From whence comes this rubbish about Blu-ray failing?

One of the most persistently irritating aspects of CNET.com is their twice a week habit of publishing prophesies of doom upon Blu-ray. From whence comes all this rubbish?

Does it come from sour grapes? Is Blu-Ray just too expensive for these pee-ons to afford?

Does it come from a long-standing alliance with Microsoft? Let's remember that Microsoft backed the looser in the highdef war: HD-DVD.

Does it come from mis-predicting the outcome of the war? Let's remember CNET told us HD-DVD would win because of price advantages. This multi-component false prophecy yielded multiple black eyes. The entire basis was false. HD-DVD was never really cheaper than Blu-Ray... At least not during the war.

Does it come from the vast amount of traffic they get every time they publish one of these rants? It seems that each time one of these hit-pieces gets published, the item rises to the top of news.google.com. Remember this means page views and click-throughs. That adds up to dollars and cents.

Is it because John C. Dvorak no longer yields this sort of controversy and traffic with anti-Mac hit-pieces, and the revenues he once generated have to be replaced? Let's remember John C Dvorak now uses a Mac. {According to rumor he was offered a Dell or a Mac at his new place of work. The company John hates more than Apple is Dell, so he took the Mac.}

Could it be that they own stock in download firms?

Could it be that it is difficult to rip Blu-Rays and trade them on the Internet (although this is done on Bittorrent).

So just what is the substance of their argument and does it have any merit?

1. A year after HD-DVD died Blu-ray still isn't doing more volume than DVD.
2. Blu-ray players are not selling. (At least the ones that aren't PS3s aren't selling)
3. Blu-ray players are more expensive than upscaling DVD players.
4. Blu-Ray discs are more expensive than DVD disks.
5. Downloads will replace DVD. Blu-Ray will not replace DVD.
6. Apple isn't supporting Blu-Ray as they once said they would.
7. I can't rip my Blu-rays, and watch them on 2.5 inch portable LCD screen, as I can with DVD.

This, in short, is the full case they make against Blu-ray. Each time they post these 7 points, and they do so about twice a week, posters knock each other over to make the usual ripostes.

1. Two years into the format's life span Blu-Ray is way ahead of where DVD was in terms of acceptance.
2. PS3 constitutes 70% to 75% of the total installed base of all Blu-Ray players because it is the finest value in the land. It is the best damn media player in the world... for all types of media. Critics are foolish to expect inferior media players (which are often more expensive) to sell in the face of such tough competition. You cannot simply disregard the PS3 because it is not “A true Blu-Ray player” such an argument is utterly false, fallacious and preposterous.
3. Since Blu-Ray players offer 622% better resolution and quantum improvement in audio, we would expect them to be more expensive than upscaling DVD players. Surely you do not believe that much quality comes for free? Do you really expect a 0.0% difference in marginal price and profits?
4. Diddo for the disk. The disks are too expensive on average, but they are remarkably better.
5. Now we reach the absolute balderdash, poppycock and rubbish. How are we to disinfect the ignorant of their ignorance? It is clear to anyone who understands binary bandwidth issues that HDTV and broadband are a mismatch made in hell. The typical broadband connection carries approximately 2.5Mbits to your computer. The typical video image stream on Blu-Ray is approximately 24-35 Mbits. Let's call it 10x higher. That's just the video. Then you have the audio stream. For uncompressed PCM, that is another 4.6Mbits. For compressed, but lossless, DTS-HD MA, we're talking about 1.5 to 2.5Mbits. Remember, we're talking about 7.1 surround sound sample at 24 bits and 96Khz in a best case scenario. A typical Blu-ray movie occupies something like 17GB of space. You try downloading 17GB of anything and just see how long it takes. Now you can compress the hell out of the stream, but then you decimate the quality. You can reduce the resolution, but then you aren't offering HDTV. Some people protest that they are downloading their movies right now. I do solemnly assure you that if you are downloading it now, it certainly is not HD. Even the crap Apple is downloading to you is just 720p. What you see on Netflix is standard def 480p. No crap-hounds, I am sorry to inform you that the Blu-Ray spec was designed from scratch to be almost untouchable. Until the mode, mean and median bandwidth in this country hits a brick solid 40Mbits, you are not going to be able to offer a service that streams Blu-Ray quality video through the net. The consumer market just can't handle it. The business model is not workable. Some fools may try, but they will lose lots and lots of money. Certainly FIOS has the potential to yield Blu-Ray bandwidth. How soon will FIOS become ubiquitous? With the current recession, project 10 years. That is a nice, long happy life span for Blu-Ray to prosper and become the institutionalized standard. If media tech writers understood anything about binary bandwidth, they would not embarrass themselves by stating that downloads will supersede Blu-Ray.
6. So Apple is not supporting Blu-Ray as they said they would...? And...? Let us remember that Apple is a very little company after all. A lot of their Macs are being used to run Windows. That's how much market influence they have. Apple wants to sell you 720p movies through Apple TV, a product which is the biggest market failure they have offered in quite some time. Everybody who owns Apple stock knows that AppleTV is not doing well at all on the open market.
7. Point 7 utterly defies logic. Do you really think you can display 1920x1080 pixels on a 320x240 screen? What made you think that HDTV was made for 2.5inch LCD? Truly, some people do not understand the entire concept of HDTV.

