Model Citizen

Just bought mu first iPod. The girls in the house all have the new style shuffle, but I have'nt had one :(

Even Nathan my boy has my wife's old stick type shuffle. He's mad keen on Primeval, so he has it as an Anomaly detector!

Anyway, it arrived yesterday. It's a beautiful piece of kit. Even the packaging is a work of art. So well thought out. I plugged it into my PC and had an issue straight away, I'm running XP 64 pro and iTunes has an issue with that OS, so I was'nt too surprised when the connection kept dropping. I did a search on  GOOGLE and found that when I did a quick rebuild all the problems went away.

So it sinced up very quickly, I downloaded some YouTube videos (with the help of an FLV converter) and added my iTunes library, of about 6000 songs and it's not even scratched the 80GB!

The sound is phenomenal, the videos look stunning, the whole interface is more like a mini PC than an MP3.

The plan now is to hook it up to a Marantz IS201 docking station. This can take the audio and video signal to your amp for navigation on your screen via remote. i've got it on order, so just waiting.

I've been pulling so much overtime at work, and still am, that I thought I'd splash out and take the plunge and buy a Blu Ray player.

Everyone who's been looking at the HD war will know by now that HD-DVD has lost it's battle against Blu-Ray, which is why you can pick the players and discs up so cheaply now.

Blu Ray on the other hand remains a tad expensive.

The player I bought, due to overwhelming feedback and advice was the Sony Playstation 3:

By farawaypictures at 2008-04-09

 Because I'd bought my Marantz amp last month I was able to have this and my DVD connected via HDMI to my screen, because of course you can't watch an HD signal without an HD lead.

The PS3 is a superb piece of kit. It's reasurringly heavy. I added some higher rubber feet on mine to give better airflow, as it does warm up pretty quickly. I bought it with the Turismo prologue game. It's a stunning game, really showing off HD gaming. The controller connects via USB, that is until the pad has been charged, then you can put the lead away and play wirelessley. Talking of wireless, it also connects to your broadband to update it's firmware, log onto the net or go shopping at the PS3 store where you can download demo's etc.

Because I bought this primarily as a Blu Ray player I had to buy the seperate remote too:

By farawaypictures, shot with H 25 at 2008-04-09

It's a bluetooth device, so no IR and thus my Phillips Pronto can't learn the codes, so i'm stuck with an extra remote. Not a particularly big deal for such great HD entertainment.

As mentioned the discs are a bit pricey, for now, but allready some places are doing 3 for 2 deals. So I bought a few, amongst those Ratatouille and Surfs Up. Watched these and was thrilled at the detail of the image. I believe the Marantz has a lot to say in this quality, as it's really improved the image of my Denon DVD player too.

What I would say though is that you have to pick your discs for this player. Unless it's a new film with big effects and CGI I expect my DVD will give just as good an image, but for digital animation like those mentioned it's unbeatable on Blu Ray.

Next stop, a new iPod I think.