Posts Tagged “review”

Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas indeed!

For the past 3 or 4 years I’ve had a Sony Cineza HS-51 front projector and loved it. There’s something special about having a movie theatre in your living room. The HS51 is 720P, which from mostly NTSC upconverted sources, has been sufficient. With HD-DVD and Bluray I got to see the quality of 720P HD but wondered if 1080P would be noticeably better. A few months ago the lamp started going and I ordered a replacement. It was like having a new projector – bright and clear. However, about a month later I got home from a trip, turned it on and the screen had blue splotches all over it. Something failed, probably the LCD panel.

Which brings me to the VPL-HW10… I have to say that I have the coolest wife in the world because since the failure of the HS-51 she’s been on board to get a new projector as soon as we could swing it. Friday I ordered the Sony Bravia SXRD 1080P VPL-HW10 direct from Sony, but this time I added the 5-year warranty. So let’s get on with the unboxing…

Read the rest of this entry »

Look what Santa brought!

Tuesday my new Sony Bravia SXRD 1080P VPL-HW10 arrived. I’ll have the complete unboxing, review and comparison to my previous 720P projector, the HS51, ready very soon. I’ve been working on that post all day but it’s not complete and we’re about to sit down to a screening of The Dark Knight. Look for the post hopefully tomorrow.

Personal Disclaimer – I hate it when websites ‘review’ products without really testing them. What especially kills me is when they quote stats off a sell sheet as if they actually got those results in practice. Therefore this is not a review of the Drobo because I don’t own a Drobo. However, this IS an explanation of why I’m not buying a Drobo – at least not in it’s current form. Read on… Read the rest of this entry »

[digg=http://digg.com/movies/Cloverfield_BD_and_DVD_Bonus_field_issues]

While I rarely go out to the movies (because of my awesome home theatre setup), I did see Cloverfield in the theatre. Like many others, I wasn’t a fan of the extreme shaky-cam which literally left me nauseous. I need to start with my opinion on the camera shake choice – because it’s relevant to what’s happening with the bonus features: I feel that they could have toned down the amateur-home-video-shake and still conveyed the cinéma-vérité “real found footage” feeling. I loved the idea of the movie and was impressed with the execution, but hated the over the top shaky-camera work. It made the movie very difficult to watch and therefore less fun. However, it was an artistic choice on the part of the filmmakers.  Whether or not I agree with it’s necessity and/or effectiveness – it was technically correct.  It was their choice.  And even though I found that choice very annoying, I still looked forward to getting the movie on Blu-ray to get more info about the cloverfield mythology and see all the bonus features.

Well, the bonus features are harder to watch than the movie – and this time it was NOT an artistic choice…

Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend I opened my fridge and found this can of Organic Batter Blaster. Now, I generally love all foods that come in a spray can: cheeze, whipped cream, icing, but pancakes?

The spray can makes people think “how can it be organic.” Despite the environmentally unfriendly delivery mechanism, the ingredients are what make it organic: Filtered water, Organic wheat flour (unbleached), Organic cane sugar, Organic whole egg solids, Organic soybean powder, Sodium lactate (lactic acid from beet sugar), DiCalcium phosphate (leavening agent), Sea salt, Sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), Organic rice bran extract, and a Propellant.  Hmm, not sure about that last one.  I think they must be required to list the propellant on the can even though you don’t ingest any propellant.

The important thing is how well it work and how it tastes, right?  We gave it a try on Saturday morning and had a delightful breakfast.  Here’s the skinny: Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s face it, part of getting through a night of any heavy tech work (coding, editing, or DVD authoring) is good snack options. When I see something new it’s in my nature to want to try it out. And from time to time a snack shows up that has a little bit of technology inside of it. So when I noticed an over-priced premium version of M&M’s in the snack aisle I was curious.  What could possibly make a 6 oz package of M&M’s worth $4? Once they went on sale 2 for 1, I was overtaken by temptation and bought a couple of boxes.  oooohhhh.. look a the pretty package.  (UPDATED) Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a few weeks since I talked about storage solutions.  I’m getting closer to purchasing a solution for my home/office, which will undoubtedly be a raid hanging off of eSata.  I’ve used a few different eSata towers and will eventually talk about each of these solutions.  Today I’m going to cover one of the better ones – the G-SPEED eS from G-Technology.

The G-SPEED eS is a mini-tower with 4 removable drive modules. With current drives it provides an unformatted capacity of 4 TB.  It attaches to a Mac or PC via one eSata cable. The typical package comes with an PCIe eSata raid controller, which is the host adaptor and handles the raid management.  This particular raid card has 4 eSata ports, meaning that it can handle 4 G-SPEED’s.  It is therefore possible to raid 16 TB drives together providing a reported 600 MB/sec.  (Although I have not invested the 6 grand to verify this speed – and you know how much I hate just repeating advertised bandwidth – so YMMV).