So there are more rumors about the Rams #2 pick

So fresh rummors have surfaced about the Rams' #2 pick overall in the upcoming 2009 draft. What are these rummors?

1. The New York Giants are said to be interested in the #2 pick. Why? The Giants have an excellent roster. They were the finest team in the league during the regular season. Eli Manning is arguably more talented than his elder brother, but his brother has plenty of things Eli doesn't have: 3 game breaking receivers and the most effective tight end in the league. Worse Plaxico Burris is probably going to do 3 years in prison, and this will effectively terminate his career. This legal case will also remove the 1 game breaking receiver Eli has. For these reasons, the Giants are said to be very interested in Michael Crabtree of Texas Tech. He is a legit game changing receiver. Unfortunately, he is also a top 5 pick. The Giants need a very high pick to secure this receiver for Eli. God knows they have the talent. They can afford to sacrifice this year's entire draft in the name of acquiring a great receiver.
2. The Vikings are without a quarterback , and it is rumored that they have three options in mind (A) Sign Kurt Warner, who is a free agent, but this is considered unlikely, (2) Make a deal for Mark Bulger--which is highly questionable as an option, (3) Trade horses to get a high pick and draft a QB. The third option is considered the most realistic option.

So what do I think? Deal the pick to the Giants if they want it. Deal Bulger to the Vikings if they want him. With the rebuilding program we must undergo over the next 2-3 years, we should consider acquiring a fellow like David Carr and/or Chris Simms. I would acquire them both. Both would be effective stop-gaps as we build.

