Friday October 26, 2007

HD at home: maybe not yet

In 2002, I visited Microsoft campus for the IEEE 1394 developer conference. It was great to see engineers from Apple, Microsoft, consumer electronics companies share pure passion for technology, with no bias or self-promotion. A hippyish dude from Mitsubishi demoed his baby: a rear-projection HDTV with FireWire I/O and Java-based GUI. Returning back to California, I bought a similar Mitsubishi set and built a decent home theater around it. I also planned to extend my av1394 driver to support video streams in this format, which is slightly different from DV.

Years passed, I minimized my material possessions, the home theater is also gone (it did not turn bad movies into good movies - shocking). Yet I'd like to try out the latest HD technology without spending too much money on outdated-in-one-year crap.

I already have a widescreen Dell 2407 with HDCP support. My computer is not up to the task though: old Athlon 64, weak video card. With Socket 754 on the mobo, I can't even upgrade to a faster single core, let alone a dual core, which is pretty much a must for smooth hi-def experience. That means I need to build a new system. I used newegg.com to estimate the cost:

Gigabyte P35-based m/b	$100
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750	$200
2GB DDR2 SDRAM	$65
ASUS GeForce 8500GT 512MB HDCP Ready	$80
500GB SATA disk	$120
Case, power supply, etc	$170
Pioneer BDC-2202 Blu-ray/DVD/CD drive	$300
CyberLink PowerDVD software	$70

Plus tax and shipping, comes down to a grand total of about $1200. Quite a bit of dough, just for wows. I will have to upgrade eventually, but my old box still has some steam. Standalone Blu-ray player is about $400, but I'm hesitant to go down that road again.

I also suspect that once hooked on HD, I will want to upgrade my cable subscription, too, and that's more money down the drain. I guess for now, I'll just buy $10 worth of beer and pay a visit to a less parsimonious friend.

(2007-10-26 08:46:17.0) Permalink Comments [0]