Laser Printers Comparisons - Brother MFC-L2700DW vs HP2200D vs HP1018 vs Pantum P2502W

 

 

So since I’m going back to school, I have more stuff to print. I’m not ready to going completely digital yet, I prefer most of the stuff to be printed for reading. Digital versions made it easy for searching based on keywords, but when actual reading, marking notes, or cross referencing etc, I still found paper to be much better. Anyways, the aging HP2200D while worked OK (except for some occasional paper jamming) for light printing over the past 3 or so years, it can’t satisfy my needs any more. I’m looking for a better AIO laser with auto duplex function. Of course the printing cost has to be reasonable. So I settled on a brother MFC-L2700DW during the recent Staples sales. Cost me about $80 after tax.

 

 

It’s the lowest model in brother’s L27xx line (2700, 2720, 2740). These are the smallest MFC’s in their line up. This one is the slowest in terms ppm. The 2720 and 2740 has a 2.7’' touch screen display, while this 2700 has a 2 line LCD with no backlights. I actually prefer the physical buttons, but no backlights make it hard to operate under low light for scanning. (Brohter’s software is not the best, so I prefer using the machine). The highest model 2740 features a dual scanning component in ADF that can scan both sides in one pass. I rarely need to scan any documents both sides, so I can live with that. Scanning speed is on par with the EPSON Artisan 725. The 2740 also has some fancy network apps. But everything you can achieve with their mobile app.

 

 

It features a 150 page tray, which is a little bit small, but more than enough. But the output tray is so narrow and can’t accommodate to more than a few paper is a bit let down. Of course there’s a second tray that you can pull out at the back. But my space is limited I don’t want to use that option.

 

 

The brother uses a new cartridge TN-630/660. There are already third party compatible cartridges out there selling for under $25 for TN-660, the high yield one which is rated for 2600 pages at 5% ISO coverage. So the printing cost is pretty reasonable. Of course for brother, you need to consider the drum cost down the road, but I believe by the time I would need to replace that, I’m graduating from the school. The machine already came with a starter toner just like all other printers. So far I’m not happy with the printing quality though. The printing is a bit blurry and light compare to my HP2200D and a few other printers I’ll talk about later. I’m not sure if it’s a problem with the drum. There is no third party drum yet.

 

 

Well, actually the HP2200D comes with a duplex module installed already, and added network card as well. The duplex option never worked well for not even large job, say anything over 5 pages, it would jam. I had attempted to fix it up with changing all rollers, but only end up with no marginal improvement. The only fix is to use heavier paper. But I have too many free copy paper from Staples over the years… The rollers end up being sunk cost. But it’s not bad to finally motivate me to open up the printer to see what’s inside.

 

 

Well, it’s mostly mechanical rollers, linkages inside, nothing fancy for a printer that’s more than 10 years old.

 

 

Before the brother, I actually also have a HP1018, and then bought a Pantum P2502W not long before. The HP1018 is a pretty neat little printer except there’s no network option. The open air paper tray makes it easier for manual double sided printer despite no auto duplex. But the no network function is absolutely a deal breaker nowadays. I tried the printer share function from the LENOVO NAS, but it couldn’t work reliably.

 

 

The Pantum P2502W was just an impulse buy during the Christmas. It’s an exclusive item from Newegg. I’ve never heard of this brand before. It turned out to be a Chinese company. And $30 seems like a cheap enough to try it at the time. It’s very similar design of the HP1018 plus the network(WIFI only) function. First time activating the WIFI is a bit strange, has to use a USB cable attached to PC to do that. But once WIFI is activated, adding the printer to other PCs is a breeze, windows 7 can even pull off the driver automatically. (The pantum website was very unreliable and slow). The printing speed and quality is very decent, certainly matches the HP performance.

 

 

The down side is there’s no third party toner available. The replacement PB-210 toner is only available Newegg for much more than what this printer cost… I’ve read on some Chinese website that you can add powder by yourself, but I just couldn’t figure out exactly which powder are compatible.

     

 

So I’m settled on the brother for now. I’m reasonably happy with the overall performance. Just not so satisfied with the printing quality, not sure if it’s the included starter toner/drum issue. I might try some third party once the drum became available…        

Dec 2011 BD and DVD Purchase (Back to Anime?)

 

 

OK, I have to eat my words here. After bought Samurai 7 Blu-ray Box on launch, I pretty much vowed to never purchase a BD from FUNimation again. But here it goes, I just bought Basilisk and Samurai Champloo due to cheap prices. Basilisk is housed in a thin box with two Blu-ray cases, a step down from the three cases from Samurai 7. Despite it being a Veridian release, it doesn’t have the stupid Veridian label on the box and case. SONY PCL has released this title in Japan, with it’s own upscale, not sure how that looks. This one though has the standard modified English credits on openings and endings which I can never appreciate, especially on these historical titles.

 

 

Samurai Champloo, it’s a new transfer from the SD master (as indicated on the slip cover) that’s released recently. The packaging is a further step down from Basilisk. It’s three disc housed in a single BD case with a slip cover. Japan has released the same discs, but with a booklet and sold it for the standard premium price.

 

 

For DVDs, I finally got all the Eureka Seven limited edition boxes thanks to the clearance sale from Rightstuf (maybe a permanent price?). The conditions of these LE boxes are pretty good, but do take a grain of salt as they are from bargain bin. And to make free shipping, I bought the Heat Guy J DVD-BOX as a “filler”. It came with two boxes which is a surprise. I don’t know much about this series, but it’s from Director Akane Kazuki, which I liked his works (Escaflowne, Noein, and Tetsuwan Birdy).

 

The packaging is pretty nice. It’s three volumes housed in a plastic reinforced box, and four volumes housed in a standard heavy chipboard box. When all volumes are in the boxes, you can see the heat guy J’s face on the spine. The only problem is that there’s no volume number on the spine, the only way to tell the order is by product code at the bottom I guess. And it’s 26 episode (25+1 special) on seven discs.

Well, a summary for 2011: I haven’t bought a lot of discs this year, most are just unplanned random purchases due to price. Macross Frontier Movie 2 LE box certainly became THE MOST EXPENSIVE purchase I’ve made for one disc. Other memorable purchase would be Rurouni Kenshin OVA BD, which is one of my favorite OVA. I’m looking forward to 2012, hopefully there will be more worthwhile releases from Japan, particularly looking forward to any Macross BD releases.