The Great Depression II

So let us review the basic facts that we are aware of at the end of January
1.We just finished the worst January in the 81 year history of the S&P 500. Down 8.5%
2.The Dow seems locked in a range between 8,000 and 9,000
3.Nourial Rabini, the only man who correctly called this crisis ahead of time, claims the stock market will finish 2009 down 20% lower than it is right now. That means that the DJIA will be at 6,400. Rabini says that we are headed for a sharp U shape recession.
4.Nourial says that the top 3 or 4 banks in the U.S. Meet the technical definitions of insolvency. This includes my beloved Wells Fargo. Rabini says that the only way to fix them is to nationalize these banks for 2 to 3 years, reorganize them, separate good and bad assets, then sell the stock back to the private market after the heavy lifting has been done. The only alternative is to permit zombie banks to wander around for 10 years, as they did in Japan during their crisis of the 1990s.
5.Banks are still massively optimistic that they will only have to write down $1.1 trillion in loans. Nourial says the figure is more like $3.6 trillion. U.S. Banks are in a massive state of denial right now, just as Japanese banks were during the 1990s. Left to their own devices, these banks will remain in a state of denial about their bad loans, just as the Japanese banks did. This is why nationalization is necessary.
6.Total consumer spending fell 3.5% just during the th Quarter. This includes a 22.4% drop in demand for durable goods, and a 7.1% drop in demand for durable goods. Inventories of unsold goods are piling up in every store.
7.We are in a world synchronized recession. All world economies are going into recession. Even countries in major denial, such as France and China are now admitting that they are going into recession.
8.Mother England is one quarter into a recession, and the Pound Sterling is taking the most devastating hits of any major currency on the free market. Even as the Euro slides down against the dollar, the Pound is falling faster. Many believe that the Pound will soon trade at 1-to-1 parity with the Euro, and both will be worth approximately $1.25-1.30 USD. Why? The Pound is basically an oil currency, and oil is in bad shape right now. This is a far cry from the days when the British Pound was worth $2.00-2.50 USD.
9.Japanese industrial output dropped 40% just in the 4th quarter of 2008. That is a larger contraction in just one quarter than Japan saw during the entire recession of the 1990s. I should mention that the Japanese recession of the 1990s was an utterly devastating recession.
10.U.S. GDP dropped 3.8% just during the 4th Quarter of 2008. The most conservative estimates say that U.S. GDP will shrink another 1.5% during fiscal 2009, regardless of the stimulus package.
11.This contraction is worse than it sounds. Population in the United States continues to expand through in-migration, low death rates, and moderate birth-rates. The economy needs to expand just to maintain consistent per-capita GDP. If GDP contracts, while population expands, per capta GDP decreases at a faster rate than simple contraction would suggest.
12.The problem of population GDP is much worse in China. China cannot abide even 5% growth without loss in Per Captia GDP. They need sustained 10% growth just to maintain a constant GDP. In China, 5% growth constitutes a hard landing.
13.Unemployment filings reached near records levels in the United States. In Michigan, unemployment is over 10% and rising.
14.New housing starts reached record lows. This portends, augers and bodes extremely bad things in the future. Give such low housing starts now, we will see more GDP shrinkage in the near future. The next quarter for sure.
15.House purchases reached record lows. Banks are not writing new mortgages. Because most people cannot buy a home without a new mortgage, existing home sales are going nowhere fast. The consequence is that prices continue to grind down in every major market.
16.HSBC, seemingly the one unshakable bank, is now entering into crisis.
17.This is now officially the worst economic decline since 1982. That was the worst decline since the Great Depression itself.
18.More and more experts believe that all institutions and families are in the process of de-leveraging. They are throwing all their resources into the process of paying down debt. They are not spending on any new consumption or production. They are paying off old consumption and production. Banks are also de-leveraging themselves.
19.More and more experts believe that this de-leveraging process is going to take several years to finish. Most do not believe a large stimulus package can convince individuals and institutions to terminate this process of de-leveraging and engage in new production and consumption.
20.The government is going to run about 3 trillion of new debt up this year. That is more than $50,000 per man woman and child in the United States.
21.The stim package the congress just past is nothing more than a wish list of Democratic Party pork. The smart grid is pretty much the only element of the package which can have a dazzling stimulus effect on the economy.
22.We have gone from an Internet bubble to a Real Estate bubble and now there is a third bubble: The Government debt bubble. There is an emerging theory which says that we are in for a grinding deflation. In this scenario, the U.S. Dollar is going to continue to gain value, commodities are going to continue to cheapen up, stock values are going to continue to drop. In this scenario, government bonds are going to continue to be in demand. Government bonds are not going to clear through cash-outs. Investors are going to continue to slam money into the bond market. This means a continuing shrinkage in GDP and reductions in government revenues. With greater and greater debt to pay, and less and less revenue, the Government debt bubble is going to burst... sooner or later. Something like this is on the verge of happening in California.
If our Government busts the Dollar Bill, it will be a defeat the dimensions of which we have never experienced. It will be a route from which no honor can be salvaged. I don't even want to imagine which hell and chaos this will unleash in the world markets.

So, a little birdie told me that the Jets and the Rams are going to do a deal... maybe...

As you all know, I live in Los Angeles. HQ for the St. Louis Rams is here. The once and future Los Angeles Rams have deep roots my sector of the world. A little birdie done told me that that Rams and Jets are beginning preliminary talks about swapping some draft picks. What is the scoopy-pooh?

First a disclaimer: Remember all of this blatant NDA buster material, and none of it may pan out. Many more draft deals fall-through than go-through. This is true each and every year. It is common for teams to talk to each other and do nothing. A lot of teams talk to each other about picks, but many fail to finalize a deal.

With that said…

Rumor has it that the Rams are quite unhappy with their position in this year's draft. The #2 is bad for a lot of reasons this year. Most important is the fact the Rams have four major needs this year: (1) Left tackle, (2) Right Guard,(3) Center and also (4) Left Guard. It is a commonly accepted fact that the Rams have the worst offensive line in professional football. This has been true for 2 years running now. This is the critical weakness that has made us loosers 2 years in a row. Only our right tackle Alex Barron is moderately solid. This year's draft class has quite a few good men in these slots, but none who are worthy of being drafted #2.

