BANANA

It Must Be Summer - Aussie F1 Qualifying

Sitting here at daft o'clock watching the qualifying, Lotus bombed out, ugh! But hey watching F1 is like playing GT5 no? As you probably know i got my 42" 3D LG yesterday and am really chuffed with it, that size seems to be the perfect size for my room set-up. The picture when you give it an HD feed just excels. very impressed. Took me a while of fiddling to suss out all the settings and program in some picture modes.

Good points about TV, beautiful picture quality, no sign of input lag, pretty good sound from 'invisible' speakers, the boot up light on the face panel (am easily pleased) and it's tiny thin! about 30mm, handles 3D wonderfully.

Bad points, no headphone socket, doesn't do 2D to 3D conversion despite being told it did. you can run side by side etc 3D video files off a flash drive though, downloaded a few to test it last night. can load 3d photos that way too.

Gaming: OK, i tried KZ3 and it does look good running in 3D despite some middle ground ghosting which is down to the game not the TV, but after a bit you don't notice it much, i was looking for niggles while playing the demo. The gun looks nice and solid and feels right when you sight aim, the hud sits on what would be the front of the screen and teh action takes place 'in' the screen mostly.

GT5: Still fiddling with the settings but i think i have depth set to 6 and convergence at .17 or something, The in-car view looks right and it felt like a could reach out and adjust the air vents in the dash :) some ghosting on gloves. bumper cam with the analogue dials is impressive as the dials seem to float, bonnet/roof cam, the one i use a lot thanks to standard cars shows off the depth on the track, noticed some ghosting on the white track lines at times, nothing to worry about.

Motorstorm 3D demos: tried these out earlier in the day, the TV handled all the fast motion a treat, just gave the whole thing a more solid feeling, dirt and stuff comes out of the screen behind your vehicle, nice.

Movies: only tried it with Piranha so far, will be renting a couple out later today, good clean picture and 3d effect, nothing to quibble about.

giving Ridge Racer 7 a go later as that got a 3D patch some time back.

PS3 3D set up is as easy as checking automatic in the display options and setting your screen size. not sure how telling it your screen is bigger or smaller than it actually is will effect 3D, may fiddle with that later too. Ghosting only seems to show it's head when you get areas of white near a dark colour but this is due to the tech rather than anything else and is pretty much unavoidable.

Dont forget to adjust your clock tomorrow.

3DS Launch Day

Does M3i Zero flash card support N3DS? The answer is YES if you update your firmware today [download here] so now you can carry on enjoying your 'back-ups' of your favorite games on Nintys new handheld system.

Not got yourself a M3i Zero and want to know just what they do, then hit up the cards page [here] item shipped next day from our converted Umbrella Corporation oil tanker floating just off the south coast of England.



now back to our scheduled programming....

Epic Is Too Small A Word

‘Shaken Manchild Syndrome’

Science less than a decade away from fully operational printer

22-03-11

SCIENTISTS will soon develop a home copying machine that is not an absolute pain in the arse, it has been claimed.

This one's good for taking up space and bumping into while carrying hot tea

As experts perfected a method for 'printing' three dimensional objects, the Institute for Studies said the only obstacle now was making a printer to print them with.

Professor Henry Brubaker said: "If printer design continues to advance at the current rate, it's likely we'll see a machine that isn't fundamentally incompatible with plain white A4 paper by the year 2021.

"Then we're just a few years away from something that isn't a shit-sucking bastard fucker with the sheer brass balls to describe itself as a printer."

He added: "One leading manufacturer already has a prototype machine, the MasterPrint500, that can successfully print documents of up to 12 pages only 11 of which look like they've been vomited by a child.

"You should see it. Paper goes in plain, paper comes out printed, with only slightly less than 9% reliability. It only needs to become a bit more than 11 times as good and that's us totally sorted for printing."

Stephen Malley, managing director of MasterPrint, said: "It will even accept normal non-printer paper that hasn't been through the special printerisation process that makes it printerified.

"And instead of having its 'drivers' on multiple CDs that disappear into the realm of fairies two hours after you first open the box, you can just plug the thing into a computer and it works."

He said: "Of course, one week after this printer is released we will discontinue its ink cartridges.

"No-one will know why."

this post has nothing to do with an engineer visit tomorrow and a 800 quid bill to fit a new gearbox to on of my printers at work, on the upside the owner has promised to buy me another new machine to run in tandem, clouds and silver linings and all that. just hope i hit the deadline, could be a late night tomorrow...

3D Friday, So So Very Near.

This friday is the release date in the Uk of the Ninty 3DS, despite being a bit sexy i'm holding out on getting one until they get 3D video playback on the thing.

