Blu-Ray for the Rest of Us
Want superior audio and video, but still need a few shekels left over to feed the family? Denon's DVD-1800BD delivers eye-popping 1080p/24p images and crystalline sounds for under $500. Denon does make high-end units as well, but you get the best of their tech-brainpower for a tenth of the price with this quite impressive unit. Goldmund -- as a point of reference -- sells their Eidos 20BD player for around $20K, which is as good a definition of overkill as I can think of. Buy Denon and send the other $19.5K to Uncle Bernie Madoff for safekeeping. Don't forget the hacksaw.
The array of Blu-Ray titles continues to explode, and are also coming down in price. Some studios are even offering multi-disc sets that include a Blu-Ray version as well as a standard DVD. That way you have a copy at home for the HD experience, and one you can jam in the laptop for the kids to enjoy on the ride down to grandma's pad. Amazon has a "buy two, get one free" promo going, another vote in favor of upgrading your home video setup. On the downside, Netflix is now charging a premium for Blu-Ray subscribers: bad for us, good for its stock price!
While Denon does not offer BD-Live capability with an Ethernet port, it does deliver on the bread-and-butter of audio and video. The 1800BD features HDMI 1.3a with Deep Color and Bonus View support, as well as full bitstream output of Dolby and DTS-HD audio formats. Even without the Ethernet port, you can download additional content from the Internet and load it onto an SD card that the player will accept. If you fancy subtitles and camera angles and trailers and games, they are easy to add to the already copious features included on a Blu-Ray disc. My most anticipated disc? A 45th anniversary edition of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, replete with Peter Sellers and George C. Scott interviews and cold war experts discussing the film's prescient take on that high-tension epoch. Due date June 16.
About this blog
A Detroit native, David Weiss fled Motown for Los Angeles in 1978 and began to write for Daily Variety and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, primarily as a music critic with a focus on jazz. His own music career started soon thereafter, with the surrealistic funk band Was (Not Was), then various gigs as a composer and producer, working with Bob Dylan and Rickie Lee Jones among others. In a parallel universe, Weiss has been filing golf and travel stories for T&L Golf, Golfweek and The New York Times and is a regular contributor to NPR's "Day to Day" program, doing stories on music and all things cultural.
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