Thoughts about webOS

 

 

Update:

HP has just released webOS 3.0.4, it makes the touchpad almost twice as fast (well, after the corresponding Govnah and UberKernal update which means still have to overclock to 1.5Ghz)

Well, just some random thoughts after installing CM7 for my HP touchpad. This maybe a rough comparison between webOS 3.0.2 vs. Android 2.3. This could be just some random rants as well… It is more expanded than the initial impression post I posted a few days ago.

Some good features about webOS 3.0.2:

1. Fairly good looking tablet interface. Dual/Triple pane, consistent design throughout the apps. Big plus for landscape mode.
2. Card system for multitasking. So that you always know what apps are running.
3. Synerge for managing multiple accounts, including many popular services.
4. Rotation lock/unlock in the notification area.
5. Good keyboard, especially with the numbers on top. Long pressing the numbers give you more features. Sometimes the keyboard layout isn’t consistent though.
6. Printer, although it only supports certain HP brand printers, it gives you easy access to print from almost every app. To bypass the limited printer support, you can install Touch2Pc Printer on your computer (this computer has to be always ON if you want to print something though)

The ugly about webOS 3.0.2:

1. Slowwww, almost everything is running slow, even after overclocking to 1.5Ghz, the apps are still running very inefficiently. Average app launching time is 5s-15s. This along with the language localization are the two real deal breaker for me to support webOS.
2. Very bad browser. The loading is extremely slow. The browser doesn’t have tabs. External links from certain sites almost never works (maybe killed by ad blocker?) And there’s no third party browser aside from advanced browser!
3. Card system takes way too much memory, you run out of memory fairly quickly. It might also be a problem trying to find the card you need.
4. Almost all the included apps didn’t have enough function. The email app doesn’t support search, nor finding labels for gmail. The calendar app won’t sync with google calendar automatically. The photo app lacks sorting, also only displays very low resolution. The video app supports practically mp4 with h.264 ONLY. The music app sometimes can’t handle unicode, can’t play music smoothly in the background.
5. Apps in HP catalog (app store) are mostly junk. What’s worst is that not a lot “HD” versions are available. I’m still puzzled why it’s so hard for developers to program some good apps. Also the apps are NOT cheap, the average is around $5-$10, many of them lack trial mode. You could end up spending a lot for crappy useless apps. The HP catalog doesn’t allow refunding.
6. Poor language localization. Well, it’s almost non-existent. With 3.0.4, it’ll add Chinese localization, but that’s about it. Poor unicode support. Both iOS and Android system support all almost all the major languages out of the box.

Now on the Android 2.3 side, the system is obviously NOT made for tablets. Even for the tablet optimized 3.0, things are not looking good either. The percentage of the “HD” versions on Android market are sparse just as HP catalog probably due to 3.0 is closed source and not too many real tablets are out there. Hopefully with the release of 4.0 ICS, things will change. The system also lacks a rotation lock/unlock function as seen in webOS. Majority of the apps are obviously designed for the cellphones, which use portrait mode most often. Or even if they do support landscape, they require manually readjust, or only rotate in certain angles, or in landscape mode, you lose access to certain function. It doesn’t have as elegant printing solution as webOS, either.

Some specific apps for directly comparison, these are the apps I use most often:

File Management:

Internalz for webOS: it’s not a native app for webOS 3.0, therefore it only supports portrait mode, but the graphics work fine. Coupled with file manager from preware, it’s a decent file manager and ipk installer for webOS.

Gemini File Manager for webOS: one of a few other options from HP catalog, $2.99. It’s a dual pane manager, supports windows SMB local network.

ES File Explorer for Android: Very versatile file manger. Supports almost every function (local, SMB, FTP) you could think of. It even has a music and video player built-in.

WiFi File Explorer for Android: manage your files via wifi. It’s a good compliment to ES File Explorer.

 

Chinese IME input:

Baidu IME for webOS: The design mimicks the native keyboard, even down to those number keys. The only problem is that it won’t remember the last input (English or Chinese), every time it seems to enforce Chinese. Also there seems to be no way to change input method like in Android, once you install this input, it will be your default keyboard.

Sogou IME for pad for Android: It is the only Chinese IME input that has a pad version. The design also resembles the webOS IME, but the number keys are not turned on by default. This is the only one that’s optimized for pad use, what can you do… Generally, I like Baidu better, if it ever gets a pad version, I would switch to it immediately.

 

Book reader:

Amazon Kindle: The webOS version has a double page design (like a real book) in landscape mode which the android version lacks. But the android version has a dictionary which can be handy for people like me who’s not a native English speaker. The webOS version also has a slightly more intuitive, clearly labeled interface.

pReader (epub) for webOS: The native alpha version is the “HD” version. It’s extremely buggy. Lots of functions such as bookmark, jumping to specific chapter don’t work. The unicode support is spotty.

FBReader (epub) for Android: It’s very light weight. It has full support for epub format. It uses ColorDict. The only function it lacks is a bookshelf function. Otherwise this would be perfect.

There are a few other good ones for Android: ireader, moon reader, Aldiko, etc. But I prefer FBReader for its performance.

Adobe reader (pdf) for webOS: It’s only pdf reader I’ve tried. It lacks a lot of important function such as bookmark, quick access to chapter. People on precentral has been spending some effort to add these missing features. But I don’t have much use on reading pdf docs anyways. It also has some problem with unicode support.

Thinkfree Office (pdf) for Android: I didn’t try it enough to conclude anything. But it does open pdf…

 

Dictionary:

Hoshidict for webOS: Has tons of dictionaries to download, and they appear to be pretty accurate. The only thing it’s lacking is online function, it doesn’t support searching for google translation or wikipedia. So it’s a very decent offline dictionary ONLY. It doesn’t support pronunciation either.

For Android: Well, there are quite a few dictionaries here. Aedict is for Japanese, ColorDict is for multi-language. For online dictionaries, you also got google translation, WWWJDIC, etc.

 

Office:

Quickoffice (doc, xls) for webOS: It gives you basic function to edit doc, docx, xls, xlsx, but you can’t insert photos, nor draw your own pictures. It has integration with dropbox.

Thinkfree office (doc, xls) for Android: Aside from the basic function, you CAN insert photos, draw your own pictures. The “free” version that comes with my LG cellphone does not have integration with google doc, but the full version supposed to have it.

 

Note taking:

Tapnote for webOS: It is keyboard based. It has integration with dropbox. But the app is not cheap, costs $5… You are better off just using Quickoffice. I got it for free from the HP weekly giveaway, thankfully…

FreeNote for Android: It has a unique keyboard, handwriting mix mode. It also combines with calendar, to-do list. The interface is a little bit messy. But overall it has probably the most flexible features among all the note taking apps. The only feature it’s missing is export formats other than the only jpg, png or pdf are much preferred, or even better doc/docx.