With that said, understand that Mel Kiper rates Andre Smith of Alabama as the #4 prospect in the entire draft. Others disagree. Kiper is frequently wrong. The only draft evaluator I trust is Mike Mayock of the NFL network. This guy has street-cred. Mayock has not yet issued a discernable verdict on Andre Smith. I look forward to his verdict with great interest. Folks I've talked too believe Andre Smith is fat and out of shape. They believe his weight problem will get worse, not better, over time.

With various salary cap problems, the Rams are strongly disinclined to reach for an offensive lineman and pay him #2 pick money. Further, there is a belief that, push comes to shove, Pace could play one more season for the Rams. You'll need to pay him his full price and talk him out of early retirement, but he could play another season.

So what are the Rams to do about their draft position? The obvious answer is: Trade down. But who wants the #2 pick? Surprisingly, the answer is the New York Jets. Let's face the facts: The Jets are recovering from the Brett Farve debacle. They gave away a perfectly good QB and traded a #3 pick for an old man who was great for a small portion of just 1 season. Now they have no QB and no 3rd Round pick. At the very least, they need a QB or they might as well not bother to take the field this year.

So here is the problem the Jets must face: Detroit is expected to select Matthew Stafford of Georgia. In this scenario, one half of the decent prospects are gone after the Lions take the first pick off the board. The Rams aren't looking for a QB... yet... so they are expected to pass on Mark Sanchez of USC. Kansas City drafts #3 and they are going to take Sanchez, according to rumor. That's the end of the good prospects for this year, mate. If you need a franchise QB we'll see you next year when we'll have a bumper crop of great prospects to pick from.

So somehow the Jets need to get above KC in order to take a decent franchise QB prospect. The solution is simple: cut a deal with the Rams. What makes it more intriguing is that the Jets have some good young offensive linemen that they can use as bait. It would be very unwise for them to deal anyone like Ferguson or Mangold, but if worse comes to worse, they could. It should be noted that the Rams wanted to put Faneca next to Orland Pace last year. The Jets got him. It is much more likely that NYJs will send their #1 and #2 pick to the Rams for the #2 over-all pick. The Rams may want a sweetener, but they may not get one.

So do I like this idea? Would I deal the #2 pick for the Jet's #1 & #2? I'll give you a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is "Yes". The long answer is as follows: With three lower picks we have a good shot at sweeping all the great interior line prospects in the draft. We could potentially get the best guards and centers in the draft. With a young and decent Alex Barron at the right tackle position, and perhaps just one more season out of Orlando Pace, the Rams could have a vastly upgraded offensive line for 2009. Ergo, the deal will work for the Rams.

We'll have to see if it happens.

Somehow, the pessimist in me says that the Rams will blow it. We might not do anything about our OL problems. This is precisely what we did last year, with disastrous consequences. Instead, we might draft a great Wide Receiver like Michael Crabtree. Don't get me wrong, I love Crabtree to death, but he just isn't an offensive lineman. He can't block a nose tackle for us. No matter what his amazing skills may be, he isn't going to help the Rams as much as a couple of lethal-strength offensive linemen will.

Ram Fans are pulling like a MoeFoe for Kurt Warner

So, the Super Bowl hype has begun. To this affect, last night the NFL network showed several of the highlight films from the Steelers many Super Bowl seasons. More specifically, I saw the "America's Game" Documentaries for the 1974 and 1975 Steelers. I don't know how many films they showed because I didn't turn on the HDTV until around 7:00pm or 8:00pm PST. It might have been 5 hours (5 documentaries) as the Steelers have won 5 Super Bowls.

Unfortunately, there are no such films for the Cardinals. To redress the balance, what could the NFL network do? They showed the America's Game documentary about the 1999 Rams. The 1999 Rams were voted the greatest single-season turn around in the history of the league by the NFL's "Top 10" documentary group. It was also the year Kurt Warner broke out and became a super-star as the grand-master of the Greatest Show on Turf.

