Posts by Richard Home 9 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jul 2008
Until the cost of an e-book is less than the cost of a paper-back (instead of more), I won't be wasting my money on one of these.
Given the other advantage of paper books (for example, I can lend them to a friend or family and they can lend them to be) I would want compensating for what I have lost.
"The advantage of active-shutter tech - according to Panasonic - is that each eye receives a 1920 x 1080p image"
but presumably at half of the refresh rate than the TV would otherwise be capable of delivering, not to mention the big clunky glasses.
One way or another, you have to deliver twice the information that a 2D set would deliver.
We've got the standard problems with a new technology here. Hologram technology is theoretically better than stereoscopic technology, but because it's at such an early stage of development, the advantages are not obvious, and it appears worse than the old technology. The viewing angle might be restricted, but that is not a fundamental feature of hologram technology, whereas it is with stereoscopic viewing.
This is star-wars technology. I was amazed that it was even possible to create any kind of interference pattern from an LCD display. Certainly, the technolgy to create a display that could render a the full interference pattern for a full TV picture must be a long way off, but it is great that someone is researching this stuff.
If you look at the speed of the best SSD drives now, they are already saturating the 3gb/s SATA II bus and are well into SATA III territory already. By the time SATA III is out in volume 6gb/s will probably be too slow for the top-end SSD drives that will be on the market.
Time to think of something else.
I bought one of these for my Vostro laptop which was grindingly slow with the standard 5400rpm HD. I used to switch it on, log in, go for coffee, have a chat at the coffee machine with my colleagues, come back and it would still be booting, and yes, I did defrag. The Vertex absolutely transformed the machine, and now the time from login to a useable prompt is just a few seconds. The system is snappy and resposive under any realistic load. I can't say that I never get pauses - it is running Windows after all - but I don't think the SSDis the problem here.
Plays BD, plays DVDs (upscales), CDs (upsamples), SACDs (60GB version); supports 7.1 surround sound and HDMI 1.3; streams DivX and MPEG video from a media server; streams MP3, AAC, WMA and AC3 audio; can rip CDs to the hard disk and look up the album info; can display your photo album as well. 60GB version has a card reader. Has a web browser (OK - not a good one, but you can read the news) and can take a video cam for online chat. Runs Folding@Home if you want to help the world. Has wireless LAN (60BG version). Has bluetooth. Can communicate with the PSP, which can be used as a remote console. You can plug in a keyboard and mouse into the USB ports.
Works out of the box. Sony subsidises it.
Even if it didn't play games, it would still be a good deal.
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