Talking of which, i've just got back from my in-store demo of the LG 42LX6900, and i have to say i was very very 725 pounds handed over worth of impressed. I had been looking into getting a 3DTV since that tech trade show around this time last year and a year on the prices have, as we all knew they would, been practically halved. good news for yours truely! The set is a 42" LED LCD and the picture looks better than my 22" Bravia, heresy! you cry. But to me, this was the moment that all those weeks reading bloody online reviews by muppets and haters, trawling A/V forums for a more tech view point and reading spec sheets came down to.

An A/V Expert From RicherSounds, Probably :)

I placed the grubby fingerprinted glasses over my eyeholes and expected to see a ghosted flickering image, thanks for the paranoia online reviewers! but what i saw was porn of the ocular kind, the image was bright, sharp, solid and had no ghosting, i felt like i could reach out and touch the picture. i felt relief and maybe that was actual real to goodness joy deep inside my black cynical heart?

Chatting with the bearded sales guy, why are all good A/V experts fond of facial hair? the other guy in the shop had a look of the bill bailey about him.. chatting, he gave me the low down about how best to run the set, turning off the tru-motion etc etc showing the various and many options, which he agreed were mostly pointless. it does 2D to 3D conversion, it has a gaming mode for minimal input lag, the screen has a response time of 2.2ms (my current set is 6ms+) it comes with wireless rechargeable active glasses which were very comfortable and the set is 1 1/4" thick.

just got to wait a couple of days for them to drop the set off. *waits*

VW BUS Nurburgring Challenge

on 18th March DaveJJoiner took the lead in the ThreeSpeech Bus Race Challenge with a timed lap around the Green Hell of 8:11, now that's pretty well damn impressive. and only 11 seconds slower than my BTR Turbo RUF! Dave, i salute you, you truely are a speed maniac.

Love Lovefilm?

I kind of do, although the PS3 streaming part of the service does NOT light my fire yet.

I went for the free trial as I expect most of you have done - if not I recommend you jump to it. The website (and to a lesser extent the PS3 browser too) is excellent. Creating your rental list is easy and fun, doddle to find things you didn't know you needed to see - like I just watched the pictured film Moon, a very lonely guy running a power station on the moon has a rather eventful ending to his 3 year posting. Not everyones cup of tea but I loved it, very 'Silent Running' in tone, tasty modern retro styling too.

The films available for streaming are quite limited, some stuff comes and goes from the package inclusive streaming, if you miss it then it's usually still available if you pay per title - some chance, noone would go for that surely? Just add the disc to the rental list. I like the Blu Ray quality and would opt for that every time - streaming is nice and even, but sub DVD quality by quite a mark.

I'm on the £9.99 unlimited films + streaming, one disc at a time. I'm only watching 4-5 per month, so I'm changing to £10.20 4 titles + 4 hrs streaming/month, 2 at a time with games. You can manage multiple lists and distrib your 'at a time' quota between them, so I can have a game list and have one of them at a time, family movies on the other. Nice, I'm going to use this for these games I'm missing out on.

I've reduced my Virgin V+ HD cable telly package down a notch, saving I think £8/month, I may go further in the future and can it altogether, if I can be bothered to organise freeview HD. Lovefilm is better.

This Is Hardcore

Now, yesterday i began playing Homefront, half an hour later i got fed up, reset my audio options and restarted playing Homefront, seems it has problems trying to do 5.1 over optical so i switched to HDMI output. hrmm. All better now.

Homefront has been getting pretty average reviews and i think i know why, it's because people generally don't like being on the loosing side and not being able to run around with infinite ammo and soak up bullets like a sponge and people don't like getting butt raped so quickly after starting a level.

This game is balls tough! even on normal mode it'll only take a few hits before you're staring at the greying death screen wondering WTF! On one section i walked out of a building to get nuked by an RPG even before i had time to refocus my eyes. second time out i sprinted to the nearest tree to hide behind then took the enemy down with a well placed round to the head.

This game is about death, dieing, suffering, mental anguish, the utter utter nasty side of war, and so it should, war is not fun, war is not a laugh with your mates, war is a mother and baby screaming and crying while you fire shots from their front room window while all hell is breaking loose. seriously i shouted 'shut the fuck up' at the tv at that point, it was horrible!

After another section, which i stupidly though i was winning, i got carpet bombed, i came round in my safehouse and for the next 10 minutes i sat there looking out of the window while having a smoke, and somewhere in the building a small child sang london bridge is falling down over and over and over...

It is not going to win any feel good games of the year awards. If you hate getting your arse handed to you you won't like it, if you like a challenge, if you like overwhelming odds, limited ammo, human suffering, then go and have a go if you think you're hard enough, just don't blame me when you're curled up in the middle of the front room crying to make it all stop :)