But, hey, let’s make the vitriol useful– if there were a means that I could report bugs, I would. If there were a way to capture the state of my machine for validation, I’d do it. If there is some way that my crap user experience could be used to prevent future user abuse, that’d be awesome.


To be completely blunt: The team responsible for the PS3 non-gaming user experience — the menus, data management, user interface, and everything else that doesn’t happen in game — are either incompetent buffoons or have a management chain and/or product marketing/design/definition demands that are ridiculous, stupid, and an insult to the customer. (Personally, I’m betting it is the latter — the PS3 is an impressive piece of engineering, both software and hardware).

It is unfortunate that the PS3 is the only vehicle via which one can enjoy such great titles as Ratchet&Clank, WipeOut HD/Fury, and Uncharted. It is insult to their greatness to require the user to have to experience but a moment of the steaming pile of crap that is the Playstation 3 user experience.

I did something incredibly stupid this evening.

I assumed that Sony remotely cares about user experience, that Sony understands that their users care about saved game data, and that Sony — after more than a decade in the game console business — might have a clue about how to implement a system.

Boy, that was a stupid assumption.

I wanted to move the PS3 from TV A to TV B. No video; TV B doesn’t do 1080p. No problem; a google search or two later reveals that holding down the power button will reset the video and give you a menu where you can reset the video.

Nope — the closest is restore default settings. An internet search indicated this was the right thing to do. Wrong. The internet was wrong. Very very wrong. Don’t do that. Don’t ever do that. If you want to switch the resolution of a PS3 without losing data, do so on a TV that works with the PS3 in the current display mode first. If you don’t have one, you are screwed. Sony? Why do you hate your users?

In fact, what it does is worse than restoring the system to factory default. The first sign of trouble is when the PS3 says something like “Hey, I discovered there was user data I didn’t know about, I restored it”.

It lies.

It actually creates disconnected, unsigned, unblessed, shell accounts that have your data in an unusable form. They will have an asterisk in front; bbum became *bbum.

Uh oh.

Upon logging into the faux-*bbum account, many things are now broken. The worst — the single biggest insult — is that the original save game data is still there, but many games can’t use it.

Assasin Creeds II? Apparently, that saved game data will still work. Peggle? Nope, not so much. Oooh.. joy… looks like all data related to games purchased from the playstation network is trashed. WipeOut HD? Won’t even launch — key file missing, redownload dumbass user! But, Sony, All I wanted to do was make it work again? Why are you throwing rocks at me?

Better yet! When you redownload, the PS3 downloads all the bytes and then says “Hey, man, you already got the same crap installed. Do you really want to install it again?” The stupid. It burns!

Now, logging back into the Playstation Network let me sync my trophies. But there was also some warning that said that I might not be able to earn any more trophies, implying that online play was broken in some fashion. Of course, there isn’t anything that I can find to verify current status.

Wait. I played Peggle once and the challenge modes were locked. Now they aren’t. Huh… what? It appears that I didn’t lose Peggle data, but that something magically triggered the reconnection of the data. I’ll have to assume that it was the WipeOut HD “key” download as that seems to be the only “user authing data event” to have happened.

At this point, I renamed the account and have restored Playstation Network connectivity. I may or may not have a mostly working account. I have lost data — all Peggle data gone and deities knows what else. Even getting back to this point was a bunch of effort that I wouldn’t wish upon a non-admin user any day.

Of course, that I failed to maintain a backup was definitely a fault of mine. Then again, I didn’t actually lose any data, Sony just went to great lengths to make my data unusable without actually modifying it.

Or not. It might be that my data is now fully restored and usable. Or it might not be. There is no way to tell. Who knows? I might decide to fire up Uncharted One later this year only to discover that I can’t load the game save and have to start over.

Sadly, this abusive user experience is not unique to the PS3. I had a similar experience with the Wii, though — to be fair — Nintendo has apparently addressed that exact issue in the interim couple of years.

After 4 years, Canon has released an upgraded camera in the Digital Rebel series that has compelled me to replace my Digital Rebel Xt.

