalent!). It just a case of not showing your hand to early, the titles you want will come down in price, but will also go out of stock and potentially never be replaced, so it its down to who blinks first! With 800 titles world wide there's enough to keep you going until BluRay is finished, affordable and definitely going to be here to stay. |
NB: All views and opinions on this website are my own, and not those of any employer,
or institute related to my research.