There is a St. Louis connection between the Rams and Cardinals. There is also a Kurt Warner connection between the Rams and Cardinals. There is also a divisional connection between the Rams and Cardinals: Both are in NFC West. There is also a franchise movement connection between the Rams and Cardinals: both moved twice. There is also a stylistic connection between these two teams. Like the Rams, the Cardinals also have an Ex-Colt in their backfield. The Edge is substituting for Marshall Faulk in this interpretation of the play. Both had superior offenses and good scoring defenses. There is also a rags-to-riches turnaround story that they share. Furthermore, the Cards are only the second 9-7 football team in the history of the League to reach the Super Bowl. The other was the 1979 Los Angeles Rams, who also won the NFC title, who faced these same Pittsburg Steelers in the Rose Bowl (a virtual home game).

We gave 'em hell in that game, but we lost. The lead changed hands 7 times in Super Bowl XIV. The Rams lead for most of the first 3 quarters. Bradshaw threw 3 interceptions. Steeler fans were dropping bricks in their shorts when the 4th quarter arrived and the Rams were still leading 19-17. Lynn Swan had been knocked out by Pat Thomas earlier in 3rd quarter. Then Bradshaw hit Stallworth on 60-prevent-slot-hook-and-go and the Steelers went ahead 24-19. Vince Ferragamo almost got us the lead back, but Jack Lambert intercepted him at the 20 of the Steelers. The Franco Harris got a meaningless touchdown on clock-killing drive as the clock wore down to nothing. The final was 31-19.

It was not a blow-out or an ass-whupping, and everybody knew it. It was closer than the now-legendary Cowboy Super Bowl from the year before. It was supposed to be a massacre. The Steelers were happy to get out of there with their skins (mostly) enacted. Fred Dryer (famous from TV series Hunter) was interviews by Steve Sabol of NFL films and said "We fought the hell out of 'em. I guarantee you those bastards will be hurting tomorrow." The Super Bowl XIV cover of Sports Illustrated declared "This One Was Really Super".

I should mention that this was the first football game I ever watched in my life (start to finish). This was the moment when I fell in love with Football, and it was the moment I became a Ram fan. Rightly or wrongly, the shadow of that loss hung over my youth, and didn't really dissipate until Kurt Warner and Marshall Faulk showed up in 1999. You can imagine how I felt when we finally won the big one.

Loosing the big one is horrible. Being the laughing stock of the league is horrible. A lot of that can be swept for the Cardinals if they defeat the Steelers on Super Sunday.

I see a lot of connections between Rams and the Cardinals in this game. It's a bit eerie and magical. I don't know about the rest of you Ram fans in SoCal, but I am pulling like a MoeFoe for Kurt Warner in this game. It's strange to think of it this way, but there are going to be hardcore NFL fans native to St. Louis, Los Angeles and Phoenix all lining up behind the Cards for several of these reasons.

If Kurt obtains the victory in this game he can be elected the Governor of Missouri the next day. Believe me, they'll hold a special election for him if he'll take the job. Furthermore, he'll become a lock for the Hall of Fame.

Why I am no longer crazy about SilverLight 2.0

Over the past year there has been a frisson of excitement about SilverLight 2.0 in the .NET world. I too was swept away in it. Why? It looked like the 3rd time would be a charm. What do I mean by the 3rd time is the charm?

Sun tried to introduce Applets with their Java platform more than a decade ago. About 12 years of experiance has proven that this concept was (is) a market failure. The technology works fine and almost nobody uses it. I can only name 3 or 4 working applets out there on the net that are of any significance. Strike one for hard code in the browser.

Microsoft tried to counter Applets with ActiveX in the browser. This was an unmidigated catastrophy. Words cannot express what a disaster this was for Microsoft. The echos and reverberations of this calamety are still being felt today throughout the world. ActiveX controls/applications inside IE5 & IE6 had no practical limits. You could do absolutely anything with ActiveX inside IE5&6. If you could code it, you could do it. This resulted in the great Spyware Pestilence of 2003. IE became the greatest vector of contageon the computer world had ever known. This gave Microsoft a seriously bad rep for unreliable and insecure systems, prone to ID theft. They are still trying to live down this bad rep today. What a disaster!

So now here comes Silverlight 2.0. This is basically a .NET Applet which is portable across multiple platforms and browsers, but based on a tight security model. You can write your .NET code in the language of your choice, but not all things are possible. You can't just do anything and everything you want to an end-user's machine. Silverlight 2 is not intended as a Flash killer. It is not in competition with Adobe Flash, no matter how often this erroneously statement is repeated. The intent is to put smart applications in the browser, just like Java Applets, just like ActiveX apps.