The Digital Rebel T1i, which started shipping in North America this month, is quite an extraordinary camera and a huge upgrade over the Xt. Excellent low light performance (high ISO performance), extreme versatility with the ability to shoot entirely automatic through to fully manual, and lots of usability upgrades.

I won’t be positing a detailed review. That has been covered far more effectively than I ever could by the folks at DPReview.

At above-left is the first image I shot with the T1i. Nothing terribly special, but I couldn’t have taken the same with the Xt without a tripod or switching to the relatively special purpose Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens (but that would have yielded a very narrow depth of field). Since someone asked, I added a link to the Amazon product page, too.

Canon 50mm f/1.4 – 1/125 f/1.6 – ISO 500

While there are many features and refinements of the T1i that I’m looking forward to leveraging, the high-ISO / low light performance is the one that yields an immediate benefit to me.

I like shooting photos in restaurants and the like, but I hate using a flash. Beyond making the food look artificial and destroying whatever natural ambiance the restaurant has tried to achieve, the flash is a huge annoyance to everyone — staff, customers, chefs, etc..

The photo at right is another shot that I could have done with the Xt without the flash or disruptive use of a tripod and posing.

Certainly, I will also leverage the upgrade from an 8MP to 15.1MP sensor, too. While the whole megapixel wars thing was overhyped and appears to now largely be over, there are some serious advantages to having a lot more pixels.

On the interactive front, it means that you can zoom into a photo and see some interesting details that wouldn’t be apparent with a lower resolution image. Looking at the full sized version of Eddie searing scallops reveals the slight haze caused by the scallops scorching under the flame.

But the biggest advantage of lots and lots of pixels is that it stretches the value of your lenses. In particular, I can shoot a shot with the Canon 100mm macro lens, crop nearly half the picture, and still end up with an image that is of the same resolution as a full framed image from the Xt. That would have been very handy for pictures like this, this, and this.

While the camera is brilliant, the software is not. At least, not so much when you want to work with an all RAW workflow.

Whenever a new camera is released, there is a lag between the release of the camera and when Apple or Adobe releases updates that include RAW support for the camera. Thus, I can’t currently shoot in RAW and import directly into Aperture (or Lightroom).

As I had shot a bunch of the initial images in RAW, I decided to install and use Canon’s RAW processing software to convert the images to usable form.

I summarized the experience with this tweet:

Canon’s camera software is a gigantic turd in the box containing an awesome camera.

Canon is in the camera business, not the imaging software business. And it shows in the software they ship with the camera.

First, don’t bother trying to download the software for your camera from canon. You can download firmware updates and you can download updates to the imaging software, but you have to have the original CD-ROM to do an installation.

How silly. What possible business reason does Canon have to prevent me from using my camera with any computer I encounter? This isn’t a revenue issue, the software “comes for free” with the camera (their description, not mine).

Because of this, I now have to install whatever outdated version of the software came with my camera and then grab the update from Canon’s rather poor web site to be able to upgrade to the latest version. For the rebel XT, the supplied installer is old enough and poorly written enough that I wouldn’t be surprised if it fails outright on Leopard these days (assuming I could even find my CD).

Now, with installer in hand, the experience does not improve.

The installer must be run from an administrative user’s account. University student trying to use a computer in a lab to process some photos? Not happening. Sensible user whose primary account is non-administrative? Log out, log in as administrator.

Once successfully run, the installer asks some questions and then does the installation into /Applications. No options to install it somewhere else.

The real kick in the crotch, though, is that the installed software is just a bunch of applications. It appears to be isolated to a folder in /Applications.

Even once installed, there is no guarantee the software is going to work. It certainly didn’t on my MacBook Pro; Canon’s own RAW decoding software can’t decode RAW images on my MBP.

However, the same software dragged to a MacPro works just fine.

Frustrating beyond belief and raises the question of why the hell the inferior installer is required in the first place.

Assuming you have the software installed on a working system, the actual user interface is awful, too. Non standard file browsers and toolbars. Toolbar buttons that make little sense. Icons in the UI that indicate something, but clicking on the icon yields no information.

