There has been a long pause between posts here but I have a very good excuse. Actually I have several. Let me see if I can convince you.
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My Optoma HD72’s bulb is acting up.  It has about 780 hours on it and now it cuts out within minutes of powering up.  I love this projector and hope to keep it going for what I paid for.  It rocks on 1080p material from Blu-ray (scalar is not bad) and just kills on 720p stuff.  Color is rich and the image is vibrant.  Blacks are better than expect, though not as good as my Sony’s 52XBR4 (ridiculous blacks levels).  It looks like I am not the only one with this problem.  I will contact Optoma and see what my options are.  In the meantime, it looks like I may be upgrading my projector any ways.  Check out TI’s latest tech bump on DLPs!  Can you imagine owning a PJ that does not use bulbs, is 50% brighter AND have true black levels (500,000:1)?  All this in a quieter and energy effiecent box.  My HD72 is fairly quiet now, hardly audible above the dialog but to go LED on 106″ just makes me shiver.  I may not have a hard time conviencing Keyla to let me jump on board when these bad boys hit the market.  She really loves our theater room and do enjoy belting out tunes in SingStar on the big screen.  God I love her!

People of the UK, stand and celebrate as now you will be given the opportunity to use that wonderful HD set you purchased for what it was designed to do. For the cost of the receiver and initial set-up, UK folks will be given access to 80 (soon to be around 200) digital television and radio channels over a satellite feed with no monthly subscription fee. Free satellite television with HD…I can only dream of such a service here in the US. Oh well, for me it will be OTA now and forever it seems.

Awhile back I wrote about the lack of DTS-HD support on the PS3.  Well it seems that Sony has corrected that with the release of firmware 2.30.  Now the PS3 will internally decode DTS-HD Master Audio and DTS-HD High Resolution Audio along with Dolby TrueHD and pass that along on the HDMI out.  It still will not transmit by bit rate for a compliant HDMI 1.3 receiver to decode, only uncompressed PCM.  That is fine as my Denon cannot decode the bit rate transfer anyways. By the way, uncompressed Dolby 5.1 and Dolby TrueHD has been stellar on Blu-Ray discs, it really drive your speakers.  The sound is engaging and deep.  I cannot wait to try out the DTS formats. It is a great time to be a HT freak.

To keep up with the demand for more HD, Comcast has started to compress the HD source a bit more by adding three HD stream into a 38.8 QAM pipe instead of two.  Once again, it is a numbers game.  Now Comcast can boast the same numbers as DirectTV or Dish, “we have 150 HD channels”.  HD is so abused just like streaming HD movies at 720p.  People, don’t believe the hype.  TRUE HD with uncompressed audio can ONLY be found on stamped media for now (Blu-ray).  There is not enough bandwidth to transport this type of data effectively.  This will not change any time soon.  Remember the golden rule.  Spend as much on the media as you did for your gear.  It does you no good to watch a compressed HD stream with pseudo-surround audio on a 106″ 1080p projection system with 7.1 premium surround sound setup.  Hell it does not make much sense to run that same stream on ANY HD capable screen.  You do not even NEED to buy Blu-ray disks, rent them from Netflix.  The point is this, if you did your homework and got a killer setup, then feed it what it deserves.  Anything less would be criminal.