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Gossip&News Feedback LEDs at Samsung did get our guided tour of the huge Samsung “city” in Vegas, but the company made it up to us…by trundling their products up to the Mont-Trembland ski resort, north of Montreal. We got to see it all: DVD players, cameras, refrigerators and washing machines. Naturally it was the TV sets that particularly held our attention, especially since in fact we have a Samsung plasma in our Kappa reference system. Gossip&News For logistical reasons we never It was easy enough to confirm that the Samsung plasmas remain among the top plasmas available, even more so with Pioneer pulling out of the race. The main visual difference since we bought ours in 2008 is the “Touch of Color” feature, a subtle color strip (usually red, 80 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine though it can be other colors, including grey), which had concerned us. When we watch TV we’re not keen on the bezel competing with the picture. Happily, the color strip is subtle. The other touch of color is green: Samsung claims it has made its plasma panels less hungry for energy, and at the same time it has greatly increased the dynamic range, making for even blacker blacks. Well, we’re all for both of those advantages, but how is it done? It’s done by actually turning off parts of the panel which should be black. This may not be a good thing. Our Samsung plasma already offers what is billed as a million-toone luminance ratio, but to get it you need to dial in the appropriate settings, and those aren’t settings that will please anyone who wants to forget that he or she is watching a television picture. Of course you know that we favor plasma among currently-available large screen panel technologies. Nonetheless, we must confess to being impressed by a new LCD line from Samsung. Instead of being backlit by a fluorescent bulb, it is lit by an array of LEDs, light-emitting diodes. Unlike fluorescents, LEDs have a continuous spectrum, and can produce a larger and better range of colors. Certainly the sets we saw (which Samsung refers to as “LED TV’s,” though LEDs are only the light source) were impressive. Fast motion was well accommodated, without smearing or trailing images. And the color range, as nearly as we could tell on the material used for demonstrations, was broader than we can recall on an LCD panel. Like the Samsung plasmas, by the way, the LED sets love to show off reds. Appropriately enough, a Ferrari kept popping up in the demos. What about the blacks? LCD’s are not strong on those, because a liquid crystal pixel can never be truly opaque, The demo sets were set up in a brightlylit room, and so it was difficult to tell. There were new Samsung Blu-ray players as well, including one that can mount right in the wall next to your wallmounted TV. We asked about reviewing one, but none was made available in time (we wound up reviewing and indeed purchasing a Pioneer player instead — you’ll find that review elsewhere in this issue). This not-so-little expo among the ski hills was a reminder of how much stuff Samsung makes: not just TVs and other audiovisual gear, but also music players, camcorders, still cameras, refrigerators, and even washers and dryers. All these products were trucked in and installed for us to see. Definitely worth the trip.
How’s Blu-ray Coming Along? It has now been more than a year since Toshiba waved the white flag and shut down its HD DVD project, leaving the way clear for Blu-ray. Since then the prices of Blu-ray players have dropped, but has that been enough? Perhaps not, because the price premium for Blu-ray discs remained high. We have been convinced that it is the disc price that matters, not the player price. And a strange thing has happened since Blu-ray was launched. Conventional DVD prices have fallen off a cliff, making the difference even more evident. Are you going to pay $30 for the Blu-ray version of a film you can now buy for $8.99? And there’s been this little…uh, glitch in the economy. An outfit unknown to us called Adams Media Research says that some 9 million Blu-ray discs have been sold so far. The figure a year ago was 4.8 million. We don’t know whether those are worldwide figures, but these researchers are not in the habit of crossing borders. Also not known is whether those are sales to stores or to actual consumers. The report also says that there are 10.6 million “Blu-ray households.” Wait a minute…you mean there are more Bluray households than discs sold??? Does anybody at Adams think that perhaps, just perhaps, that could require some explanation? Let us hazard our own guess. The reason is probably that a lot of those Blu-ray players are actually Sony PSP game consoles, whose owners often don’t know what Blu-ray is, and who certainly aren’t about to pick up a Blu-ray movie instead of a copy of Grand Theft Auto XXVI. In the meantime Blu-ray gets badmouthed all over the Internet by the “what the hell, it’s good enough” crowd, who talk up fake high-res downloadable movies. But we have seen some Blu-ray films, including some blockbusters, drop sharply in price. Quantum of Solace, the new James Bond flick, in its Blu-ray incarnation, was $29, but within days soared to $33. Then we saw it on line for $18. Yes, all those amounts are in Canadian dollars. A shift is about to come, we think. There has been an explosion in the range of films being burned to Blu-ray, and they’re getting more space on the shelves. They’re even properly alphabetized instead of being jammed into a rack. Watch for falling prices. Canada Blacklisted on Copyright It appears that the Obama administration is cozy with the music and film industry. In April US Vicepresident Joe Biden told industry spokespeople he favors more action to deter theft of intellectual content, singling out Canada. An ill-fated bill proposed last year provided a $20,000 fine for copying a movie even for private use. In Canada it is still legal to copy a CD or DVD, for yourself. Now the United States has blacklisted us for our “lax stance” on copyright violations, along with Algeria, China, Russia and Indonesia. More than 10 years ago Canada and many of the world’s other countries signed two treaties promising to bring intellectual property protection “into the digital age.” According to the critics (and we’re among them), that means preventing anyone from doing anything. Indeed, the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act is so stringent it is widely ignored, though some randomly-chosen citizens get their lives ruined because of it. Canada is a signatory to the WIPO treaties. New legislation was proposed on two occasions, but died before being enacted. Now, with a fragile minority government in place, and with the economy bleeding, it seems the wrong time to threaten consumers with jail or financial ruin. ADVERTISERS Allnic . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Cover 2, 9 Audiophileboutique.com . . . . Cover 3 Audio Dream . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Audiophile Store . . . . . . . . . . 55-62 Audio Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Audio Zendo . . . . . . . . . . . Cover 3 BIS Audio. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Blue Circle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Charisma Audio . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Codell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Cyrus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Diamond Groove . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Divergent Technologies . . . . . . . . 43 Entre’acte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 ETI (Eichmann) . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Europroducts International . 13, 16, 17 Hammertone Audio . . . . . .Cover 2, 9 Lavardin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Leema Acoustics . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 MagZee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Marchand Electronics. . . . . . . . . 10 Moon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Mutine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cover 3 Reference 3a . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Simaudio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 UHF Back Issues . . . . . . . . . . . 34 UHF Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine 81 Gossip&News Gossip&News Feedback
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No. 87 CAN $6.49 / US $7.69 THE CD
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