And it doesn’t fully work, either. On the Mac Pro, the non-standard file browser randomly doesn’t allow some folders or volumes to be expanded. Like, for example, my user’s home folder. Got images in your Pictures folder? Nope. Can’t get to them from the software and there is no “open” or “import” that offers the system’s standard dialog box.

Of course, much of this stupidity might be explained by the obviously buggy implementation; so buggy that the system complains about the software loudly and often:

*** WARNING: Method setAutoresizesAllColumnsToFit: in class NSTableView is deprecated on 10.4 and later. It should not be used in new applications. Use setColumnAutoresizingStyle: instead.
*** WARNING: Method autoresizesAllColumnsToFit in class NSTableView is deprecated on 10.4 and later. It should not be used in new applications. Use columnAutoresizingStyle instead.
*** WARNING: Method setResizable: in class NSTableColumn is deprecated on 10.4 and later. It should not be used in new applications. Use setResizingMask: instead.
*** WARNING: Method isResizable in class NSTableColumn is deprecated on 10.4 and later. It should not be used in new applications. Use resizingMask instead.
*** -[NSLock unlock]: lock (%lt;nslock : 0x14a378a0%gt; ‘(null)’) unlocked when not locked *** Break on _NSLockError() to debug.
…. lots more deleted ….

To Canon’s credit, once you do struggle through the installer, move your images to somewhere the software can actually see it, and do all of this on a machine where the software can actually decode an image, it does a brilliant job of turning a RAW into a JPG that can be handled by Aperture or iPhoto just fine.

As an aside, the donateware RAW Photo Processor software can successfully decode T1i RAW images. It isn’t very easy to use, but at least it works. The resulting images don’t look as good as those decoded by the Canon software as they seem to have considerably more noise.

But at least it works and is straightforward to install.

For now, I’ll shoot in JPG on the camera. While it probably won’t look quite as good as using Canon’s software to do the RAW conversion on the desktop, Canon’s software is such a totally tedious pain in the ass to use, I can live with a bit of minor degradation to preserve the fun part of photography.

(I know I could shoot RAW+JPG and then import the RAW once Apple ships an update that supports the T1i, but that ain’t going to happen — I already have enough trouble keeping the photos I take now organized and don’t care to deal with that.)

On January 31st, 2007, the Boston authorities completely lost their minds in a highly visible and ultimately humiliating way.

I am, of course, referring to the Mooninite Invasion.

For the first time in 8 years, we have the potential to live in a nation governed by the sane with policies grounded in reasoned thought.

But it is only potential.

We must remain vigilant and must never fail to ridicule figures of authority when they act like complete unreasoning jackasses!

Replacement parts for our refrigerator seem to be a major profit center for GE and our microwave was clearly designed by jackasses.

Read on for many too many details.

Our GE Profile Refrigerator’s freezer section stopped reaching 0, hovering at 10 to 28 degrees, depending on how hot the day was.

At 2.5 years old, it is out of warranty.

One $69 service call later revealed that the compressor fan wasn’t running. Cost for the relatively small, plastic fan and cheap-ass electric motor? $179. But that isn’t all that needs to be replaced.

Several years ago, GE redesigned the Profile such that it uses a “main board” — a little embedded controller — to control the various fans, pumps, etc… And when the compressor fan stops working, it either takes out the main board’s compressor fan control subsection or the main board’s compressor fan control subsection already failed and the dead compressor fan is the result.

Main board? Yeah — GE wants $250 for that. So, with labor, GE wants $520 to fix a 2.5 year old refrigerator that didn’t cost that much more than $520.

A quick search on the internet reveals dozens and dozens of similar failures. GE screwed up the design and their replacement part program is either intentionally or inadvertently a profit center.

A call to the service # yielded zero sympathy or clue. “That will be $99 to visit your refrigerator and you’ll have to talk with the [likely competent, but completely powerless, front line service guy] about not charging you to fix our screwed up product.”. Uh, no. That isn’t acceptable. I’ll be speaking to GE’s customer relations next week.