Picture Viewer:

Synergy (native app) for webOS: It syncs to a lot of popular online photo services aside from manage your local photos. Only problem is that it doesn’t have sort function so that your photos are all over the place. Another problem is it indexes the online photo to local device with lower resolution.

JustPictures! for Android: It syncs to a lot of popular online photo services as well. It has sort function. Account management is not intuitive, but it does work. Wish it has a double pane design as webOS.

Comic/Manga Viewer:

One of the primary reason I bought for the Touchpad is to read manga.

ComicShelf HD for webOS: This is the only comic/manga reading app available for webOS, sadly… Well, if the native photo app supports sorting by names, I wouldn’t even need this app! That is to say I’m not satisfied with ComicShelf HD at all, it has way too many limitations and it runs slow as hell. It can only read *.rar, *.zip, *.cbr, and *.cbz files, and they all have to be placed in only “comic” folder. The way it reads pictures is that it first have to unzip, unrar all pictures, therefore it could take a longgggggggg time if the zipped files are too big. Sadly it couldn’t read uncompressed images… And the moment you close the card, you lose your unpacked files. It has very poor support for unicode, your file name cannot include any foreign characters, otherwise they won’t be recognized. It doesn’t have a right to left mode. It doesn’t have a single page mode to split pictures if they are scanned in per page. Well, for $1.99, I didn’t lose much.

Manga Reader for webOS: This is the only comic/manga reading app available for webOS to read fan translated manga. It downloads manga from certain server, and display it. It can not read your own manga unlike ComicShelf HD. The quality on the downloaded manga (English fan translated ONLY) is very poor, texts are often heavily dithered, and the fan translated manga has way too many watermarks on them, between chapters could be from different groups. Occasionally there is also server problem? so that the manga cannot be downloaded completely. The functionality however is more polished than ComicShelf HD. For $2.99, you get to enjoy some fan translated work as much as you can.

Perfect Viewer for Android: Like the name suggests, it’s really perfect. It has ten times more features than ComicShelf HD, it runs ten times faster as well. It opens compressed *.rar, *.zip, *.cbr, and *.cbz files within seconds. It doesn’t care where your manga are placed, it recognizes unicode extremely well, even for those wrongly coded character downloading from Share/Winny.

ComicBricks for Android: It has pretty much the same function as Manga Reader for webOS, but it only downloads from Chinese website (which means majority of them are Chinese translated). Image quality is far better, but it also means files are larger. It can be used as standalone manga reading app as well, but I would rather use Perfect Viewer. ComicBricks for finding the manga, Perfect Viewer to view is the perfect combo for Android!

Printing:

As I said earlier, webOS features a very convenient printing system, it’s accessible from almost all apps. For Android, cloud printing is worth trying, as long as you have an HP eprinter or any computer that uses google Chrome on. The most annoying part is that it’s not integrated into the system, so you have to print it inside this app. Another one I’ve tried is printershare, which costs $12.99, but thankfully I got it from Amazon daily app… It works similarly as cloud printing as a standalone app. Only difference is that you don’t need google cloud service, thus no computer is required to print.

Video Player:

KalemSoft meida player for webOS: it supports a lot of more media file types than the native ones, avi, mkv, wmv just to name a few. Subtitle support is non-existent. Mkv works ok, but don’t expect to work on all of them. If everything fails, there’s always the streamer to do real-time transcoding from PC to touchpad.

Moboplayer for Android: it supports a few media file types (everything is done by soft decoding here, otherwise none will play, at least on current CM7 mod). But still it lacks good support for mpeg2 HD (ts, tp), wmv etc. The mkv appears to work, 720p appears to play a bit laggy, can’t seem to switch audio track if more than one track is included. Video doesn’t always have the correct aspect ratio. It does support subtitle for mkv, externally or internally. Some other considerations: MX video player, Diceplayer, Vital player etc.

For online video, there is no dedicated youtube app for webOS, instead you use the web browser. Crackle works pretty decent, even better ad block seems to do a good job at blocking any ads. Hulu, you have to install the patch from preware to work, and it works intermittently.

For CM7 mod, currently the youtube app sort of work, but sometimes the aspect ratio is not correct, sound cracks, lots of stuttering, buffering etc. Crakle app does not work, website access is spotty not to mention the quality is so poor…

 

Screenshot Taking:

WebOS support screenshot taking natively by holding “Power”+"Home” keys together. It even works in games. (Also by holding “Power”+"Home” keys longer than 30s, you can reboot the device, I only have to do it once for an app causing the system freezing up… But after I added CM7, I have to do this more often since the alpha release has some sleeping issue, as well as rebooting issue)

For Android, the CM7 mod has native screenshot by holding “Power” button (my LG phone doesn’t have this option). The quality is much better than webOS. Or alternatively, you can try shootme (root required, no longer available on market). It runs on background, you shake your phone and it takes pictures.

 

Twitter:

Spaz HD for webOS: you don’t have much choice here. Spaz HD is free, and it’s pretty much the only twitter client that’s optimized for tablet. You get all the standard functions here, including photo attachment, url shortening. I wish it can let you choose the width of column since I really only need two columns, but it enforces you to use three columns…

Glimpse for webOS: For $5, you get tons of tools in one card. And twitter is one of the many available tools. The interface closely resembles the official twitter webpage. All the major functions are there.

RSS Reader:

NomNomNom for webOS: My favorite webOS app. It revolutionizes the way I read RSS feeds. The card system works extremely well for pulling feeds with pictures and texts. I can get way more contents than the google reader way, but I also get lots more junk information… The only thing it’s missing is an integrated web browser to take you to the original site by directly clicking on the feed. It’s pointless to blow up the feed if it’s the same content, the “Get More Content” is not functioning well.

Google Reader for Android: Nothing to comment here, just wish that they could bring two panes back when they have a tablet version. With this I spent far less time reading than NomNomNom since I’m more selective by just reading the title.

Taptu for Android: OK, I’ve finally found the alternative to NomNomNom on Android platform. Taptu works similar. The difference is that NomNomNom shows three cards at a time, but taptu here shows a lot more. I still prefer NomNomNom though as you can read the entire feed.

 

HP touchpad webOS 3.0 initial impression

So I’m one of the fortunate ones who got a HP touchpad 16GB during their fire sale last week. I’ve been using this device for the weekend. And here are some of my impressions, with comparison to my phone which is powered by Android 2.2.

