Integra's High End HD-DVD Player
Integra announced its first HD DVD player; the DHS-8.8. This $1,100 player supports HDMI 1.3, 24 frames per second output, and decoding of HD audio formats like Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD.
Pioneer's Blu-ray Player
Pioneer showed off its latest generation Blu-ray player; the BDP-95FD. This is the successor to last year's BDP-90FD model and retails for $1,000. New features include full support for HDMI 1.3a, HD audio formats like Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD, and 24 frames per second video output.
Load times for high definition DVD players are a concern for many buyers. With first generation players taking over a minute from disk insertion to actual playback, consumers were undoubtedly annoyed. The Pioneer rep kindly let us test the load time for this unit using a Blu-Ray demo disk and we measured it at 36 seconds. This is a far cry from the near instant-on nature of current DVD players, but still much better than ~2 minute times from a year ago. It's also important to note that load times can vary greatly from disk to disk depending on the amount of BDJ used.
Samsung's Dual-Format HD-DVD/BD Combo Player
Samsung was also showing off its latest next-gen high definition DVD players at the show this year. First up is the $599 BDP-2400. This player features support for the Dolyby TrueHD and DTS-HD audio standards as well as 24 frames per second output. The Samsung rep stated that the load times for this player should be around 30 seconds depending on the content. Expect availability around October.
Next up is the combination Blu-ray/HD DVD player called BDUP-5000. Samsung claims this is the first "true" Blu-ray and HD DVD player as it supports full interactive content for both formats. LG took the crown for having the first dual-format player earlier this year, however they did not fully support interactive content for both formats. Although LG seems to have corrected this issue with the BH200, Samsung is claiming to have beaten it to the punch. Expect the BDUP-5000 on sale for $999 this October.
This is the first I've heard of the anamorphic business. I'm confused: given that there's no more data available to add pixels, why digitally scale up (removing some high frequency information in the process, unless there's something exceptionally clever going on) to fill the 1080 pixels of the image, then stick an additional anamorphic (expensive and complicated, and probably not quite as high quality as a "normal" lens) lens in front of the existing optical elements? What does this gain you that sticking a bog standard wide angle lens on the front of the projector (and putting a couple of bits of cardboard over the borders if your projector has a poor black point) doesn't?
It just sounds like a really complicated and expensive way of making the image worse. Am I missing something?
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