Once it’s set up as a RAID 5, your local system sees it as one volume and a single drive failure should not cause data loss. The bad drive module can be replaced and the RAID will rebuild itself.  I’ve not dissected this particular model, but generally a module is just a tray that the raw eSata drive screws onto, which makes for easy replacement and upgrade. Read the rest of this entry »

Continuing my series of reviewing every hard drive solution I’ve ever touched, I want to talk about the Vantec NexStar. Not only this particular hard drive dock but the general concept, the goods and bads about it, including some benchmarks.

I’ve always like the idea of the hard drive dock. Recently I needed to back up a massive amount of data and was on a tight budget to do it. I purchased 5 of these NexStar docks for about $35 $39 a piece, and a box of 1 TB hard drives. The dock works by plugging your favorite raw SATA drive right in to the top (like a Nintendo Cart). It has a power button on the front and USB and eSATA connections on the back. Vantec makes other versions, one with the addition of FireWire.  Mine performed very well. In practice, using the eSATA connection I was able to fill up a TB in about 3 hours. When I started having problems with my FreeAgent drive I did benchmarks on all of these solutions. Read the rest of this entry »

A few years ago I moved towards eSATA connectivity for drives.  SATA (or Serial ATA) is the connection that is on the actual drive and has blazing fast transfer speeds up to 3Gb/sec.  The concept is that whatever drive enclosure you buy has some sort of interface card that ‘converts’ SATA to USB or Firewire.  That’s the definition of a bandwidth bottleneck. Using SATA to SATA connectivity should eliminate any bottleneck and give you the full bandwidth of the drive.  eSATA is simply an external version of the SATA connector.  I’ll do more detailed explanations in later posts, but in general to use eSATA you need a PCI host adaptor card and a drive with an eSATA connection.

I was excited when the FreeAgent Pro came out because of the eSata connectivity.  I got a great deal and paid around 100 bucks at Fry’s for a 1TB model.  Every other article I’ve seen of the FreeAgent Pro drive gives it a rave review and claims that the 3Gb/sec is blazing fast.  It should be – but it’s not.  It’s also important to note that these reviewers probably never tested the eSATA connection for speed. They’re just quoting the Seagate data sheet – even using the same word to describe it.  If they actually tested it or benchmarked it they would report honestly on how the drive is actually performing. No single drive (today) performs at 3Gb/s because that is the maximum burst bandwidth of the drive interface.  In practice you’re average is going to max out at 1/4 – 1/3 that rate.

Seagate’s datasheet on the (now) FreeAgent Pro Classic has this to say: “It provides eSATA connectivity at blazing speeds up to 3Gb/sec, FireWire® 400 connectivity for Macs and digital video users, as well as USB 2.0 connectivity, the most commonly used interface in the world today.”

The drive seemed fine to me until I tried copying a large chunk of video files to it using the eSATA connection. A copy function that should have taken only an hour or so was claiming that it would take 30 hours! So I decided to start taking some benchmarks and get to the bottom of the problem. Read the rest of this entry »

By far the best and most reliable portable drive I’ve used is the G-Raid series by G-Technology.  I have 4 of them, some are 4 – 5 years old, and they all still work great.

Internally, G-Raid has two 3.5″ SATA drives that are striped together using RAID level 0 for speed.  The stripe management is all handled inside the box. The mac sees it as one volume. Therefore if you have a 500GB G-Raid, inside is two 250GB drives.  These arrays are very fast and can handle multiple streams of DVCPRO HD. I edited a show in FCP at 720P and never experienced any drop frames. From a reliability standpoint I’ve never had any hardware problems with them but have seen the typical mac volume problems. However I’ve never had any data loss from it.

G-Tech now has a version 2 of this drive with ‘Triple Interface’ FireWire 400, 800 and USB 2.0. Newer drives get up to 2TB capacity for under $550.

Now let’s examine the disadvantages.  The main concern is that with 2 drives striped together you are risking up to 2TB of data with twice as many chances of a hardware failure.  If either of the two physical hard drives inside the box die you lose all the data on both drives. If you’re using them for media and have the tapes as a backup – it might be an acceptable a low risk.  Like I said, I’ve never had data loss.

As part of my “moving forward” theme (out with the old) I’m trying to lower the risks of data loss. I will most likely be selling my G-Raid drives in favor of a larger safer total solution. Since this solution will likely be based on a sata connection, I might keep one for transporting files.

There are other newer G-Tech solutions such as the G-Speed which I’ll talk about another day.