Overall I wasn’t super satisfied with the performance compared to my Android phone. Operations as simple as swiping between screens when multiple cards (HP’s way of multitasking) are opening. App launching speed is generally slow. Most operations require clicking the home button. There are instances when the OS prevent you from creating more cards (equivalent of force close on Android). All of these happen even after disabling logging and overclocking the device. This is very unacceptable since the hardware seems pretty good: 1.5Ghz dual core processor, 1GB memory seem all wasted. Even my 600Mhz 256MB Android phone can run multitasking very smoothly!

First about the booting time, there are two kinds of booting:
1. Normal booting, takes a long time. (My laptop with win 7 could probably boot faster)
2. LUNA restart which is required when you install patches from preware.

Wifi connection - apparently I can connect it to both 2.4G and 5G mode. Three days into using it, I figured I want to change the wifi connection, but when I’m sitting right next to my router, the damn thing cannot detect the WiFi signal (2.4g) Touchpad WiFi seems defective? Can't find any network! Sure a simple reboot will fix this problem, but it’s really not very acceptable.

The screen is 1024*768 4:3. The aspect ratio isn’t optimized for widescreen movie viewing, nor good for general web viewing. Maybe it’s just me used to the widescreen monitors… The screen is glossy, and if you look at the screen with tiliting when it’s off, you can somehow see the dots for the touch panel. The screen has a lot of backlight bleeding when viewing in the night. Overall the screen is mediocre at the best.

The storage, I got the 16GB model. When I got it, I have only around 11GB available space. The app size is usually pretty big, could be about the same size as windows program. And webOS has a limitation of 2GB file size. There’s no expandable storage option, but it seems the device does support USB host?

On the software side, first the webOS lacks support for a lot of languages. It only gives the usual English, Spanish, and French support. There’s no asian language support (IME), but it does support unicode. You can get apps from both official HP App Catalog or Preware (homebrew). Only very few apps are optimized for Touchpad, majority of them are for small screen mobile phone, if viewed under Touchpad, they will be in simulation mode which only occupies half of the screen. The useful apps on HP App Catalog are usually paid program, could range from 0.99 to over $10, averages about $5, and most don’t offer free or trial version. So you have to be fairly rich to use this device. HP has been offering some free code for the paid apps, but they run out in a few hours. The ones on Preware are mostly for older webOS, therefore they mostly don’t run well. The most useful ones are a few patches such as unthrottle the downloading speed, overclocking the device. For optimizing the device, just follow this one.

Notification system, I think the notification bar is too thin, it’s very hard to press the buttons accurately especially when it wear the ipad folio case (not fitting perfectly). The system incorporates web search, email, music, general setting (screen rotation lock, airplane mode, wifi, etc). I think it generally works OK, especially the email notifications, but I still prefer Android’s pull down style.

The power button, it doesn’t support reset, vibration, etc via long press of the power button like Android or Symbian. There is a patch on Preware, but it didn’t work for me. So to restart the device, you have to go to Settings->Device Info->Reset Options. It’s just way too long process.

Pre-loaded software are minimal at the best, includes web browser, email, calendar, contacts, Skype video, picture video browser, music player, Amazon Kindle, youtube, maps, memo, PDF, office, but none of them are perfect IMO. The web browser loads webpages very slow and almost fails loading external links EVERY SINGLE time. The browser is NOT multi-tabbed, to switch between tabs is a pain. Also there is no way to adjust text size, the text on a 10in device is just way too small IMO. The email is all right, but again since the web browser fails loading external links or emails with pictures, I can’t really check some of my emails. The calendar works OK, it syncs with Google calendar, I installed the default to month view on Preware. The contact feature is not super useful, but it does sync with Gmail. The Skype video has very inferior quality, the video just breaks up, I don’t think the either the device or the OS can handle it. The picture and video browser, I’m not sure why they combine these two together. It can sync with Photobucket and Snapfish for the online photo. I happen to use Photobucket a lot, so I definitely appreciate this feature, it’s far more convenient than the individual app on Android. But unfortunately the picture browser doesn’t support sorting, the pictures appear in random order (maybe by creation date?), while I generally want to to be in name ascending order. Sadly it doesn’t include syncing with Picasa which I use a little bit on the Android phone. The video player, I haven’t tried it yet since I don’t have any mp4 format (which is the only one that’s compatible), majority of my encoded videos are avi, wmv, and mkv. There is a 10Mbps and max 2GB limit on the video. They have a handbreak preset for Touchpad on precentral. I’m not sure if the h.264 this device support is main or high profile. The music player is good enough, it doesn’t play APE or FLAC. Amazon Kindle works fine here, but it doesn’t offer dictionary like the one on Android. Youtube, there’s no separate app, instead it’s just a website link. The device can play 720p video with adequate framerate, but chock on 1080p. Maps, I’m not sure which service it’s using, doesn’t look like google maps. There’s no GPS equipped on these WiFi only models. The only thing I’m pretty satisfied is the account management, which they call synergy, it offers a lot of services which you can manage multiple accounts easily. The box.net and dropbox accounts are only integrated with Quickoffice though, meaning only word, excel, PDF files can be pulled. In order to have full access to every file, there is a separate box.net app. (You get free 50GB storage for box.net as an HP Touchpad owner). There’s no dropbox app though.

For productivity, the touchpad comes with Adobe PDF reader and Quickoffice. For the latter, the new update 8/29 enables local word and excel editing, functionality is very limited. Not as good as thinkfree office on android, my cellphone could do more than what quickoffice offers such as inserting pictures and drawing pictures.

And the system doesn't come with a native camera app, instead you have to pay .99 for an app with only a single button - capture. No zoom, no white balance, no contrast, nothing. And the camera is front only. Both the camera and the Skype video quality are very poor.

