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  1. Brent Hutto

    The Dark Knight changing Aspect Ratio feels like a Joke

    I guess it's all good until we get a director whose "vision" is to give the focus puller the day off and let his 3-year-old play with yanking the lens back and forth while he's shooting. Unless it's in a parody or otherwise having fun with the medium in an less-than-serious setting I don't have...
  2. Brent Hutto

    Blu-ray Review HTF BLU-RAY REVIEW: WALL-E

    I can't dispute what sort of story one person find compelling and another does not. But Jesse's point is correct in that the storytelling style of Disney in the Sleeping Beauty/Snow White era could hardly be more different than Pixar's today. At one extreme (let's say Finding Nemo) you can find...
  3. Brent Hutto

    Please Clarify, Is anyone actually getting decent/good PQ from SD DVD's on HDTV's?

    Some of our regular DVD's look spectacular on our Panny plasma and Panny BD30 Blu-Ray player. Those DVD's looked very good with the old DVD player and 36" Sony CRT as well. The DVD of North by Northwest for instance looks as good as most Blu-Ray discs. Some of our regular DVD's look very...
  4. Brent Hutto

    ipod classic as audio source - sound quality problem

    I'm not sure what seems too good to be true. The "dock" connector on the bottom of the iPod makes available line-level audio prior to being sent to the headphone amp section of the iPod's chipset. So that gets amplified by a somewhat more robust (higher current, drives complex loads better)...
  5. Brent Hutto

    Blu-ray Review HTF BLU-RAY REVIEW: WALL-E

    I must say the picture quality on this Blu-Ray disc is beyond reproach. I'd bet a nickel the DVD version of Wall-E has some loss of detail (softening) or compression artifacts during the dusty brownish scenes near the beginning of the movie but it looks crisp and perfect on our 50" screen. And...
  6. Brent Hutto

    Nightmare Before Christmas Blu-ray coming 8/26 (Features and specs announced)

    At the time you choose to play the movie from the main menu, you can choose to play it with or without the New and Improved Tim Burton Exclusive Introduction which if I recall correctly lasts about 38 seconds, more or less. It's not really much of a feature.
  7. Brent Hutto

    ipod classic as audio source - sound quality problem

    I have a little white plastic adapter that plugs into the "dock" connector on the bottom on my iPod and then has a 1/8" mini-jack to which I connect my headphone amp with a patch cord. Not asking the gutless amp-on-a-chip in the iPod to drive the complex load of the headphones makes a pretty...
  8. Brent Hutto

    Blu-ray Review HTF BLU-RAY REVIEW: WALL-E

    We're going to watch Wall-E tonight but as a teaser last night we watched Presto and it was amazing how much more detail we could see (and hear) compared to either of the two times we saw it at the Multiplex. Of course neither time did we manage to score a digital-projection showing but still it...
  9. Brent Hutto

    Blu-ray Review HTF BLU-RAY REVIEW: WALL-E

    By "older Disney films" do you mean Snow White or are we talking about The Aristocats?
  10. Brent Hutto

    Blu-ray Review HTF BLU-RAY REVIEW: WALL-E

    The TV advertisements are billing Wall-E as being "From the Studio That Brought You Finding Nemo and Cars..." Are they kidding me? Cars? I guess the ad-writers think Brad Bird is chopped liver and The Incredibles isn't worth mentioning. I think Wall-E is Pixar's best work to date and find...
  11. Brent Hutto

    ipod classic as audio source - sound quality problem

    You need to be using the line outs. There are various complaints about the headphone-output sections of the different iPod models but none of them are exactly audiophile quality, at least not if "audiophile" means people that spend hundreds of dollars on interconnect cables. For that matter the...
  12. Brent Hutto

    Torn between two sets...PLEASE help!

    Yeah, it's slower than our old DVD player (which was no speed demon). When you put a disk in you'll get stuff on the screen in about half a minute I'd say. But if the disk has those Java menus (seems to be most disks) you'll get a little icon while the menu finishes loading for close to another...
  13. Brent Hutto

    Torn between two sets...PLEASE help!

    Well, to me standard definition TV programs look kinda washed out. They looked washout out on our previous CRT, too (Sony 36XBR800). On the other hand I've been very pleased with regular DVD's. When I brought the new TV and Panasonic BD30 Blu-Ray player home and hooked them up the first thing I...
  14. Brent Hutto

    Torn between two sets...PLEASE help!

    Well, I only spent half that on a TH-50PX80U and so far after a month it still makes me sit back and go Wow every time I fire up a Blu-Ray disk or watch an NFL game. I don't know for sure about the '800U but the Panny like we bought was running in a non-torch mode in Best Buy when I was...
  15. Brent Hutto

    Torn between two sets...PLEASE help!