Ball is in their court. If GE makes good on fixing something that — evidence on the net and exorbitant parts quote — is clearly their problem, I might consider their products in the future. As it stands, not so much.

Update: GE didn’t care. During our remodel, we ended up sticking the refrigerator in the atrium — our make-do kitchen — with a box fan behind it. Kept the temperature stable on all but the hottest days for about 5 months until our new Kitchen Aid refrigerator was delivered and installed.

GE appliances are now on our blacklist.

The second issue is sort of funny if it weren’t actually downright dangerous.

We have a Samsung microwave that is more than a decade old. Nice enough device with the typical overly complex UI. Once you ignore all the gee-gaws and extraneous buttons, it is actually possible to program the microwave to nuke a bit of food — like, say, melt some butter — for a given amount of time at some given power level.

It goes like this:

• Insert food into ‘wave and close door
• Type a time
• Hit power level button
• Type a number from 1 to 6 (no UI indication of range), microwave will show that 10x that number (for no apparent reason).
• Hit Start button.

Now, say, you:

• Open door to check if butter is melting, stir it slightly (microwave, of course, stops nuking)
• Close door
• Hit Start button.

Beyond continuing the nuking process with the remaining time left, would you expect the microwave to also (a)continue to use the same power setting or (b)revert to full power with no indication that any change to power settings has occurred?

For whatever reason, the microwave does (b). So, if you are melting butter, this means that the microwave goes from power level 3 (which seems to work well) to power level 11 (whatever the maximum is, which seems to be beyond what you can set when you use the power level button in the first place).

This, in turn, renders the butter into a molten pool of lava like fat in a matter of seconds, shortly after which it explodes all over the inside of the microwave.

Awesome user experience, folks.

Nothing like reaching into the microwave to grab what is left of the lava butter only to have a big splat of lava butter fall off the roof of the microwave and land on the back of your hand.

From the press release, this device contains features such as “a 28-in-1 media card reader, front IO, USB and fire wire connections, dual NTSC and HDTV tuners (with CableCARD shipping soon), 8 channel HD audio”, etc.etc.etc…

Sounds neat enough. Especially with the six terabytes of potential storage. Put some decent multimedia control software on it and… well.. not bad!

Except who the hell designed it? Clearly not someone who actually thought through how to use it!

Anything that sticks out at all from any of those “front IO” ports is going to obscure the screen! Can you imagine trying to download photos or video with your video camera balanced somewhere — because, most likely, this behemoth will be inside a big old media center cabinet — while trying to deal with a touchy/feely UI with cables constantly flopping on the screen?

And, of course, you’ll probably want to plug in a keyboard and/or mouse to be abel to properly annotate and edit whatever media you capture into said unit. That’ll be convenient.

I wonder if it is even smart enough to know not to open the DVD drawer when the screen is in the retracted position (assuming, of course, the screen retracts).

Update: Embedded the BoingBoing TV segment on reading AmEx blue cards.

American Express decided to “automatically upgrade” my plebeian green card to an American Express Blue card.

Beyond giving me the “privilege” of paying AmEx a monthly exorbitant interest rate if I don’t pay the full balance, the card has an embedded RFID chip that is used to “wave and pay” at a bunch of locations.

Hell, AmEx is so proud of the RFID feature that the card is transparent such that the chip and antenna are clearly visible.

How incredibly stupid.

Why?

Because this is the exact same chip that can be read and decrypted with about $8 in hardware and a some freely available software.

Without touching the card.

From a distance, even.

Better yet, AmEx embeds a bunch of personal information in the card.

Now I have to call American Express and demand a replacement non-RFID card. Others have done this and been stymied. Or, alternatively, I think I’ll just take a drill to this one and apply some rotational entropy to the RFID chip.

Sadly, I’ll have to renew my passport in the next couple of years and US passports now also embed equally as insecure RFID accessible chunks of personal information.

Evil Mad Scientists Laboratory has made the foundation of this build available as The Peggy for $80.

