All Your Base Are Belong To Us — The Kip Lange Homepage

Okay, folks, even I get caught up in the 1080p hype these days. But, as always, don’t believe the hype. Here’s what I’ve learned in the seven months since I’ve owned my truly excellent 720p Panasonic.

There’s no doubt that 1080p is “better”. It’s simple math. It has more pixels, so you can cram more graphics in, smooth graphics out more, and such. That’s the bottom line. 1080p is — technically — better.

But that’s where the clarity of the subject ends. First, consider that most 1080p TVs are a good $1000-$2000 more expensive than a 720p set (excluding Westinghouse, a brand I simply do not trust). Now we get into the nitty-gritty. No television station broadcasts in 1080p. That means that when you’re watching your hi-definition TV broadcasts, your 1080p TV will simply “upscale” or “upconvert” a 720p image to 1080p — meaning it will stretch it to fit the screen. The broadcast will still be in 720p. So scratch 1080p if you’re just going to be watching standard HDTV broadcasts on cable.

When does 1080p come into play? Video games and Blu-Ray movies. I own a PS3, and some of the PS3 titles are beginning to come out in 1080p. I can only run them in 720p. And my PS3 is a Blu-Ray DVD player as well, which broadcasts in 1080p — so I’m losing out, right?

No. Anyone knowledgeable in the field will be quick to point out to you that 1080p is really only for television sets over 50″. If you have a 40″ set, and you’re in true 1080p (not upconverted 720p), and you sit, say, around six feet away from the television, you are not going to notice a difference. Sure, if you look hard enough, you might be able to spot it. But it simply isn’t noticeable enough to be worth an extra grand or two.

So what do you do if you’re in my situation? You have a next-gen console gaming system (an Xbox 360 or a Playstation 3), you have a Blu-Ray DVD player (which will only play in 720p, obviously, on a 720p set) or you have Blu-Ray built into your Playstation 3, your TV is less than 50″, and you’re not made of money. What should you do?

You should buy a 720p plasma set. Plasma is still the best picture quality in HDTVs, bar none, and the few 1080p plasmas that are out are insanely expensive. You will not notice a difference, I promise you. If you want to test my theory out, go to your local electronics store. Do not let them show you a regular TV broadcast on a 720p set and a 1080p set. There’s no difference. You have to ask them to hook up a Blu-Ray player or a next-gen system playing a 1080p title on both screens. Then stand about six feet away and see if you can really notice a difference.

If you can, and if you just happen to have two grand floating around that you “just don’t know what to do with”, and you absolutely have to have the best gadget on the market, go ahead and buy the 1080p set. If you’re a middle-class consumer who’s jumping into the market because these sets are finally affordable, buy your 720p and never look back. There’s nothing to worry about. You won’t notice the difference. If you have a Blu-Ray player, it will downscale the HD movies to 720p — which is still better than the “Standard TV” 480p.

When the 1080p sets drop, and you’re buying one over 50″, go ahead and get that 1080p set. Of course, by that time, a new resolution will have taken over. Ask any PC gamer — 1080 pixels to them is nada, they’re looking for a monitor that can do 1200 pixels — 1080 is, to them, stone age engineering (so never hook your computer up to a 720p set).

Just rest easy if you have 720p and you’re under 50 inches. I know all the hype there is surrounding 1080p, but if you do a careful search on the Internet, you will find the technical experts telling you exactly what I am. In fact, when 1080p was first introduced at places like the Consumer Electronics Show, executives were quick to point out that it really was only worth it if you had a TV larger than 50″.

So sleep easy with your kickass 720p plasma set (I recommend plasma because there are no viewing angles, the colors are amazing, and it can reproduce true blacks with great ease — something that you will find makes a bigger difference than scaling up to 1080p).

Okay?

That’s all I really wanted to say. One more time:

Fuck you, David Chase.

Fucker.

Well, I gotta say, Sony may have screwed some things up in terms of launching the PS3, but since it’s been out, they’ve been doing a breakneck job of getting up to speed. Most of the third party games have been ported over by now, the library is picking up speed, and the first PS3-only games are starting to build up.

Now, as for Firmware Update 1.80 — available as of today, Thursday, May 24th — get it. Get it now. Why?

The 1.80 update is able to “upscale” regular (non blu-ray) DVDs and PS2/PS1 games to high definition. Okay, obviously, it’s not “true” HD, but I must admit, Sony has done a good job. I fired up my PS2 version of Madden 2007 to check it out, and it looks great.

In addition, “Remote Play” for PSP users has finally been implemented bigtime, and you can now port information and such from a computer or similar device. Well, you could before, sort of, but now it’s much easier.

Major points to Sony on this one.

Someone wrote that Kurt Vonnegut is dead and I should write something. Okay. Here:

Kurt Vonnegut is dead.

