Snooze

Oooo yeah. Watching other people play snooker is right up there with watching other people play golf!

Probably just you Ronnie is one of the most (/only?) entertaining snooker players to watch play.

Hehe - nice. A few years back my family lived in a village in Befordshire. As there was quite a few guys with air force ties in the village, they always managed to arrange a mini-airshow for the village fete (ie just a couple of thousand people). I'll never forget the year that a Vulcan turned up and did a low-level flypast (no more than a few hundred feet) right over our house! :D

Yeah - sorry people Our guys have been working with Airbus on this for a couple of years now. http://www.onair.aero/

Looks like this isn't an uncommon problem on this TV: http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=414823 http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?p=3667503#post3667503

Forget table football! Stiga Table Hockey is a far superior game!!! Full size "rod hockey" tables only seem to be available in the US though Forget pool! Get a Bar Billiards table!!!

To be honest, the difference in graphical capabilities is so negligible that surely other features like the prospective quality of gameplay of available games is far more important? I understand that the XBox may have a headstart in this regard, as they have made the 360 easy to program (in fact, the very first presentations of the new console were targetted at prospective games developers, NOT at consumers) - as a result a number of games developers signed up to exclusivity deals with MS, I believe?

To be honest, I think you'll find the presence (or absence) of jagged lines is also down to the games developers themselves. Especially with the PS3, the developers have access at a low enough level to take quite a bit of control of the GPU hardware. Oh - by the way - Rainbow 6 is one of the games that was cited as only playing at 720p, not 1080, so make sure you let your TV do the scaling!

Likewise - I just took off Movies & Sports when they dropped the £10 Sky+ charge. The movies channels have gone badly downhill in the last couple of years - there used to be a good progression from cinema -> DVD -> Sky Box Office -> Sky Movies, but Sky have stopped moving that many films across to Sky Movies and just keep playing the same old repeats instead.

Oh - it could still easily go either way. Blu-ray was the initial darling of the film studios because of its copy protection. Which has now been hacked. But Sony including the Blu-ray in the PS3 was a good idea for them (plus actually owning one of the aforementioned studios helps!). Apparently Blu-ray rentals vs HD rentals is 70%-30%. That said - most of the producers have now stated that current sales are based on early adopters and console buyers. When the real home market buys in, the cheaper production costs of HD-DVD, and Toshiba's ability to produce cheaper player units will probably bias things that way. However..... with the comparatively slow uptake of HD thus far in the UK, though, its equally possible that mainstream HD will be so far delayed that Blu-ray will have already won! Who knows!?!? I'm not buying into either technology myself, yet (although, secretly, I'd love Blu-ray to win out due to its technical superiority!). So until its decided, I wouldn't consider Blu-ray an advantage of buying a PS3 (or, indeed, the HD-addon capability an advantage for the XBox360). By the time the world has gone Blu-ray (or not!), a standalone Blu-ray player is probably going to affordable anyway!

Cool - at the end of the day, all the jargon, the time spent browsing avforums ( ) and the reviews don't really matter at all. Whatever looks best to you is the best option! Personally, I'm still on the fence about next-gen consoles, and the amount of time I've spent gaming since my boy was born probably means it's not worth me getting one at all (until he's old enough to play with me ). I'd be a bit worried at the future of the Blu-ray format, as the industry seems to be leaning towards the cheaper (but slightly inferior) HD-DVD format. But with the weight of Sony and the PS3 behind it, who knows!

It really depends on the DVD player and the TV. The Bravia has a pretty good upscaler, but it's not going to be as good as something like the Oppo or the Denon players, which are getting good reviews. If you want to go really over-the-top, you could even buy a dedicated Scaler unit and route your Sky, standard DVD player and PS3 ALL through it. The problem with the comparison is that it's quite subjective as companies (obviously) guard their upscaling algorithms closely. I'm sure the PS3 upscaler isn't completely shoddy (apart from the issue with 720p games, of course!), and with a Bravia too, you've got a good selection of options there - just go with whatever works best for you! As you have a Bravia, I wouldn't rush to replace a 480 DVD player with an upscaling one - might be worth seeing if you can borrow one from your local AV shop to try in your set-up to see if it's worth it for you.....

Well the Bravias display 1920x1080 pixels native, I believe, so something has to be filling in the extra pixels, unless your standard DVD player only displays in one quarter of the screen?!?! When you say the TV "switches to 1080p", this is it informing you of the INPUT resolution, not the output resolution - the output resolution is ALWAYS at the native display resolution (hence the picture fills the screen). And having bought a Bravia, you've already paid a decent chunk of money for a good quality hardware scaler to do this. And an HD source, like Sky HD, is MUCH MUCH MUCH better than an upscaled 480p image, of course. With an HD source, the "extra" pixels are from the original picture, not made up by some algorithm which Sony commissioned, which can (and frequently does! - especially with moving images!) get it wrong.