A lot of XAML graphical junk is possible. You can talk with web services. There is the possibility of 3d graphics and games. Rockford Lhotka is bringing his marvelous CSLA framework to Silverlight 2.0. His firm believes Silverlight is the way, the truth and the light. No one will reach the father without Silverlight 2.0, acording to Mugenic. However, and this is a drop dead issue for me, all of your code gets downloaded with Silverlight 2.0 applet zip file. This is CIL code... or original source code... I can't seem to get a clear answer on this question. In any event, the app can be totally disassembled and de-obfuscated using .NET Reflector and its marvelous plugins. I have done this. It is perfectly possible. It is easier now than ever before to interogate somebody else's code and figure out how it is done.

So why does this matter? When you code in ASP.NET or the MVC framework, you enjoy code privacy. Competitors will need to hack their way into your servers to get your source code, and thereby discover how you do things. That is a tall order. If you know what you are doing, it ain't so hard to lock these little fuckers out. If your rival knows what he is doing, it is difficult to hack into his server. I am a private source guy. My company is a private source company. A lot of crucial trade secretes are embeded in our source code. Not many know how to do what we do. Many confidential bits of knowledge can also be found inside the running bits of our app code. The web has protected our trade secrets rather well by hiding this stuff on our servers. Putting them into Silverlight would let the proverbial cat out of the bag. Personally, I can tell you that my blood runs cold at the thought of exposing our code to the world. It's not because I am embaressed about what I have written. Rather the opposite. I am afraid I am going to educate our rivals.

For this reason, my enthusiasm for Silverlight 2 has flat-lined. It no longer has a pulse. Although I was daunted by it at first, my enthusiasm for ASP.NET MVC is growing by the day. I believe this is the path to ultra-high reliability software. If implemented fully--in all its glory--MVC should deliver flawless software to the consumer and provide strong security for the authors. I believe in ASP.NET MVC.

3d a smash at CES? LaserVue puts plasma to shame...?

Or so they say here. Supposedly, 3d ready HDTVs like Mitsubishi's DLPs and Panasonic's Plasmas are the rage right now at CES. What is a 3d ready HDTV? It basically an HDTV which can take any Blu-Ray {and perhaps any HDMI digital input} and transform the standard flat 2d picture into a stereoscopic picture. This means you can sit in front of the DiamondScan or the Viera and watch Dark City, or Apocalypto or No Country for Old Men in 3d. All you need are the customary glasses. The original authors and engineers of the film and disk do not need to do anything special to permit this stereoscopic feature to function. Its all done, post-process, with our marvelous silicone digital signal processing technology.

Although I have never been a particular fan of 3d movies, I must admit, this is cool feature. It would be fun and cool to try it out with my library. It would give me a reason to go back and watch all my favorites again. I am skeptical it will work well {this technology has never worked well in my estimation} but it would be fun to try it. Based on the enthusiasm for the tech, it must be working better than I would presume.

But then again...

We come to the issue of LaserVue. If you read my past blog entries, you know what I think about LaserVue: Its a fraud. The emperor has no cloths on. I say this is as a commited DLP fan who wishes it would work. I am more likely to buy a Mitsubishi DiamondScan 835 than a LaserVue right now, and not because of LaserVue's price. I would finance it, if I though it would work better. It does not.

Nevertheless, somehow, someway, the lovely Alix Steel [will you marry me babby?] is all bubbly about how LaserVue puts Plasma to shame. She even embedded a small res video in her post to prove it... not that such a proof can prove her point. I hope you are right, Alix, but I am highly skeptical. One thing I will say is this: You are girl after my own heart. Image quality is more important than skinny screens.

I vow that I will give LaserVue another look soon. It may be that Mitsubishi debugged their shtick in the past few months. I was expecting major improvement with the next gen. So far we have no generational landmark, but Mitsubishi may be making improvements to the LaserVue firmware. This process did wonders for my mighty PS3.

In my last survey of the market, Panasonic's marvelous Viera PZ850 series proved itself to be a serious contender for the championship. If the LaserVue can put such a screen 'to shame' it will be worth every penny of the $7,000 they are asking for it. It is no mean task to crush the PZ850 series or the Pioneer Kuro Elite Pro.