In typical EMSL fashion, that link includes tons and tons of information, including full details, board design, source, and loads of implementation notes.

So, apparently, it is being called Aqua Teen Day. Good enough.

Better yet, though, is that the fine folks of boston — the level headed public that makes the city such a great place — are celebrating the first annual “Aqua Teen Day” by decorating the city with LED art.

On January 31st, 2007, the authorities in Boston completely lost their minds. It wasn’t the first time, but this particular date was heavily reported and even the most head-in-the-sand die-hard “OMGWTFBINLADENFTChildren!!!one!!!” fear mongers found it ridiculous.

I am, of course, referring to the Aqua Teen Hunger Force “Hoax Device” bomb scare.

I could go on a political rant about fear based leadership and the general stupidity of the security theater played out in our cities and airports.

But that is boring.

I’d rather remind people of the jackassery that has happened and, once again, laugh at it. Then vote appropriately.

To that end, I purchased memorial kits from the fine folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories and put them together over the last few days.

The results are just stunning. And effective. I brought the boards into work on Monday and, on the way home, stopped for a beer with boards in hand. Several folks asked about them and, upon explaining the history of the boards, they became just a touch more enlightened as to the stupidity of certain leadership and just a slight bit more inclined to learn more and vote accordingly.

Mission accomplished. With laughter included.

(The kits were a special edition from EMSL — you’ll have to contact them for availability. The LED “peg board” is generic; you can lay out the LEDs anyway you want to make any kind of similar display, including a “charlieplexed” mode that allows simple animations. I believe EMSL will be offering the generic form of the kit sometime soon.)

We visited the San Jose Museum of Art over the weekend. Roger totally dug it; sketching various scenes that he found inspiring.

Of course, we ended up with a $28 parking ticket. No surprises there. I mean, we parked in a marked parking space that had no parking limitation signs on Saturday near a meter that had no documented weekend rates are anything.

Obviously, a city that is trying to attract more tourists and more nearby residents would make accessibility to the downtown as easy and painless as possible. And a complete lack of posted parking policy is a BIG help. So is the total lack of grocery stores or other services that are necessary to support residents.

But I digress (and fully admit that it was my fault for not assuming that the city wouldn’t maximize revenue opportunities).

So, I went to pay the parking ticket online. Clearly, a city at the heart of silicon valley in the proactively environmental state of California will have an online payment system!

Sure does! And the fine City of San Jose will charge you $3 for the privilege of paying via their web site. Let’s see — $3 surcharge for a transaction that involves no paper, no illegible handwriting, no check processing, and less bookkeeping? Makes perfect sense.

Fine.

So, I’ll just pay that damned ticket via online banking.

Uh, no. The Fine City of San Jose effectively requires that you submit your Parking Violation payment with the Parking Violation Ticket itself.

No online banking for you!

Clearly, the City of San Jose hates them pesky trees.

Update:
So, it appears to boot to the stupid loading screen whenever this disc is inserted. The extended web enabled content looks kinda cool, though I didn’t bother with it.

The movie, itself, is just flat out gorgeous. But, wow, what a stupid user experience to play the damned disc.

Tonight, we dropped Transformers (HD DVD) into the HD DVD player to check out the amazing awesomeness supposedly contained within.

No such luck.

The stupid disc booted to a stupid “updating advanced web content” screen.

And then it sat there.

Only indication that someone was going on was the silly horizontal rule would occasionally have a rolling highlight.

But nothing happened. Not after 2 minutes, not after 20.

But, hey! There is a [CANCEL] button.

Except that there is no cancel button on the remote, nor does the UI respond to any random key-presses on the remote, nor does it do anything when you hit OK.

Or, maybe it does? Eventually, the “loading” UI went away and the movie started.

Looks really really good, too.

But, wow, what an incredibly broken, stupid, and horribly designed user experience.

This generation of media will hopefully die a quick death. I can’t imagine Blu-ray is worse, but it doesn’t sound like a party either.

I’m very much looking forward to the Apple TV software update. Depending on the experience, Netflix will either be downgraded by a disc or eliminated entirely.

