HD Nation

HD Nation is your guide to the best in HD content, and the best in home theatre gear, no matter what your budget is!

HD News:

Three words: Toshiba Blu-ray Player. That's gotta hurt.

You-Tube made some nifty upgrades for HD video: the 1GB file cap on clips has been doubled to 2GB, and the company made it easier to embed and link directly to videos in HD quality. Sweet!

Thanks to CrunchGear for their HD and HQ YouTube video of Comcast's 2100 foot HD wall in Philly... that thing is unreal, and it's nice to look at HD and HQ mode side by side.

LG announced the first ever "THX Display Certified LCDs..." at least in the US market. We're talking about LG's new LH90 series of 240Hz-ish LED LCDS.

Does THX Certification on an HDTV mean anything? Robert weighs in on the show.

We also discussed how and why LED backlights are replacing cold cathode fluorescent lamps in new HDTVs.

The BBC America has won our first ever Biggest Tease Of 2009 Award! Why? For launching BBC America's HD Simulcast bfore it could be seen anywhere!! We want TopGear in HD!

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Blu-ray releases for the week of Tuesday, July 28th?

Battlestar Galatica: The Complete Series. All the Battlestar Galactica episodes in full 1080p high-definition video, with English DTS-HD MA 5.1 lossless audio. (Patrick may not be back in time for next week's shoot!)

Bill Hunt over atTheDigitalBits.com says this series has never looked and sounded better than this - not on SciFi or DVD, not on SciFi-HD or Universal HD - not even on HD-DVD. The video quality is just stunning.. (Amazon is still getting $75 for Battlestar Galactica - Season One in HD DVD!)

Other stand outs this week include:

Joss Whedon's latest, Dollhouse: Season One, three Blu-ray disks with the whole season plus the never-before-seen episode Epitaph One and the 'original unaired pilot.' Woot!

It could be called the Brad Pitt Behaving Badly Series... if Fight Club was being released on Blu-ray this week alongside his most excellent work in this week's releases: A River Runs Through It and 12 Monkeys.

Want something shinier than Brad Pitt? The Fast and the Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift are all now available on separate disks to coincide with the Blu-ray release of Fast & Furious. Previously The Fast and the Furious / 2 Fast 2 Furious / The Fast and the Furious: Toyko Drift were only out as a boxed set in the Fast and the Furious Trilogy.

Brendan Surpless over at HighDefDiscNews.com got his hands on Fast & Furious ... we like his overall verdict: Bad Film/Good Disc.

Repulsion... not 'cause we're Roman Polanksi fans... we want to encourage the Criterion Collection to keep releasing their epic catalog of titles on Blu-ray! The 400 Blows needs some company. -0- Rounding out this week's releases are Doctor Who: Planet of the Dead, Dragonball: Evolution, Green Lantern: First Flight, Miss March, Torchwood: The Complete Second Season and Adam Sandler's legendar The Waterboy. (Uh-oh! The Waterboy release on Blu-ray has been pushed to August 4th!)

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Contrast ratios can be a bit misleading when it comes to HDTVs. Case in point, Adrian in Arlington, TX is looking for help choosing between a 1080p HDTV with a 10,000:1 contrast ratio, and a 720p monitor with a claimed 30,000:1 contrast ratio.

Dynamic contrast ratio? Bad marketing fluff to help sell HDTVs. Properly measured ANSI, or static contrast, however, are a serious tool for evaluating monitor quality... Robert explains the ins and out Contrast, Color Saturation, Color Accuracy and Resolution on the show!

Heads up: how bright or dark the room you watch in can make a big difference in how critical that contrast ratio is!

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Recession Selection! This week's pick for saving on your HDTV experience: don't overpay when you're buying cables. If you don't have a source of reasonably priced quality HDMI (and other AV cables) chck out MonoPrice.com and Blue Jeans Cable. You'll thank us!

One place to take care: with long HDMI runs. Want a serious cable? Look for HDMI Specification 1.3a with compliance testing... learn more about HDMI cables with the Blue Jeans Cables Articles About Cables!

Wanna see a pretty piece o' history? Part of NASA's celebration of the Apollo 40th Anniversary is a set of six 720p HD videos of restored footage including Neil Armstrong taking mans first stop on the moon, a moonwalk ontage, Armstrong and Buzz Alrdrin raising the American flag, and more!

NASA has awhole HD library!

Apple's iTunes Movie Trailers website? Epic. And thanks to Lifehacker, we've got two more sites for HD trailers. First up: HD-Trailers.net and Trailer Freaks.

Oh... and while technically, it's it's not -home- theater, if you're into opera, check out The Metropolitan Opera Live in HD. We're talking select operas from from the Met streamed live in HD... to movie theaters. (We can haz a download on demand or streaming version, please???)

Didn't get to go to San Diego Comic Con? Be sure to watch TRS this week, recorded live from San Diego Comic Con at www.revision3.com/trs!

As always, we want to know what you think, so send your comments, questions, or suggestions to "hdnation@revision3.com".