My Take Radio

As a techie/nerd I always try to stay on top of the newest tech­nol­ogy, but some­times even I throw in the towel and give my pock­ets a rest. As you all have seen and heard, 3D tech­nol­ogy is the newest fad in home the­ater (thanks to the pop­u­lar­ity of Avatar), along with a need to keep rap­ing our pock­ets. Ini­tially, the need for cutting-edge hard­ware was based on the need for 1080p, 1080i, and 720p, then came along the 60mhz, 120mhz and the newest 240mhz — now of course its 3D. Well, get ready for some­thing new to blow your mind — and that my friends is “quad TV “. The NAB (National Asso­ci­a­tion of Broad­cast­ing) was demon­strat­ing these new TV’s which boast a res­o­lu­tion of 3840 x 2120 and up, which clas­si­fies them as ultra-high def. So these new tv’s will pro­duce roughly 4X the pix­els of cur­rent 1080p pictures.

These new tv’s will debut in Korea first, but I am sure we will be see­ing this tech­nol­ogy shortly after the 3D buzz dies down. CES has already shown us some 4K tech­nol­ogy from Pana­sonic which debuted their 152-inch plasma which is capa­ble of 3D  and boasts a 4096 x 2160 res­o­lu­tion and a 17:9 aspect ratio.

While I am all for new tech­nol­ogy, it really is get­ting fuck­ing ridicu­lous! 3D, while inno­v­a­tive, is really not as awe­some as it’s hyped up to be. (Read Handel’s impres­sions) I think that if broad­cast TV is at 480p & 720p then the next step is 1080p and then 3D. We aren’t even at 1080p and net­works are all ready to hop on the 3D band­wagon. It’s going to be sen­sory over­load, and in the end, our pock­ets will be empty and our eyes will be burned out.

So are you ready for 3D, or will you wait for 4K?

Share your thoughts and com­ments below:

Excerpts & Image Credits:Dvice.com & DigitalTrends.com

Some­one ported the iPhone ver­sion of the SuperNES emu­la­tor for the iPad. Check it out!

Check out the arti­cle at Giz­modo

Video Credit: Giz­modo

It seems that fans of the new “Real” 3D effect really will need to slap down the extra coin for a 3DTV. I was on one of my Best Buy excur­sions yes­ter­day and who do I bump into but Mr. My Take Radio him­self, Rich. Being the tech junkies that we are, we look at all the new home the­ater equip­ment and notice that the Mag­no­lia sec­tion had a 3D setup. We wanted to com­pare this one to our expe­ri­ence at the Sony store, espe­cially since the setup here was Pana­sonic (2009’s top 5 rated tele­vi­sions were from Pana­sonic or Sam­sung, no Sony mod­els). The pic­ture itself was of course beau­ti­ful but the 3D was severely lack­ing com­pared to what we had expe­ri­enced with the Sony model. First and fore­most, the Pana­sonic glasses felt cheap. The 3D lenses sit off of your face and they look and feel like a clip on. Worse than that, a lot of the 3D effects seemed to not come off the screen while oth­ers did. To Panasonic’s credit, the per­spec­tive effect was awe­some even when the 3D was not. If you move to a dif­fer­ent view­ing angle, the 3D effect adjusts to your posi­tion. The mis­take we made was that we thought the TV was a 3D TV; it was not. It was a Pana­sonic Plasma hooked to a Pana­sonic 3D Blu-Ray player. What we con­cluded this will mean is that peo­ple who for exam­ple have a PS3 and get the 3D firmware upgrade will have what I am call­ing a gimped 3D expe­ri­ence if they choose to not buy a 3D TV. I have said on the show that the TV in the Sony store was play­ing Lit­tleBig­Planet, a game not designed for 3D and the effect was quite pro­nounced. So as of right now, if you have a 3D player, but a 2D TV, you will not get as vivid an expe­ri­ence as some­one who has a 3DTV and a stan­dard player. Of course the opti­mal sit­u­a­tion would be to have both if you want to enjoy 3D, but I hope that future upgrades will make it so that any­one can truly enjoy 3D (if they want to) with any combination.

