Home theaters are becoming more and more prevalent today, especially amongst film freaks like myself. Since I am a tech geek, I'm always looking to upgrade my equipment. This past weekend I had a new TV installed in the living room. Prior to that, I had a 34" Panasonic tube HDTV housed inside a nice entertainment center which also stored all my components. I sold the entertainment center and TV to my good friend Ryan and bought a new 40" Sony 1080p XBR3 LCD. I also bought a Bell O TV stand with glass shelves and a bracket to mount a flat screen set. I bought it at Best Buy, so I paid the extra dough to have the guys assemble the stand, and mount the TV as well. Prior to purchasing the TV, last month I bought a new Sony receiver (up to 7.1 channels of audio) and upgraded to a HDTV DVR cable box from Time Warner. This stuff, combined with my Pioneer laserdisc player, JVC X'EYE video game system (it plays Sega Genesis cartridges and CD's), and JVC multi region DVD player meant I had plenty of good stuff already at my disposal. Not to mention my front and rear BOSE speakers, Yamaha center channel and Velodyne subwoofer. My thinking was to make sure I had all of the necessary components prior to them installing my new set. So I went out and bought a Logitech Harmony 1000 universal remote, which has a 3.5" LCD screen capable of programming all of your audio/video equipment with the option of one touch power on and off. I paid a bunch for this sucker, but all you do is hook it up to your computer, go to the internet, and download the model number of the equipment you want to control, and it automatically sets up all of the buttons for you. You tell it what to do, and it does it. Nice. I then bought a new Monster power surge outlet, 2 THX Monster Optic Audio cords, a 1.3 HDMI cable, and a Monster component cable. The final piece of the puzzle was a Sony Playstation 3! I didn't intend to buy this so soon, but after reading the various XBR3 TV reviews online, everyone said that the set looked amazing when you had a PS3 plugged into it since you can get full 1080p output. Not only that, most agreed that the PS3 was the best Blu Ray player currently on the market, and at $600 also the cheapest. Since I had some older PS1 and PS2 games that I still play, I figured that this would be the crown jewel to my new home theater set-up so I sold my PS2 and picked up a new PS3! The BB guys did a good job hooking everything up, so all I really had to do was test out the TV and see how everything looked on it. The PS3 really did a bang up job with my regular DVD's. I read that the PS3 isn't capable of upconverting discs to near high-def quality, but the new TV mixed with the 1.3 HDMI cable sure makes certain discs appear near high-def. The Dark Sky Films DVD of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre certainly looked better on the PS3, as did every disc I popped into it. The only Blu Ray disc I own is THE DESCENT, and it looks wonderful. I did a comparison with my Pal 2 disc set, and no question about it, Blu Ray attains a superior detail and color palette that regular DVD just can't deliver. Even Synapse's new 42nd street Xxxtreme trailer disc looks fantastic on the PS3. What I'll be doing now is going through my old DVD's to watch on the PS3 just so I can soak up the added clarity. SUSPIRIA, ZOMBIE and THE BEYOND also looked (and sounded) killer on the PS3. With the THX Monster Optical cable, my PS3 is also capable of delivering superb 5.1 and 6.1 sound, so these discs rock any way you slice 'em! So yeah you could say I'm happy with the movie performance of the PS3. As for gaming, well that part I'll get to down the road, but I'm sure I'll buy a new PS3 game sometime this year just to see how it looks and sounds on my system. I'm certainly enjoying my home theater experience. How about you?