2010 Black Friday Purchase

 

Time to update on what’s bought for this Black Friday. Not much either for this year. It’s actually the first year that we didn’t wake up at 4AM and go into the lines. I got up at 9AM that day and went out to buy a couple stuff, which most of the items are still in stock. Granted they aren’t THE popular stuff like TV, notebook, etc…

So here are what I got:

A Samsung BT headset, my staples rewards is about to expire, so I got this… I actually made two staples online purchases with a seagate 1TB expansion drive, and a camera bundle. The camera gets cancelled though… Next is the Logitech mouse from office depot. I’m pretty impressed with the new Logitch lines with these mini receivers. They got great range unlike the older ones which totally sucked and required in line of sight. Then it’s the SIIG AC adapter for notebook. The Toshiba notebook we got last year had a malfunctioned adapter, so we exchanged the adapter within warranty with Toshiba acclaim without problem (one incident is Toshiba charged my credit card for original price of $134 even though I returned the broken one within 30 days, but a call solved the problem). And this SIIG AC adapter is only $10 after rebate… It seeams I got lots of SIIG product lately from sound card, notebook cooler, to keyboard… Last one out of this photo is the ASUS DVD writer. It is the first SATA DVD writer I got. My old SONY ATA one is dying, so this is a good replacement, hopefully it can last long enough before I got my first Blu-ray writer…

These are got from the next day, Saturday, which turns out have a better deal than Friday (more attractive). There’s also the Fujitsu i3 I reviewed earlier on sale for $400 which is a great deal, but I opt out since I want to assemble an i7 desktop in the near future (just wait for the memory to come down a bit further!) The SIIG card reader takes four drives which I don’t like, otherwise it’s decent enough with a dedicated microSD (TF) slot. The Trio 8GB 7” mp4 player WAS a steal at only $20. But it’s going back to store, since yesterday I can’t power this sh*t on! Called the manufacture, support guy suspects the battery is out, which I only had it for two weeks?? How unreliable is this… Lessons learned, never get unnamed brand… Last is the HDMI 1.4 cable with ethernet built-in. This was much better than the HDMI 1.3 cables I got last year from cablesunlimited.

So that’s pretty much what I got for this year.

Next are the entertainment stuff. There are MANY crazy prices for Blu-ray boxsets this year. The price/disc is even better than the end of 2007 when SONY defeats Toshiba’s HD-DVD. Anyway, I got the following, six movies for less than $40 after tax:

And lastly, the order in Sept from Sony rewards has been cancelled by me since I got the move bundle from Amazon:

I got tired waiting for Sony, since Amazon’s price is not too bad, I went ahead and placed order, got it within 3 days instead of endless waiting. Now just have to wait for Sony to reimburse the purchase by using my rewards points I got way back when I purchased my Playstation 3!

Farewell Windows Live Space, Welcome Google Blogger

 

 

OK, so M$ has officially dumped Windows Live Space, it’s just such a sad news to me. I’ve started blogging three years ago, 241 posts which averages about 1.5 post per week. I remember how I hated doing diaries during my elementary school and writing weekly essays when I was in China, because there’s really not too much going on in my life that deserves to be recorded so frequently. But blogging, at my own pace, is actually something I enjoyed doing, well, some of the posts are a bit show off, or most of them are pretty technical, but they really record my growing knowledge about video/audio technology. Out of 241 posts, about 90% I spent lots of time writing them, the rest are a little sloppy. Several things happened during the three years of my blogging life, first is my constantly researching for a better blogging place, tried a couple big ones such as fc2, blogger, livejournal, wordpress, I’ve always come back to Live Space because of its unique features such as dynamic page layout, which I can use super wide pictures (at least 800pixels on a 1024*768 monitor), lists which I can link to another site and make some comments, connects with msn messenger directly, which I’ve made some friends with through blogging, and statistics which tracks back all websites where it originally link from. The Live wave4 update removed the statistics feature which was a huge deal breaker so I have to start looking for a new blogger service which I think I finally settled down on blogger this time. But blogger is still lacking some of the features I’m looking for, the dynamic page isn’t dynamic although I can change the CSS style for accommodating the 800pixel width, I just don’t understand why the f*ck people prefer using narrow columns for their blogs, which you have to click every single picture to zoom in in order to see what is going on, it just never makes sense to me. Also the statistics feature, despite google made some effort on improving it such as using the same tech as google analytic, it’s just NOT the same as Live Space, it won’t track back the websites for example, also despite it provides a “don’t track my page view” feature, it still tracks my page views anyway, furthermore it enforces autopagenation, which saves on their resources, but it’s really irritate for people such as me who want to post long articles. I think the only solution to make me totally happy would be hosting my own blog, but it’s not gonna happen any time soon since I don’t want to get into the trouble of setting up all the stuff and pay domain and web hosting fees. Second is the development of Windows Live Writer, which simplifies my blogging significantly, it offers some great feature such as tables, links, graphics, but the video part is extremely weak, which I have to log into the site and do it from their. Third thing is my inner otaku power suddenly woke up sometime around 2008 so that I was really into anime at the time (maybe Macross Frontier was the cause), up until now I’m still watching on a regular basis, just not as much, but since then my blog postings have been centered on anime topics quite a lot, which I eventually renamed my blog’s name to “Anime, movies, home entertainment technology”.

I believe moving to blogger is the right decision for me. While losing some functions from Live Space, I have some new things to play around with blogger. This blog is still under construction, hopefully I could finish updating all the pages soon. Lastly, I have backed up all my old posts from Live Spaces and it’s available for download.

HDTV Heaven vs. SDTV Hell? Detective Conan vs. Haruhi Suzumiya

 
So 4/4/2009 NTV in Japan rebroadcasted the first episode ( ジェットコースター殺人事件 Jet coaster murder case/Big Shrink) of Detective Conan (Case Closed), according to hdanime’s screenshot and comment, it appears to be HDTV, not some SDTV upconversion.

The introduction is 16:9 upconversion shown some aliasing stuff:

转：观《风云决》有感 （VeryCD）

 

