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.
Category Archives: Tech
Apple gets it right with iPhone 2.1 firmware release
Based on my experience the last time I upgraded my iPod Touch, I was a bit hesitant when it came to this release. I was pleasantly surprised to see that none of the 3rd party apps were broken after the upgrade this time around. So far the iPod Touch has been rock solid on this release. The 2.0 release was pretty solid too, so it’s nice to get some stability back. (one thing that was certainly missing in the previous release) The most noticeable new feature mirrors the Genius feature of the new iTunes 8. I’m interested to see how well it works. The Genius feature is supposed to suggest music you’d like based on other things you have. It can also create playlists that go together based on the same technology. I’ll have to give it a whirl the next time I’m on the bus…
Greening my home IT infrastructure
It’s been a while since my last post, in part because work has been crazy busy and in part because I’ve been working on migrating to a “new” server at home. I finally finished the migration earlier this afternoon. The primary reason behind doing this is to achieve a 70% reduction in power usage. My old machine was a 2nd generation Athlon at 1.2Ghz and used about 108 watts. The new machine is a legacy-free (no serial or parallel ports) Compaq Evo with an Intel P4 at 1.9Ghz and uses only 30 watts. While I was at it, I also upgraded my storage capacity and moved from Windows Server 2003 to 2008. So far everything seems to be running quite well. I considered switching to Ubuntu Server, but in the end decided to stick with Windows so I could preserve my Active Directory domain. Perhaps I’ll try that in the next migration phase. (maybe when/if I move to an even lower power platform.)