As a follow up to the earlier introspective, a post more in keeping with my usual content: New Toys.
I should warn you that this is a fairly long post and may be of little interest to those without techno joy.
So the wonderful world of a new flat (more on that later … what? You’d rather have this in bit size pieces or in one big lump. Besides I have a quota to fill here and I’m already 29 posts out for January) has meant that I have had the opportunity to fulfil a couple of purchases to make life a little more enjoyable.
The first 3 items are all in a common vein and are all supporting my habit of watching movies:
1)The highlight of the living room is the new Sony Bravia 40” X Series HD ready LCD TV 
It’s a wonderful TV with an amazing picture and some serious connectivity options. it’s the first new TV I’ve owned since 1998 and I plan to have this one for at least 10 years. besides being HD ready with HDMI ports all over the place it also accepts native input from my laptop, HD input from the Wii and pretty much anything else. The menus contain a bewildering array of options to allow you to sharpen and tweak colour settings and images. The whole system plays very nicely with:
2)a Sony Blu-Ray disc player. Boy am I glad that Blu-Ray is winning the race for HiDef formats. The player has a couple of interesting features including the boot up time of a 386 but once it’s up and running the results are very impressive. It was part of the bundle with the TV and the main reason for actually bothering with this wonderful piece of next gen technology is simple: the payer has a magic gnome inside that takes existing DVDs and up samples them to 1080i complete with sharpening, artefact removal and general tidy ups. This means that the majority of DVD’s I already own look amazing played through it. I’ve done direct comparisons with other DVD players and can safely say that they don’t come close!
I can safely say that the Blu-Ray revolution is leaving me cold – most movies simply don’t look / sound sufficiently better to justify the £20 price tag and a lot of the remastered stuff is just plain ass. I mean come on people – Bullitt was made in 1968 and I don’t give a damn how well you rescan the film stock – it’s never going to be good enough to justify 1080i resolution. That said I suppose there is some mileage in the “true copy” argument but really not enough to part me from twenty quid.
I do have a small selection of Blu-Ray discs but these are mostly new movies (indeed I think half of them are seriously CGI flicks) and were shot on digital stock, edited and post processed with HD in mind. For example, Black Hawk Down looks and sounds amazing on the:
3)Sony digital surround sound system – standard fare – 5.1 surround with a nice beefy sub and some pretty respectable surround speakers make watching any movie (and some TV) a joy. Of course there was a slight hiccup in getting true digital Dolby surround out of the blu-ray player (who’d have thought that you have to plug the DVD into the Amp first and with two cables?) but since I’ve sorted that out it’s fully up and running. Additional features include an analogue radio (FM / AM) built in and some pretty nifty compression options to tidy up iPod playback and watch late at night without waking the neighbours.
So that’s what’s taking up space in the corner of the living room. We don’t have Sky (yet) so am limited to analogue terrestrial broadcast for day to day TV but the combination of amazing DVD / Blu-Ray playback and PC hookup for downloaded stuff means I’m not exactly short of things to watch.
Should I run out of material? Well there’s always the Wii (complete with some very cool games indeed) the N64, the SNES and new house mate’s PS2 to play with. If I’m being honest everything except the Wii does look a little shit on the telly but the SNES is over 15 years old - I’m just pleased it still works!
There’s more of course but as they fit neatly into a domestic post you can have them in post 3 of 3 for today …
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