SHARP AQUOS D92U SPECS ARE HERE

I've been in contact with Sharp USA about the upcoming D92U series. As I've mentioned before, this was the best display screen I saw at CES 2007. The only thing better was the $32,000 Sony 70" XBR, so we won't count that! I've had hundreds of hits requesting info on the D92U series alone, so if you want it, leave a post with your email address and I'll get it to you.

The D92U should be trickling into retail stores around April, available in 42",46" and 52" sizes. But as a side note, Sharp have not demo'd this display with film, or animation based material yet, so we really will have to wait for a review on this, but as it stands the demo material was jaw-dropping, this could be the one to beat!

Update: Here are some pics I took off the D92U 46" and 52" at CES 2007 in Las Vegas. If you want a high res image of it, free subscribers, shoot me an email and I'll get it to you.

Update 3/9/2007: It has been confirmed that banding is still an issue on this Aquos series. Looks like Sharp are neither listening to consumer feedback nor learning from their mistakes on older models. If you can put up with the banding or if it just doesn't bother you like it does to purists, this still makes for a great LCD performer. But I would wait for them to drop the premium pricing.



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$599 BLU-RAY BDP-S300 PLAYER DUE SOON FROM SONY!

Sony plans to release the BDP-S300 Blu-ray player with a suggested price of $599, that's almost half the price of the current $999 BDP-S1 Blu-ray player. Sony claims that it will have the same capabilities of the current player but will be more compact to resemble current DVD players.

Features include DVD upconversion up to 1080p and 24 frames per second output on Blu-ray discs, support for standard audio CDs, decoding of Dolby Digital Plus (although no support for Dolby TrueHD or DTS HD-Master format),and support for the xvYCC color space which suggests HDMI 1.3, but has not been confirmed as yet.

Expected ship date is around the end of the 3rd quarter 2007. In additon, the company claims that by year end they expect their Blu-Ray player to drop even more to the $299-$399 price range in a move to drive sales up and HD-DVD out.

Update: The $299-$399 Blu-Ray player pricing towared the end of the year was a misquote from the Sony rep "Stan Glasgow." Apparently what he meant was that the "$299 price would be the tipping point where the average consumer would start to consider buying a Blu-ray player."

TV DOESN'T LOOK GOOD IN THE STORE!!!

You read a review for a potential TV purchase, and all fingers are pointing towards this one particular set. You get to the store and it looks horrible. Why aren't things adding up? Were the reviews off their mark?

More than likely the problem is the fact that when you go to your local electronics store, they don't have a direct source going to each tv. This means they don't have a DVD player or Blu-Ray player for EACH tv like you would at home. They have one source (player) and split it over however many tv are there. Imagine, 50 tv's and one dvd player. When this is done, the signal quality going to each screen is heavily degraded. Add to this, the fact that store's literally pull the tv out of the box and set it up as is, no calibration (see this article why calibration is so important), just some basic menu setting changes. What you're left with is a fairly poor representation of each displays capabilities.

When buying an HDTV, it's always a good idea to have the sales people hook up a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player directly to the display you're interested in. As long as the store isn't too busy, they're usually happy to oblige. High end audio/video stores are almost always happy to do this. Although the display isn't calibrated, you get a much better idea of what the picture will look like at home.