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Jabba · 01-06-2007, 10:38 AM

Ok we have a new TV king with the monster that RC45 has now, so I shall throw my hat into the ring with my new HD projector and a couple of other toys.

First we have an infocus 163" 720p HD projector zoomed (unzoomed I guess you could get to over a 300" screen easy...if you can find a big enough wall).

Its a lot less noisy than my last projector, a lot brighter, quicker start up and shut down times and no motion blur. Only bad point really is that it doesn't support 1080i/p....maybe next year...

I watched all six star wars movies in HD over xmas back to back from 5pm to 9am with a break for food etc, the first 3 were 1080i rips and were indeed breathtaking, a true "movie theatre experience" from this beast.

8/10

Second we have a modded xbox 360 connected to a media PC, this is a nice idea but it doesn't support many HD formats apart from WMV. You can "transcode" other formats such as Divx and Xvid on the PC with 3rd party software and stream them to the xbox, however with mixed and messy results. Games are of course excellent and "backup games" are free !

5/10 for media streaming and 7/10 for gaming.

Next we have a SnaZio SZ1350 High Definition Network DVD player, this is better than the Xbox for streaming media as it supports nearly all the HD formats and much more such as a built in upscaling DVD player for all your old disks. Sadly this device doesn't support the all important h.264 codec that all the decent HD movies are encoded in (which you can download for free

)

http://www.pluggedin.tv/SnaZio-SZ135...=2&category=12

6/10

Lastly its the good old PC directly connected to the projector which plays everything, thanks to the good old karma I have already built a nice collection of over 50 HD movies which take up less than 900 GB and all available on tap without even opening a disc box up. The downside is that I need to run my conroe E6400 at 3 ghz plus to get 100% smooth video from 1080i movies such as the star wars prequels.

8/10

I hope to get a PS3 when they hit the UK as I am going with blu-ray as the discs are almost double the capacity of toshiba hd and are therefore more useful to me.

I hear TG might be shot in HD soon, if thats the case then I think I will upload the usual hi-res TG features first, followed by HD versions shortly after. Anybody that doubts HD hasn't seen it set up properly, as RC45 will probably confirm its a real bitch to get a good picture of and pictures never really do it justice, the blurry one at the end with the Xbox360 is just for scale !