这文章有深度。。。

观《风云决》有感
1、总体上是要肯定中国动画片制作水平已经有了大幅提升，相对于《大头儿子小头爸爸》、《蓝皮鼠和大脸猫》等适龄幼儿动画更是有了划时代的进步，已经回升到了改革开放初期的《小蝌蚪找妈妈》、《哪吒闹海》、《葫芦兄弟》、《没头脑和不高兴》等的优秀作品水平，这是值得我们庆幸和继续期待的。
2、关于动画方面，并没有采用日本时下省事的矢量画法，而是完美地保留和沿用了原著漫画的风格，而且为了更好的表现场景的宏伟和武打的炫丽效果加入了大量CG特效，这也是《大头儿子》和《蓝皮鼠》所不能比拟的。
3、雄霸的死。继漫画、电影、电视剧之后，雄霸他老人家的死又多了一个版本，这是很多雄霸FANS所不能接受的，每当我看到雄霸被风云两个恶徒殴打致死的时候，我的脑海里就会响起这样的一个声音：“这一定是、这一定是在炒作！众所周知，雄霸N年前就死球了，可是死球后的他接不到其他戏了，为了挽救自己每日欲下的知名度，只能求自己曾经一手培养的两位爱徒给自己的死反复炒作。唉！昔日雄霸天下的枭雄，今日却只得是位被天下遗忘的过气明星，真是叫人唏嘘不已！雄霸可称得上是继李小龙、张国荣、希斯莱杰和饭岛爱之后又一个死亡谜团。你们几个到底是自杀？他杀？还是出家？稍微有点名气就TM开始拽，你们这帮臭明星们就不能死的光明正大、明明白白点儿吗？死了还给世人留下这么大个谜团，你们做人太不厚道了！”
4、聂风真的很像君麻吕，难道大蛇丸在我巍巍中华、祖国大陆还有实验窝点儿？这个2B估计是搭着731部队过来的，大家看到了请用AK打BK的。
5、大家肯定会注意到这部片子里有很多“零碎”。所谓“零碎”就是指一个跑龙套的配角，没什么对白、没什么戏份、更不会武功，居然还敢穿金戴银、花里胡哨的来抢主角们的戏，更有甚者把自己弄成了“青面兽”来抢戏，这是不道德的，杨志先生应该在3.15站出来维权，告他们侵权盗版。
6、由很多的“零碎” 可以断言该片制作组里肯定有个别的“杂碎”，而且这些个别的“杂碎”很有可能参与过《大头儿子》和《蓝皮鼠》的策划和制作，不过可喜的是10多年过去了，他们也有了长足的进步，至少从当初的毫无创意进步到了当今的拿来主义。他们拿来的是什么？他们拿来的是“日本短粗矮们通过漫画所表达出的对欧美高大白人种的渴望”。
7、有些配角设计的很摩登，摩登的脱离了时代背景；还有些配角设计的胸很大、很暴露、很雅典娜，可是你不要忘了你是中国人，是共产主义的接班人，而不是欧洲性自由、性开放主义的传播者，我们更是坚决反对同性恋，这是对上帝和马克思的亵渎，竟然还安排两个女配角在不必要的时间、不必要的场合、不必要地中了不必要的穿果剑【又名醉银剑，详见：曹云金、刘云天合说的对口相声《大保镖》】，而后相拥而死。就连断浪本人也在拍摄后的采访中也大骂编剧很大很傻B，不懂得怜香惜玉，更使得自己失去大批FANS，择偶更是难上加难。而在男性观众的调查中发现，竟然有86.9%的人产生了奸尸的冲动，可以肯定这部影片将被列为限制级影片。
8、关于配音。首先我要再次强调，对于动画制作和拍摄手法特效等我是给予很高的评价，相信所有看过《大头儿子小头爸爸》、《蓝皮鼠和大脸猫》的观众朋友们都会给该片的动画制作打上满分，至少是高分，但是没有好的剧本剧情仍旧是令观众、演员、导演以及制片人、赞助商、广告商、发行公司和电影院头疼的顽疾。对于该片的剧情，我始终拿捏不准到底应该用什么定词来形容它，混乱的？扭曲的？浑沌的？不明不白的？世界观杂交的？不伦不类的？中西日合资的？真是白瞎了那么好的视觉效果，那么相对于剧情的失败，配音也就不显得那么糟糕了，其实反角和配角们的声优们还是很专业的，所以在最后我仅以我国著名评书艺术家单田芳老师常说的一句话，来对主角们的配音做一下总结性的陈述，那就是‘趣拟抹的！’（单老师每次都是尽职尽责的、毫无保留的、歇斯底里且发自肺腑的呐喊出来的：）风云FANS要联合起来，联名上书请胡戈先生来重新配音制作。
9、影片中精彩对白——大胡子甲：他还活着。 娘娘腔乙：怎么后山来的人都这么厉害？
10、两把JUE剑。 【绝世好剑】：相传是由女娲补天后余下的一颗奇石制成，这颗奇石唤作[黑寒]，是石中之铁，乃天下间至寒之物。千百年后[黑寒]由拜剑山庄庄主傲日所得。当时火麒麟四处为祸，便与聂风先祖聂英研究将[黑寒]制成一把至寒宝剑，方可克制至热的火麒麟。——百度百科&维基百科 【决 剑】：UF剑，百度百科和维基百科都无从查证。
根据片中所述，决剑为天外飞石所铸，读过《大唐双龙传》的朋友们知道，天刀宋缺所使的天刀也是天外飞石所铸，威力惊人。但根据【大话西游2】——网易出品，补天神石的官方价格是天外飞石的5倍（80w：16w），黑市更是炒到6倍之多（120w+：20w），所以由此观之绝世好剑要比决剑厉害的多。无奈哪把更厉害的决定权落在了编剧的手里，由该编剧所编的世界观中可以见得，决剑名字虽短，但是属性和战斗力要比绝世好剑好的多、厉害的多，具有魔性，可以吸血，在【大话西游2】的世界观里应该是魔族和鬼族通用的神兵，强震慑和回血功能。但是拿到我们现实世界中来看的话，大家可以判断出决剑的本体是红绿相间具有强放射性的陨石，那么我们可以根据【超人】系列的世界观推理出，傲决先生可以试着拿这把剑来砍超人，由此反证傲决先生想统治世界的理想不是没有可能实现。
11、无名。无名是个有大智慧的人，因为他不以真名示人，这样我们就没法指着他的鼻子骂大街了，这是我们最困扰的地方。跟浪客剑心的师傅比古清十郎一样，是一个有着封杀全部大小BOSS能力的世外高人，与故事发生的主线次线均无太多联系，交给主角点功夫后，就省没事摆酷了。之所以我对此类人物反感，是因为，他们不用刻苦修炼就能像超人一样强大，别人都得从0级一点一点地升级，他们一上来就是满级，这是非常不公平的。
12、傲决。如果说无名是官方造出的NPC代表正义一方，那么这个傲决就是黑客黑出来的NPC更强更邪性更臭不要脸，篡改原著数据更是没谱，你哪来的啊？你谁徒弟的啊？学艺几年啊？你一臭铁匠家的娃敢学伟大领袖希特勒想统治世界？！你神经病吃错药了！还是精神病没吃药啊！
13、写在最后。草草的看了一遍我觉得够了，虽不是一部完美的作品，但戏中眼花缭乱的特效确实可圈可点，我们大家一同期待更好的作品出炉吧。写了不少了，最后还请柯南生帮忙调查一下雄霸和饭岛爱到底是怎么死的，好吗？真相只有一个，麻烦您在您的下部作品里帮我们揭晓；还请当红网络剽客胡戈先生帮忙组织几个人再配遍音，主要是配那几个将来可能不知道怎么死的，没事臭得瑟，这回客串吐字不真的四流声优的三流演员的戏份，花那冤枉钱请他们，还不如叫德云社的班子来配音呢，尤其是那大眼板子李，太刺激了！~~~
如需转载，请留自名，挨骂和骂人的事大家都有责任承担嘛！
中国人你们都别吵了！留着点劲儿等八国联军再侵华的时候好骂他们啊！~

Playstation 3 does NOT support DVD SPRM4 register !!!