I am like many that are mixed on the need to pur­chase an iPad but as a comic fan this looks awe­some. I am even will­ing to look past it’s short com­ings for cool stuff like comics and Net­flix stream­ing. The future is here folks and if DC & Image fol­low suit I will be read­ing comics a hell of a lot more. Would you buy it ? Share your com­ments below.

The title of the post is a lit­tle mis­lead­ing. It should be iPad + Net­flix Stream­ing = Poten­tially Awe­some. The movie com­pa­nies have imposed such crazy restric­tions on stream­ing to pro­tect their DVD cash cow that all of the movies you want at the touch of a but­ton just won’t be there. So the big news (unless this is an April Fool’s joke) is that Net­flix is going to offer a stream­ing ser­vice for the iPad. There really couldn’t be a more per­fect match. Watch­ing movies and TV shows on an iPhone is fine for short peri­ods of time, but watch­ing them on the larger and higher res­o­lu­tion screen is going to be a much more enjoy­able experience.

The big ques­tion: Is Net­flix the app that will get you to buy an iPad?

Nintendo’s new DSi XL

Yes­ter­day, Nin­tendo pulled out the good ol’ beat you in the head stick and released another win­ner in the Nin­tendo DSi XL. The fourth incar­na­tion of Nintendo’s dual-screened hand­held is for the most part just a giant sized DSi, but it is a lit­tle bit more. For $20 more than the DSi, it had bet­ter be. Let me start with the bad and get that out of the way. Being a long time gamer and long time Nin­tendo fan, it was dis­ap­point­ing when the orig­i­nal DS came out and we learned that it would not sup­port Game Boy games. When the portable dropped it’s orig­i­nal “tank” con­fig­u­ra­tion and became the DS Lite, peo­ple were happy that it fit in their pock­ets and that it still had the GBA slot. Last year, the portable “evolved” into the DSi and it gained two cam­eras, inter­net access and an SD card slot along with a new UI which was rem­i­nis­cent of the Wii menu. This evo­lu­tion involved the com­plete loss of any Game Boy com­pat­i­bil­ity. The DSi XL, while larger than the DSi or Lite, still does not show the Game Boy or Game Boy Advance any love and this really sucks for some­one who may have a large col­lec­tion of those older games. One would find this excep­tion­ally strange from a finan­cial stand­point because of the con­tin­ued suc­cess of the title Poké­mon. Not one, not two, but five Nin­tendo DS titles with the Poké­mon name have a sig­nif­i­cant attach­ment to the Game Boy Advance. The Dia­mond, Pearl, Plat­inum, Heart­Gold and Soul­Sil­ver ver­sions of the game all fea­ture an area in their game world called the Pal Park, which allows the player to plug in the GBA titles Poké­mon Ruby, Sap­phire, Emer­ald, Fir­eRed and Leaf­Green in order to send pocket mon­sters from those games to the DS games. To me, the move makes no sense, but it is what it is.

(con­tinue reading…)

While doing my morn­ing web brows­ing, I came across a site that makes cus­tom skins and cov­ers for var­i­ous techie devices that I thought I ‘d share with MTR’s illus­tri­ous readers…

The com­pany is called GelaSk­ins (check out http://www.gelaskins.com/). Their newest col­lab­o­ra­tion is with Mar­vel — and they have made some pretty cool things to stick on your stuff. Who wouldn’t want Spidey to save their phone from unsightly scratches??

In addi­tion to Mar­vel, they also have some stuff from Metal Gear Solid 4 (although that’s just for the iPod Touch and iPhone) and a Dark Horse Comics Col­lec­tion, which includes the Dark Horse logo, Hell­boy, Buffy the Vam­pire Slayer, and Tim Burton’s Tragic Toys for Girls and Boys, amongst some others.

The best part — they use 3M “tech­nol­ogy” for easy appli­ca­tion and removal of the skins, so for klutzes like me, it may actu­ally look good when I’m done.  

Prices range from $14.95 for iPods and iPhones, $19.95 for Net­books and $29.95 for most lap­tops and notebooks. Not every piece of art­work is avail­able on every device though, so you need to see what they have.

Check some of them out below and hit up the Gelask­ins’ web­site for the rest…

Click an image to enlarge