I’ve been searching desperately for something to write on here that wasn’t just about my new TV and/or DVD player which is proving very difficult at the moment because I’m obsessing over the whole thing. I’ve been playing with settings and have the new DVD player looking great, so I’m happy with it now and can find something else to talk about.

Anyway, this is the best I could come up with. There’s an interesting article here at GamesFirst which speculates on that popular topic of whether or not DVD9 is going to be big enough for Xbox 360 games. They look at the massive improvement in the graphical quality of Xbox games (check out that Azurik/FarCry comparison!) and then at the relatively small increase in the size of game data. Judging by that, in a few years compression and knowledge of the hardware should allow for massive and stunning games on a single disc and it has allayed some of my fears.

Only time will tell but I remember that seriously impressive 96k FPS demo from when it came out and it doesn’t look half bad. Imagine what that technology would allow them to fit in an 8.5GB disc with some high definition art assets.

The replacement SD-350E arrived and has exactly the same problems as the first one. I called Toshiba and they said that I just got unlucky despite the fact that I’ve had two that have done it, Jan has one, and several people in this thread complain of similar issues. Full credit to Amazon for their returns policy though, as they say that my card will be refunded in the next couple of days and they pay for DHL to come and pick up the returns which must cost them a fortune.

Anyway, I went to Richer Sounds and paid a bit more for a Samsung DVD-HD950. OK, so it wasn’t only a bit more. I paid twice the price of the Toshiba…

It’s a similar size and has all the same features (HDMI, upscaling, multiregion, etc) but also more connections, DVD-A support, SACD support, WMA support, and no annoying blue disc tray (instead it has an attractive but hardly practical white LCD screen and a power button with a blue light around the outside when it’s turned off). Also, as my TV is a Samsung as well, the remote can control my TV and saves me having to keep two around when I’m watching a DVD. Surprisingly, it comes with an HDMI cable (both HDMI-HDMI and HDMI-DVI) which could have saved me some money if I’d bought this one in the first place. At least I’ll have a spare when the PS3 comes out…

First impressions are that the remote is cluttered and will take some time to learn the ropes of, but this player has a lot more options than the SD-350E, which was fairly anaemic in that respect. Picture quality is excellent although the default settings need tweaking slightly, and it seems that the scaler is fairly cheap as 480/576p looks marginally better than 720p and 1080i. I’m sure once I get my head around what all those damn buttons do I’ll be fine.

New to my features page is a guide to HDTV that I’ve been working on which can be found here. You may have noticed that I finally managed to get a decent one that I’m happy with but the experience taught me that there are more new acronyms, jargon, and pitfalls to learn and negotiate than any other kind of new technology that I can remember, even when building a PC, so I thought passing on my experience would be useful. Just explaining it all had to be fitted into two rather long pages.

As always I welcome feedback and any corrections for stuff that I inevitably missed on a topic this big. Hopefully someone finds it useful and avoids making a purchase that’s going to bite them in the ass in the future when they find that they can only watch HD-DVD in 480p.

Now that I’ve spent 24 hours with the TV I can expand on a few things that a couple of hours playtime only allowed me to gloss over, and how to solve a couple of problems that cropped up for anyone else who might be getting or already have the same TV.

• As usual with TVs the default settings are crap. I’m quite happy with the following settings, which look good for games and DVDs: contrast – 85; brightness – 70; sharpness – 25; colour – 50; tone – Warm1.
• Turn off digital noise reduction. It leaves some weird grey trails in black areas of bright sections (examples here) which is incredibly annoying and looks horrible in stuff like credits or movies with a lot of high contrast black and white (Sin City, for example).
• When connecting a 360 to any TV via component, remember to flick the switch on the cable from TV to HDTV. I spent a while trying to work out why it looked so crap before realising it was in 480i and not the 720p that I’d set it to.
• The skipping issue on the SD-350E is really annoying, but thankfully the artifacting problem is gone through HDMI. Amazon are sending me a replacement which should be here tomorrow so that I can see if I just got unlucky with this one, but nonetheless 576p looks great. Now just give me affordable HD-DVD because I need 720p movies.
• Annoyingly to turn the PS2’s output from RGB to component you need to go into the menu and change it yourself, which it won’t do over a component cable. You have to run it through SCART, change the output, and then swap in the new cable, and that just about makes it look passable. I pray that the PS3 can upscale the games.
• It’s been said that PGR3 doesn’t actually run in true HD and when you see it running on an HDTV it certainly appears to be true. It looks good but nowhere near the impossibly gorgeous DOA4.

There you go, then. We’ll see if there’s anything else that bears mentioning but now that the teething problems have been ironed out for me I’m very happy with things. The TV gets a thumbs up from me if you’re looking for HDTV on a budget.

It’s here! It was like Christmas this morning when I was waiting for the HDTV to be delivered and it finally came just before 11. In fact I was more excited than I’ve been about Christmas for a long time (it’s not as fun once your age hits double figures), so since that was a bit of a non-event this was like the real thing again. Only I paid £615 for my present…

Crap analogies aside, I was excited. I’ve been gearing up for this since I ordered it, buying HD AV cables for various machines that I’ve got connected and now came the opportunity to see if it’s all it’s cracked up to be. This is what the new baby looked like when I got it all hooked up:

Xbox 360 is the only natively HD device that I own and it naturally looks great – games look more detailed and DOA4 in particular looks unbelievably good; upscaled DVDs on the SD-350E look really nice but it’s definitely a stopgap before HD-DVD; Freeview through RGB SCART looks average and probably worse than my CRT (if anyone knows of a DVB box with progressive scan please tell me); and I’ve yet to try the PS2 through component. Nonetheless it gives me plenty to fiddle with and I’m loving it.

The only one I need now is a GameCube component because I’m told that it can look rather nice through 480p, but after spending that much on the TV and accessories I can’t justify having to import a cable for £30 or so. That’ll probably have to wait until Twilight Princess. Or the Revolution since that might actually come first at this rate…

I’ve just joined the editorial team over at Gaming Horizon, one of the better up-and-coming gaming websites. Their news feed has been in my reader for a while, and I referenced them here when they were the first of the bigger sites with the Splinter Cell 4 screenshots. They should be around much longer than the last site that I joined and didn’t even get to finish an article for before the owner decided to pack it in.

Anyway, I’m onboard as a staff writer so I’ll be doing a few news stories a day, starting today, and features whenever I get given them, so keep an eye out for me.