 

OK, this was discovered few hours ago. As I’ve doing some DVD modifying projects lately, my DVDs always have some issues with Playstation 3. While these issues are not critical, but they are certainly annoying. What I’ve found is that Playstation 3 does NOT read SPRM4 register at ALL! This is verified on the US fw 2.70, with my recent project which has the scripts entirely depending on SPRM4 reading. SPRM4 is supposedly to read the title number being played, but Playstation 3 does NOT read it at ALL!!! However, SPRM7, which reads the chapter (PTT) number (another more common register) is being read correctly. The other two, SPRM5, title number in VTS and SPRM6, PGC number, I never use them, so I can’t confirm if they work or not.

    

Left is the troubled code, right is the modified codes to comply the “PS3 standards”. Now as I look back to my previous projects, all of them got the Mov GPRM4, SPRM4 statement somewhere, so this explains some weird behavior in PS3! 

Here is the scenarist project files, ORGUSS_V1_old.scn is the one with SPRM4 codes, ORGUSS_V1 mod.scn is the new codes without SPRM4, corresponding *.scp files also provided just in case for lower versions. The new codes works perfectly on PS3 now.

Palypal to stop Paypal Plugin in Sept. / Fry’s is stopping selling CPU+mobo combo??

 

As the economy continues to suffer, another useful service is going away after Bing Cashback. Paypal Plugin, while not used as much as Bing Cashback by me, has provided some seamless shopping experiences.

On the other side, it’s been at least a month that Fry’s hasn’t put out any good CPU+mobo combo after some crazy hot deals back in May and June. Actually for the past two weeks, they haven’t advertised any CPU+mobo combo at all! Not sure what happened to them, but things sure don’t go the way I had hoped since I’m currently in the market for a combo… Now the second option is to drive to Micro Center which is 40 miles away from where I live since they actually have some pretty decent prices on both Intel CPUs and AMD combos.

BTW I haven’t been posting that much lately mainly due to laziness. But Microsoft Live team should be another cause – ever since they removed the statistics feature, I haven’t been visiting my blog that frequently…

LOL, home theater axiom#1

 

While browsing the Blu-ray threads on 2ch today, I came thru the following claim:

PC再生の糞画質では観てられないから焼いて専用プレイヤーで視聴だな。

Roughly translates as:

Video quality from PC playback is shit, I burn discs and watch them using dedicated player.

I couldn’t agree with this guy any more…

Some weird behavior (limitations) of PS3 AND Macross series on Japanese PS3 Video store

 

Don't know if I have ranted about this weird behavior PS3 has: if mpeg with aac audio is muxed, the playback depends on the resolution of the video. If the video has a 1440*1080 resolution, the file plays; if the video has a 1920*1080 resolution, the file is "corrupt" as reported by PS3. Guess I'll have to just wait and see if they'll fix it in the future firmware (Not likely though), but they did give me DD5.1 output on XMB and fixed playback issue for my CBS recorded files.

Next limitation I have encountered recently is the amount of external media storage devices. After I insert a fourth media storage device, the PS3 complains that it has reached its maximum media storage device, and prompts me to remove one. The exact wording is "You have reached the limit on the number of storage media device. Remove a storage media device to continue." But I didn't remove any devices, and all of them seems to be working fine, at least had no problem of reading, not sure about writing though...

Next is the news about Macross, the entire Macross series, yes including the latest Frontier, will be available for downloading on the Japnaese PS3 video store in September according to this news.

These titles:

「マクロス　ゼロ」／「マクロスF（フロンティア）」／「超時空要塞マクロス」／「超時空要塞マクロス　愛・おぼえていますか」／「超時空要塞マクロスII　-LOVERS AGAIN-」／「マクロス７」／「マクロスプラス」／「劇場版　マクロス７　銀河がオレを呼んでいる！」／「マクロスプラス　MOVIE EDITION」／「マクロス　ダイナマイト７」

Which translate to:

Macross Zero
Macross F
Super Dimensional Fortress Macross
SDF Macross Do you remember love?
SDF Macross II Lovers Again
Macross 7
Macross Plus
Macross 7 the Movie "The Galaxy's calling me!"
Macross Plus "The movie Edition"
Macross Dynamite 7

Will be available on Bandai Channel.

The article didn't say if any of these will be available in HD though.

Why I think Blu-Ray should win...

 

Saw this post over at avsforum.com, thought it's pretty funny. Here is the title: "Why my wife thinks Blu-Ray should win..."
Here I slightly modified the subject (me instead of the wife in that post) in the sentence as my title.

Here is the ORIGNAL POST:

"

Sort of a different topic, as most of the posts anymore here are along the lines of "omg brd 4 the win!! down with hddvd it sux! Lol!!11" :-)

Coming from someone who DOESN'T CARE about the format war, who barely understands anything about resolution, bitrate, lossless audio... My Wife. She represents to me 80% of the consumers out there trying to get a grasp on the emerging HD technologies and what her Husband and his geeky friends like to call "the format war".

Background: This is meant to be a neutral topic as I was an early adopter of HD-DVD (1st week HD-DVD released the A1 I bought it), soon after we bought a XA2 early in 2007 right after release. As 1stQ 2007 went by, titles that HD-DVD studios had announced weren't anything we cared for, and Blu-Ray had a TON of titles we wanted to see. We sold the players, and bought a 60GB PS3 to play Blu-Ray discs.

After comparing the formats for 18 months now, this is what she has to say about the comparisons that we all make such a big deal about, and why she thinks Blu-Ray may have the edge in this "war".

- Studio Support:
Warner has most of the titles that we watch, and the studio which has a lot of her favorite movies that women and typical consumers seem to like. Harry Potter is coming this Christmas, thats a plus! Disney has to be the key here as well, she DOES recognize how much better most animated titles look in HD and the new Disney relases on Blu-Ray always seem to make it to the top of our Netflix Queue.

- The Discs Play (Translation: Coating on the Discs):
I cannot even BEGIN to tell you how many HD-DVD movies we had sent to us from Netflix that had just the SLIGHTEST scratch that would make the player lock up halfway through the movie. 75% of the discs we rented had some sort of minute defect that made the movie unplayable, HUGE deal when you're in the middle of the movie and it stops suddenly.

- Blu-Ray cases look prettier than the red HD-DVD ones
If you've ever had a relationship with a woman, you'll understand this...

