It’s Saturday night and you want to rent a movie and watch it with your family. Seems simple enough, but suddenly you have a cavalcade of choices including:

Brick and Mortar Rental Stores: You go to a store and rent a physical copy.
Delivery Service: You sign up for a subscription service such as Netflix, create a wish list of movies you want to see, and receive DVDs by mail.
Video On Demand: You select a movie to watch from a video-on-demand menu on your television and pay a fee that gets added to your cable bill.
Downloads: You go online, pay a fee and download a movie.

So many choices just to decide how you will get your movie, yet each has its pros and cons. Deciding which is the best choice is not always easy. Welcome to the world of 21st century entertainment. read more »

If what you are interested in is the best of the best, then this is the product for you. Introducing the Rolls-Royce of Blu-ray players, the Eidos 20 BD by Goldmund. The Goldmund company is a Swiss-based provider of high-end electronics for true connoisseurs with great expectations of quality. The Eidos 20 BD is the first Blu-ray player to be released by a luxury manufacturer. It embodies all of the fine craftsmanship of the Goldmund company and features the “AC-Curator” to give you top quality sound stability, picture and dynamics, the “Mechanical Grounding” which prevents vibrations that can blur picture, and the “Magnetic Damper” which is exclusive to Goldmund’s top products. read more »

“This site also demonstrates one of the great dangers of archeology, not to life and limb, although that does sometimes take place, I'm talking about folklore.” – Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) – Raiders of the Lost Ark (Lucasfilms – 1981)

Some called it a battle. Others a war. But the blue laser thing was more like a tussle…a two year tussle. HD DVD had Toshiba, the DVD Forum (that sure helped DVD-RAM?) and a few studios that were kinda, maybe, sorta on their side. Oh yeah…and Microsoft.

BD had Sony and its string of content owners, Panasonic, the CE industry and a lot of financially grateful production houses. On one side a technology leader who wanted to have a consumer presence. On the other…hardened marketing/sales. read more »

Panasonic’s new DMP-BD30 High Definition 1080p Blu-ray Disc player is the first Blu-ray player to be introduced with Final Standard Profile, a function which adds features like four Picture-in-Picture modes including Enhanced Commentary (from directors and actors), Backstage Pass, Peek Behind the Animation and Audio Mixing. And with the included SD Memory card slot, you can view JPEG images (the DMP-BD30 even converts the images to 1920x1080 resolution - perfect for viewing on a 1080p Plasma TV) and playback HD content recorded in the AVCHD format.

Technology advances include Deep Color Compatibility and HDMI 1.3B that bumps the step gradation from 8-bit 256 all the way up to 12-bit, 4,096 step gradation. To further enhance viewing, the DMP-BD30 also provides 1080/24p playback, so the consumer can enjoy the same 24-fps (frames per second) reproduction as the original movie. This eliminates the need to utilize 3.2 pull down, a process to convert 24-fps images to 60-fps, resulting in a smoother picture. read more »