With the announcement of a new line of Macbook and Macbook Pro laptops from Apple, I had to stop by the local Apple store and check them out. From the website it looked like the Firewire port was missing from the entry level Macbook. With video editing being such a large part of the iLife experience, I couldn’t believe this feature would be missing from a new product. However, when I entered the store, my suspicions were confirmed, the Firewire port was indeed missing. With all the thought that went into designing these new machines, it’s hard for me to believe Apple would leave this out. Any video amateur or professional is now essentially forced into buying the $2k+ pro model if they want to plug in many digital video cameras. After looking at the specs for both machines, it would seem the Firewire port is the largest differentiating factor now aside from size. Apple’s even dropped the standard FW400 port on the Pro in favor of a single FW800 port. This makes sense to me in that it seemed a bit redundant to have both. Perhaps most Macbook users don’t use the FW400 port. If so, this probably won’t turn out to be a problem. I personally haven’t used mine except to hook up an external drive once, but if I ever wanted to get into video editing again it would certainly come in handy. That said, the new Macbooks are quite a piece of engineering to behold. Check out the video on the new Macbook site to see just how much went into its creation.
Category Archives: Tech
Australia to implement government mandated content filtering
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081016-net-filters-required-for-all-australians-no-opt-out.html
This is truly scary stuff. If you think this could never happen here, think again.
Going HD with the Samsung BD-P1500
I’ve been dying to get an HD media player for the home theater for a long time now, but the format war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray and high prices have kept me away until now. I noticed a few weeks back that Blu-Ray players had been coming down in price. With a number of units dropping just below the $300 mark and a few even coming close to $200, I started looking around. After looking at all the models available I set my sights on the Samsung BD-P1500. The 1500 is a midrange BD player that isn’t too expensive (generally about $269 at the time I wrote this) and has most of the features of the higher end players. It also doesn’t hurt that I found it at the local Best Buy in an open box for only $199. Factoring in my reward zone discount and credits, I was able to walk out the door with the player and a copy of Iron Man for less than $200. Setup was a snap. I’ve had a progressive scan JVC 7-disc DVD changer for a while now. I sacrificed the component (and therefore the progressive scan) connections for the Samsung player, added an optical connection to my reciever and had it all working in about 10 minutes. After watching Iron Man last night, my only complaint about the system so far is the heat the BD-P1500 produces. (and it produces quite a bit) I’m going to try propping the unit up on some rubber feet for better airflow (the unit is passively cooled) and see if that works. If not, an Antec USB-powered laptop cooler may be the way to go. Since all of my components are housed in an enclosure, the heat is a huge concern. I know the DVD player doesn’t take well to heat, so hopefully this is a problem that can be solved easily. Having already experienced HD picture quality, I wasn’t too surprised with that aspect of it. The sound was what blew me away initially. Being something of an AV snob, I’ve been accustomed to turning up my nose at anything less than DTS. Dolby Digital never could match the performance of DTS on DVD. While that may still be the case, I was quite surprised by the level of detail in the Dolby Digital True HD track on Iron Man. Hopefully this will prove to be true of DTS on BD as well.