I never cared for Vonnegut. I found his writing to be turgid, and even Slaughterhouse-Five bored the crap out of me.

So he’s dead. Whatever. Move along.

Yeah. Right. I get this great idea, at 3:15 AM last Saturday night, that I’ll drive down to the house in Eastham (Cape Cod), open it up for the summer, air it out a little, maybe walk along the beach, then take a nap, and I’ll be back by like four in the afternoon.

So I get down there at 5:00, roughly, and the house is freezing. I mean, really cold. We leave the thermostat on down there just a little so the pipes won’t freeze, and something was definitely wrong.

And the damn magnet we had for the oil company is not on the refrigerator anymore.

So I spend the next hour on my cell calling different oil companies, in the car (because you can see your breath in the house) and eventually track down the right company. They don’t call until around 8 AM, at which point I’m told, it’ll be at least two hours until we get there.

I said screw it, ran down the the Hearth & Kettle on 6A, and had an enormous breakfast. Then I tipped the waitress $23 on a $17 meal — what the hell, it’s Easter, right?

When I get back, I lounge in the car again for about an hour until the guy shows up. Nice guy. I take him downstairs, he attacks the fuel pump, he fixes it quickly, informs me that the fuel pump was filled with air that he had to bleed out, and now it’s working just fine (“The spark is wicked huge!” he told me).

Now I spend two hours waiting for the house to warm up. The house does not warm up. Around noon, I call my father. He insists the house should be warm by now and calls the oil guy back. The oil guy calls me (as my cell phone is just dying — the regular phone service is still off down there) and tells me, “That house is wicked cold. Wicked cold. Trust me. It’s gonna take like six hours to heat up.”

So I waited two more hours…then figured…what the hell…and drove all the way back.

I did get to see the sun rise at Skaket Beach, though. Har!

Just a quick note/reminder to PS3 owners — plug that ethernet cable in, because Sony has just released version 1.60 of the PS3 firmware.

If you’re having troubles connecting to the network with your PS3, you can always get the firmare at Sony’s website.

It includes the ability to download a neat new app, Folding@home, which allows you, if you’re not playing a game/watching a movie/etc, to aid Stanford researchers in the study of protein folding. Kinda neat.

Well, I do have to report good news. I got in touch with an old friend whom I parted with on less than great terms — an old female friend, not a girlfriend, but a good friend. And the young lady in question has absolved me from the temper tantrum I threw at her during our last meeting. Which is a huge weight off my back, because this is one of those temper tantrums you have that lasts five minutes and then you realize how stupid it was but there’s no damn going back.

I am guilty, I believe, of blanket judgment of all women sometimes. If one acts one way, I somehow think they all act that way. Which is stupid. Which is why I don’t have a girlfriend or many female friends (when, in fact, I actually like platonic female friends — a lot — the few that I have).

I’m working on it, that’s all I can say. Thirty-one years old and I’m still working on it. Then again, can any guy reading this tell me they really understand women? I don’t mean understanding how to manipulate them, because I know some guys like that, and I don’t particularly like that approach, and it certainly isn’t anywhere near the same thing as actually understanding women.

But I feel better. Dharma has been restored. Karma has worked to swing things back to their natural balance. The Eagle has landed (no, wait, that last one, right, that makes no sense — I just like saying it — “the Eagle has landed!” — it never loses power as a phrase to me…)

Perhaps I’m not hopeless after all. 🙂

Nah, who am I kidding…hehehe.

I do feel better about myself, though.

Yep, it’s true. We may not have rumble back yet, but for all of you people out there who, like me, like first-person shooters better when you have the freedom and precision of a mouse over the (for FP shooters) clunky controls of a regular Sixaxis controller — Splitfish has announced it’s releasing a mouse system (which can fit in your lap) for the PS3 that should allow all of us spoiled by the PC precision of shooters to match that precision on a Playsation 3.

Hardly as monumental as reviving rumble, but still, an interesting device, especially if you frag like a mofo on a PC but get yourself perpetually waxed when trying to play Resistance online.

I’m not sure if the PS3 firmware updates (currently at 1.54, again) are responsible for this, or if Comcast did something to their network, but I have found that it is now a lot easier to connect. You no longer have to power cycle your cable modem when you swap back and forth between your PC and your PS3. This makes things a hell of a lot easier.

However, that still doesn’t help much you if you buy a Playstation that has the old firmware and you need to connect to update (classic Catch-22, although you can always download the firmware update to a memory stick and import it to the PS3 in that manner). So, if you’ve just bought a PS3 with the old firmware, you’ll still need some help, and I’d like to once again refer you to how I managed to fix the 80710102 problem.

Happy gaming!

Yep. That’s all. The PS3 firmware is now at 1.54. Remember to hook up your ethernet cable.