    From 11 feet if I had the physical space and the budget for a 58" television I'd get it. Our distance is 8 feet and 50" seems just about right, although I think 46" would have been fine 42" was way too small. Your distance is three screen widths back from the display and IMO that's just about...
  16. Brent Hutto

    Gizmodo: How Criterion Hones Its Restoration Magic for HD

    Well I redid my Amazon pre-order to get The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Third Man and of course Chungking Express which is the real prize of the bunch. I also added The Last Emporer, aspect ratio cavils notwithstanding, because I remember it being quite a spectacle in its original release and...
  17. Brent Hutto

    Gizmodo: How Criterion Hones Its Restoration Magic for HD

    OK, so I've preordered Chungking Express and The Third Man and would definitely like to get Walkabout which I've always read about but never seen. I'll think about The Man Who Fell to Earth one day but the prospect isn't really thrilling at the moment. And 400 Blows is one I ought to see before...
  18. Brent Hutto

    WTF - Opening Credits of Thunderball on BR are Pillarboxed

    Agreed on the silliness of comments like "punch in the face". But even though I'm past getting worked up over geeky stuff I understand perfectly how frustrating this is to some people. We've all bought DVD releases that were compromised under various least-common-denominator rationalizations but...
  19. Brent Hutto

    Which Panasonic Plasma?

    Our television only cost a thousand bucks and has very limited service-mode controls so we never seriously considered paying for a professional calibrator's services. That said, I think you can achieve an awfully good picture using a combination of advice gleaned online and a hour spent with a...
  20. Brent Hutto

    Best AV Receiver in the $400 to $700 Range?

    To second the recommendation for the Onkyo TX-SR606 you can easily find it on sale somewhere on any given day for the low end of your price range. Not only is a solid-performing AVR with the ability to switch HDMI sources it has the miraculous Audessey 2EQ setup feature (plus Audessey's...
  21. Brent Hutto

    Which TV?

    Buy a decent plasma TV (Panasonic, Pioneer, etc.), hook it up, watch whatever you like on it. The whole burn-in thing is totally an Internet myth. Yes you can permanently burn out pixels on a plasma television but not by playing video games for a few hours here or there and certainly not by...
  22. Brent Hutto

    Why Doesn't Either the Length or the Width Fill the Screen?

    No, you're right. Zooming and stretching and all that stuff does distort the image in most cases. But a 4:3 broadcast of a widescreen movie is only sending out a teensy, tiny little bit of a picture. Sometimes it's worth the distortion to make the thing big enough to see by zooming in. A...
  23. Brent Hutto

    Gizmodo: How Criterion Hones Its Restoration Magic for HD

    I have a pre-order in for Chungking Express as I'm a Kar-Wei Wong fan but have never seen that movie. Which of the other initial Criterion titles are a good bet? I've seen Bottle Rocket (two snaps, "hated it") and probably caught Man Who Fell To Earth on TV at some point but don't recall it in...
  24. Brent Hutto

    Finally making the Blu-ray jump...

    When we bought our first flat-panel TV (a nice, inexpensive 50" Panasonic) a few weeks ago I wanted capabilities of both Blu-Ray and the new audio formats. So we got a BD30 (previous model not nearly as good a deal as the BD35) and an Onkyo TX-SR606 for a total about a hundred dollars under your...
  25. Brent Hutto

    Reciever/Speaker setup question

    That's a good point...if/when I ever get around to setting up a stereo listening rig again the pair of speakers I paid 400-odd big, fat late-70's dollars for still sound better to me than anything I could buy now for a few hundred bucks. They're in the closet patiently waiting to be brought out...
  26. Brent Hutto

    More Than A Few Words About the New Panasonic DMP-BD35

    And IMHO life is very good for Home Theater owners who have been able to do an upgrade cycle lately. We sat out 5+ years of incremental improvements, including waiting for the software format wars to end, and then made the jump recently to plasma and Blu-Ray. My goodness what an experience...
  27. Brent Hutto

    Reciever/Speaker setup question

    I'm pretty sure Gene's "oops" is correct. That low-pass is just an LFE thing, the rest works however you set the speakers. For that matter the rest of Gene's suggestions are right, too...including the Bose part. I'm a big fan of the Audessey processing and IMO using Bose speakers with their...
  28. Brent Hutto

    Reciever/Speaker setup question

    Set the sub's crossover to as high as possible. Your receiver (including the Audessey's DSP) will make sure only the correct frequencies get sent to the subwoofer. The crossover introduces rolloffs and phase effects that just get in the way of letting the AVR crossover work as intended. No...
  29. Brent Hutto

    Reciever/Speaker setup question

    I think Audessey (at least Onkyo's implementation) errs on the side of sending bass to the sub. As it should IMO since it allows the speakers and the amplifier driving them to function more effectively if they're not trying to reproduce the bottom octave or two. A halfway-decent subwoofer is...
  30. Brent Hutto

    Sony BDP-S350 Blu-ray Player

    I bought one of the $35 ones from Radio Shack and two $27 ones from Target (both were plus sales tax, of course). The ones at Target are the cheapest I found locally. Of course a few days later our computer video monitor crapped out and the one I replaced it with came with...an HDMI cable. Drat...
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