Bourne Ultimatum HD-DVD vs a bunch of Blu-ray movies+Kodak C613 vs Nikon L11...

 

Got back home this weekend, Nikon L11 DC has come in finally... Compare to Kodak C613, this Nikon doesn't do any better in terms of the image quality and functionality... The Nikon doesn't have a viewfinder either, seems like the manufacturers are trying to get rid of viewfinders for all these low-end point and shoot digital cameras?? The menu system is really unintuitive on this Nikon, maybe I'm not playing with it long enough, but with the 3 brands I've tried (Nikon, Kodak, and Canon), Canon definitely has the most intuitive menu system. I feel like I need to read the manual for Nikon which I usually don't read any manuals... Nikon's build quality is a lot better than Kodak, metal alloy body feels very sturdy and looks sexy. It came with a non-standard USB cable again! Different than Kodak, so now I've got 3 USB cables for three different brands (Canon's is standard, could be used for charging my SIXAXIS controller or used for other devices)! Another thing is that it seems doesn't take rechargeables, when I put two freshly charged 1.25V into it, it starts with low battery warning, don't know why. I need to try some others when I got time... So this is a short review for Nikon L11.

And this morning, Bourne Ultimatum came in surprisingly! Ordered this HD-DVD/DVD combo from fye this time, also the second time I pre-ordered something. First time is Spiderman Trilogy Blu-ray, but that's two days before the release, last minute decision since a $50 amazon promotional gift certificate was about to expire and had nothing to buy... received way after the official release. This time I pre-ordered about a month ago, and came in 3 three days before the release date, such a great feeling to get the disc earlier than most of the people! Back to the cameras, I used both of them to take some pictures... Ironically used Nikon to take HD-DVD, and Kodak to take Blu-ray, shouldn't it be the other way around?? Here is the pictures... Shrinked down to fit the browser for better viewing. The original pictures are bigger than 1MB, over the limit at photobucket which is the picture storage service I'm currently using, so unfortunately I can't post the originals for comparisons... Plus these two cameras are both low end, no point to take them seriously anyways...

Bourne Front, I don't know why I'm doing this, I could've just used my scanner to get the images, much better than the blurred images here... (Nikon L11):

Bourne Back (Nikon L11):

Blu-ray movie collections front row - mostly unopened yet, watched ones are on the back row, 25 discs plus one crappy Gundam PS3 game so far and counting (Kodak C613):

Another notice is that to left of the first blu-ray is my center speaker, one of the most important components in a home theater system. Furthest to the right is DVD - Jericho, the third TV DVD Boxset I've purchased. First two being Jessica Alba's Dark Angel Season 1 and Season 2... Jericho is the first show I've followed closely since it's first broadcasting, didn't miss the first 10 episodes until had a schedule change, had to wait the DVDs... I do get a chance to record the last six episodes in Hi-def when I finally got an HDTV capture card this summer. (have to admit that compare to HD, the DVD looks like crap, sound is OK though)

Impression about Bourne Ultimatum - DVD side:

     This disc is a double sided combo disc, one side HD-DVD, the other side DVD. Since I don't have an HD-DVD player yet, I can only watch DVD side... Watched the movie this afternoon while doing rebates... Video: this transfer is a lot better than the previous two, kind of close to how a great DVD should look like (eg: Lord of the rings extended version), and do have film like looking, kind of reminds me when I watched it in the theater. Sound: as expected, the dynamic range is huge, very aggresive, loud gun shootings, fightings, and explosions while conversations are very clear even though it's only a dolby digital soundtrack. Only thing is that can't hear lots of surround sound kicking in, maybe due to I'm not sitting in the center. Seems on recently releases, dolby digitals got a lot better, I've heard quite a few impressive soundtracks using this codec such as Transformers, Ratatouille, these are getting very close to the DTS soundtracks. Extras: When the movie ends, it goes to extras menu directly, lots of extras, resembles to those on the first two Bourne movies including deleted scenes and makings of the movie, don't have time to watch those, cuz I want to watch them using the U-control feature on the HD-DVD side...