HDTV information resource - HD TV plasma television

June 21, 2006

It’s official: the first batch of Blu-Ray HD titles are now on the shelves. If you’d like to pick up a flick to watch on your snazzy new Blu-Ray player, here’s what you’ll have to choose from:

- Hitch (Sony)
- The Fifth Element (Sony)
- House Of Flying Daggers (Sony)
- 50 First Dates (Sony)
- The Terminator (MGM)
- Underworld: Evolution (Sony)
- xXx (Sony)

Next week, you can expect to see the following on the shelves:

- Crash (Lions Gate)
- A Knight’s Tale (Sony)
- The Last Waltz (MGM)
- Lord Of War (Lions Gate)
- The Punisher (Lions Gate)
- Saw (Lions Gate)
- Terminator 2 (Lions Gate)
- Ultraviolet (Sony)

Sony and Panasonic have teamed up to offer a new camcorder HD format: AVCHD.

Technology for AVCHD will make use of MPEG4 compression as well as 8cm DVD’s.  This will allow the cameras to record HD content onto standard DVDs, however, only 20 minutes of HD content will fit onto each DVD. Not exactly an ideal set-up, but nice to have the option of going full on HD if you would like.