- Retailer Support
She said that she has seen much more advertising in large retail stores. Not just Best Buy, Circuit City, etc... But stores that SHE shops at on a normal basis. Target, Wal-Mart (until recent days), Sears, etc....

- The Name
She's been back and forth on this one... But according to her Blu-Ray sounds like a much "higher end" technology than "HD-DVD". HD-DVD acccording to her sounds like an extension of the current DVD format that doesn't offer as much in the way of "breakthrough technology".

Things that she is NOT happy about:

- Price
$599 for a PS3. I could've "waited a few months" and pick up an HD player for $99 and we could've "saved all kinds of money"! She does take into consideration the fact the I do actually use the PS3 for games nowadays and that buying a 360 then an HD-DVD player wouldn't been a more expensive option... (Elite model we're talking about here!)

- Me
$25-$35 a movie, one per week, hundreds of dollars lost on early technology (XA2, PS3)

Ahh the price of being an early adopter... At any rate, thought I'd start the topic and hear how YOUR spouses/girlfriends are taking this whole "format war" and what they're opinions are. I give them a lot of credit for seeing this whole thing on a much broader sense than most of us :-).

"

______________________________________________________________

So here is my version - Why I think Blu-Ray should win...

1. From the disc authoring ponit of view, blu-ray offers much better option than HD-DVD. Both technology offers two levels of authoring, one standard, one advanced. The standard authoring mode for BD is called BDMV, and for HD-DVD is just called standard authoring... BDMV pretty much has all the new feature the high definition media (HDM) offers, mainly the pop-up menu, while HD-DVD's standard authoring mode only offers DVD level of authoring which means NO pop-up menu! This is a huge differentiate already. Then for advanced authoring mode, BD has BD-J, HD-DVD has the so-called advanced authoring. Both offer PIP commentary, yet due to limited memory HD-DVD has, a pathetic 64MB cache, when in advanced authoring mode, you have to give up the PCM track, while this is NOT a issue for BD-J. So if you get a crappy mp3 track and want to clean it up a bit and maybe mix a surround track or those impossible decoding multi-channel aac tracks, you always have the option to render them as lossless PCM, you CANNOT stick this track into HD-DVD, while this is NO problem for BD-J.(This is why we never see a single HD-DVD with the pop-up menu and PCM at the same time!) Plus not to mention the constant worries about the 64MB overflow graph, if you have lots of features you want to add, this 64MB quickly runs out! (That's why Transformers HD-DVD doesn't inclued a DolbyTrue HD track)... And then we have the bitrate limitation, BD gives 48Mbps for total data and 40Mbps dedicated for video, HD-DVD only gives 30Mbps for total data and upto 29Mbps dedicated for video. So if you have lots of angles or want to do seamless branching, it's definitely better to have more bitrates for video. (yes, I'm crazy about angles and seamless branching...)

2. Blu-ray has more studio support than HD-DVD, almost all the movies I want are in blu-ray exclusive. The only movies on HD-DVD really may finally force me to become format netrual are Universal's Bourne Trilogy and the Matrix Trilogy I got on the price mistake deals from Circuitcity back in June. (I'm only willing to pay $150 for HD-DVD hardware, could be used as an inexpensive upconversion DVD player, save the BD drive's life on PS3.)

3. Blu-ray movie cost is signicantly cheaper than HD-DVD's. There are just so many blu-ray movie sales going on recently. My blu-ray movie collection has been increasing exponentially over the last and this month. I originally had only 2 movies prior to October, but now I have 24! I don't mind people saying that the discount on Blu-ray movie is just the marketing strategy that SONY wants to beat HD-DVD software on sales number on a weekly basis by droping the price whenever there's a hit title released exclusively on HD-DVD such as Transformers and Shrek 3. The average price of BD movie I got is around $10-13, which is a very reasonable price. While look at the HD-DVD, even if they have a sale, they only have very very limited choices, usually no more than 15 titles, and the price is about $15 each. Many people make a big deal, thinking that it's the hardware price hinders more high definition players being sold, especially Blu-ray player sells double the price as HD-DVD player. But I believe the real spending starts after having the hardware, it's the $30 tag on high definition media in stores that scares most people away. Well, you might argue that you never buy any disc, only rent, but still I see lots of people buying dvds in stores (at regular price). From my Blockbuster (online and in-store) and Netflix renting experience, the quality on the rented discs is pretty bad, which may cause the hardware to fail earlier than expected. That's why I prefer buying disc rather than renting, just wait for a deal, and buy a bunch. It also fulfills my collection desire...

4. Hardware wise, blu-ray player has lots of manufacturers, including SONY, Samsung, Philips, Sharp, Pioneer, Panasonic, etc... While HD-DVD has only one manufacturer - Toshiba, or LG, if you want to count dual format player... (If looking at DVD players, Toshiba and LG are hardly the main stream brands...) The beauty of having lots of different manufacturers is that it's less prone to have the same problem that might never solved in this generation and maybe carry on to the next generation hardware since everyone understands the specifications a little bit differently (someone might even understand it wrong). So if Samsung's player has some annoying problems, you can always switch to SONY, and vice versa. While in HD-DVD player, you only have Toshiba, if they make a design flaw in their product line or maybe one particular function/feature that bothers you, you are pretty much stucked.

5. Blu-ray is for my Dad! Blu-ray still has the region code (A, B, and C), region A has North America, Central America, South America, Japan, Taiwan, North Korea, South Korea, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. Quote form wiki:" This arrangement puts the countries of the major Blu-ray manufacturers (Japan, Korea, Malaysia) in the same region as the U.S., thus ensuring early releases of U.S. content to those markets, whereas they weren't before." Thus blu-ray movies have lots of subtitle/audio options, Chinese is one of them. Almost 2/3 of the blu-ray movies in my collection have Chinese subtitles. So now my dad can enjoy these movies! DVDs and HD-DVDs are more for the US market, only a tiny fraction of them include Chinese subtitle, the only option to get Chinese subtitles is to download from internet or decrypt the DVDs and put the translations... These practices either takes time or too much energy... Some new HD-DVDs incorporates the internet function, which one of them is downloading subtitles/audio track for the disc, I don't know how well this is gonna work out...

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There is a third thought on the format war recently being popular - Blu-ray and HD-DVD neither will die, coexist is the future, just as the war between DVD-R and DVD+R. A strong reason is that both technology use 405 nm blue-violet laser, thus unlike Betamax vs VHS which has a different physical form, Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs can be used in the same drive. I think this is quite possible, but even if they coexist, I still prefer blu-ray, the better technology, just like I prefer using DVD-R for all my video archives currently.