Yeah - MS always claimed the 360 did 1080p, which was by-and-large true. The problem is that there was no way of getting a 1080p signal OUT of the box!

It all depends on the TV - you need to check what signals your TV can cope with. The TV will always display at its native resolution (otherwise you'd get a big black border around the picture). In fact, most "720p" televisions actually display 768 or 788 output lines, which means they do a little bit of scaling anyway! When you plug a SD signal directly into an HDTV (this is why most HD TVs still accept 480 input), it is the TV that does the upscaling, not the source. Videophiles rave about upscaling DVD players (and external upscalers too) because, by and large, the upscaler that gets put into these is better than the one in the TV, but don't necessarily write off the TV upscaler, as some of them look pretty good now, especially to an untrained eye like my own! You're right about DTS - you can't take a 5:1 sound and convert it to DTS, because there's no way to "make up" the other channel - it has to be done when the content is created. But the analogy does not work with images - the whole point of an upscaler IS to "make up" the missing pixels by looking at the rest of the image and applying an algorithm that calculates the missing pixels (upscaled images tend to look better for animated content as the consistent colours are easier to recognise). The quality of an upscaler is largely defined by the quality of this algorithm.

Ah - sorry - you're right, of course - watching regular DVDs (which are 480p) on an HDTV you need upscaling of some sort. But it doesn't really matter where the upscaling is performed - either the DVD Player/PS3 or a upscaler built-in to the TV should do the job. Especially if you buy a TV with a good scaler, like a Sony Bravia (although I wouldn't necessarily recommend a Sony due to their other disadvantages) or something, it will generally do a much better job than the iffy one Sony put in the PS3 - you're much better off letting the PS3 output at 480p and then let the TV upscale to its native display resolution (1080i/1080p/whatever).

Errr - if it's a Blu-Ray disc, running on a PS3 at 1080p, displaying on a 1080p TV, then I'd hope that it's bypassing the upscaler altogether! Bear in mind most newer HDTV's upscale, so whether you let the PS3 upscale or the TV upscale won't make muh difference (unless your TV has a particularly bad upscaler). PS. also be aware that I believe there is a fault with the PS3 upscaling that means it won't upscale 720p games (ie. a lot of the current games) to 1080, so if your TV won't accept a 720p signal, it'll have to display at 480 instead! Yuck!

Yep - lots of Danish interest in Supras here - I understand that the tax they have to pay to buy one domestically is so high that it's actually much cheaper to pay over the odds for one from here. When I was selling mine, over half the queries I got were from over there, from guys who are now frequent visitors to the site.

Enough to keep the family fed and happy, the mortgage paid and the car full of V-Power with a little bit left over (money, not petrol!).

IT stuff. Pays well, but there's plenty of things I'd rather be doing. Anyone who says they "love" their job in IT either: a) needs to get a real life or b) works in content-creation for a suitably disreputable website

Crikey! Teenage crushes? A longer list than I can remember..... Wendy James definitely! Philippa Forrester (back in her kids TV days). 80's page 3 girls - Maria Whittaker, Suzanne Mizzi, etc.

Exactly the right stuff! To be honest, I'm probably not a great person to actually give recommendations to a normal person (ie. being a geeky board game addict now)! There's more information that you can shake a very large stick at on this website.

Like my sports. I play 5-a-side. American football took up a lot of my time, but injuries put paid to that a couple of years ago. Also a bit of guitar, but my main hobby is playing strategy boardgames. I used to play lots of computer games, but have jaded to them in the last few years and now play boardgames instead.

Hey hey! I'll be there in Brixton on the 2nd - it's a good venue. Mate and I got our tickets for this within 5 minutes of them coming up on sale! I understand the support is going to be Sultans Of Ping too! How f**king ace is that?!?! :D Saw them last year and they were quality. Mind you - I love the Frank & Walters too - saw them last time they played Islington (with Fruitbat's band "Abdoujaparov" supporting!). Next time I get to see them, I wanna be the one up on stage singing "This Is Not A Song"..... As for jumping around - all the recent Ned's, Sultans, etc. gigs in the last few years have been great - all us 30-somethings jumping around like we were kids again!

The 3-abreast at 2140ish is a killer. Aim to get to the very top right of the road when your score goes to 1800 if you want to get past them. After that it gets a bit easier. Most people seem to either top out at 2140ish (like Pabs) on it, or get past the 3-abreast and make it to 5,000 or more.....