Its been along time since i bought anything in the consumer electronics category. And worst than that, i haven't done much with my existing setup.
I keep looking for a another freeview box but cant find one going cheap enough to add to my current setup. remember i only need it for recording digital tv completely independent of my old freeview box. saying that i haven't looked through loot or ebay recently.
I have this itch for buying, and it might have something to do with the stuff show today. Seems I'm mistaken about the prices of Freeview boxes, because I looked on ebay again. Maybe I will treat myself to a box very soon
I finally had a real try out on panasonic's sdav20, better known for its role in tomb raider as d-snap. and the believe it or not the quality is better than i expected. I put the d-snap sd card in my ipaq and tried to play it in philips platform 4 player. but nothing came up! so i went to file explorer and it had windows media icons. so after clicking on it, windows media 9 started and played it. i thought nothing more about it.
Till on the tube home from olympia exhibition hall, i analyzed the mpeg4 file i had copied off there sd card. It turned out to be a *.asf file.
Yes that means the dsnap doesn't do real standard mpeg4 at all. it does the mpeg4 codec inside the windows media advanced streaming format container. What a con! how dare panasonic sell this fantastic device, which even i was thinking of buying on the fact it does mpeg4 when it doesn't. i'm going to investigate more into this.
But if its true, Panasonic may be laughing but I'm not!
Another interesing thing I saw at the stuff show, well actually it was the What hifi 2003 show, which is usually in the Bristol Broadmead Marriot hotel around Febuary time. Toshiba are launching a projector for the budget end of the home cinema market. Yep sub one grand! 999 pounds. No details on the web as of yet, I kind of wish I took down the model number of the projector. All I kind of remember is that its round, white and contains speaks and scart, which is very odd for a projector.
All the details I can find about it right now.
Toshiba's new Home Cinema projector created the biggest impact at this years IFA. It's show-time! Toshiba presents its new, outstanding, visually unmistakable home-cinema projector. This innovative projector does not just impress by its design, but particularly by its technical features, geared mainly for home use. Thus a Faroudja video-scaler, integrated into the LCD-projector, allows for outstanding picture quality. Three different video modes (standard, movie, and sport) round off the picture presentation (in genuine 16:9 format, of course). The ET1 projector is extreme quiet: ventilation produces merely 28 db, further reduceable by means of a bulb-saving ECO mode. Additionally, the ET1 excels with user-friendly controls and numerous plug-ins, like a scart connection, for instance. Due to its excellent price-performance-ratio, the ET1 is the perfect projector for the first-time buyer.
If I could understand German language, the word document would be useful. Did get some specs out of the word doc though.
- Widescreen 858 x 480
- Format: 16:9
- Contrast ratio: 600:1
- 130 Watt lamp
- Intergrated surround sound (2 x 5W)
- 32,0 width x 13,1 height x 32,0 length
- Supports 16.7 million colours
- VGA, SVGA / XGA-emulated i guess
- Supports RGB ( D-sub15 x 1 ), Component (YPbPr) Video, S-Video, Composite Video (RCA x 1), SCART, Audio (RCA x 2 (L/R)
- 3.4 Kilograms