It has now been nearly a week since we added an HD DVD player to the home entertainment system.

Some impressions.

We watched Serenity this evening. It is visually stunning. I’m sure the audio is pretty amazing, too, but I don’t currently have the 5.1 pre-amp / speakers hooked up.

By “visually stunning”, I mean: It looks better than it did in the theater. As an added bonus, I make better popcorn, have vastly superior beverages for far less money, and can watch a visually stunning movie while sitting in front of a fire.

No wonder the theaters are running scared. Hell — we paid $19 for Serenity on HD DVD which, accounting for the evening’s expense, is about 1/3rd to 1/5th the cost of actually going to a theater (depending on babysitting expenses).

Anyway — HD DVD really delivers in terms of the visuals when paired with a decent TV; 46″ 1080p Sony LCD, in my case.

The Planet Earth really drives it home. I have watched it on DVD, via Satellite, and on HD DVD. At 1080p, The Planet Earth is an awesome — a moving — tour of the awesome breadth of life on this planet.

As well, we watched the remastered HD DVD version of Blazing Saddles. The difference between it and the DVD is quite noticeable, but mostly in that HD DVD so clearly displays the noise and imperfections found in the original production process.

And, of course, if the discs do so, the extras on HD DVD can be considerably richer and more deeply integrated with the primary content than regular DVDs. Speaking of regular DVDs, the player does an awesome job of upscaling legacy content (though, honestly, I have no idea how it compares to the various $30 to $70 upscaling DVD players that are commonplace these days).

And that is pretty much where the happiness ends. Click on through for a bit of a rant on the vasty stupidity that is next generation media….

In this first week, it has also becomes abundantly clear that HD DVD is doomed. Though I have no experience with it, I would bet that a lot of my relatively off-the-cuff observations would apply equally to Blu-Ray.

First, the media is fragile. The Blazing Saddles disc came from Netflix. It locked up a couple of times during playback, taking minutes to get through a few seconds of scene. Not surprising — the disc itself was a bit scratched. While the player handled the data corruption better than the various DVD players I have used, the source of the problem — the scratches on the disc — were of a much smaller magnitude than what would be required to make a DVD fail in the same fashion.

This should come as no surprise. An HD DVD disc has a considerably higher data density. That is, the bits are smaller. Much smaller. So that means that a scratch of the same magnitude will obscure several times more data on an HD DVD vs. a DVD (vs. a CD).

So, the media is fragile. And the fragility will increase as the data density increases.

Putting aside reality for a second and pretending that all discs will remain pristine for all time, there is still vast stupidity here.

The user experience leading up to actually playing a movie really sucks. And the added flexibility of the menu system means that the user experience when doing anything but just watching the media can suck mightily, too. Some of this is likely DRM related, but — frankly — I don’t give a rat’s ass why it is this way or if DRM is at fault.

(1) The player takes nearly a minute to boot.

It seems that it is copying firmware from A to B or something. The manual says something to the effect of “This next generation super cool media player is much more like a computer than your previous home entertainment devices and, thus, it takes longer to do stuff.”. Paraphrased, but it really does say that. Worse, there is basically no feedback to indicate that the player has done anything other than lock up.

Inexcusable. The device should be responsive nearly immediately. At least let the user open the damned media drawer, regardless of how much “copying the firmware” crap that has to go on.

If this were first generation hardware, it would be one thing. But it isn’t. This is at least a second, if not third, generation player.

(2) The player takes a good 20 seconds to load a piece of media, DVD or HD DVD

See (1). Why the hell should the player take about 5x as long to load a piece of media as a DVD player?

(3) HDMI v1.3 (and player setup)

Huh? HDMI v1.3? I thought it was just a damned cable!

Apparently not. The player’s manual is rife with warnings and troubleshooting hints regarding mismatches in HDMI compliance levels between the player and the output device — don’t forget the pre-amp / switch tha may be between! — and how it might cause playback to be negatively impacting (i.e. you don’t see anything).

OK. Fine. Clearly, HDMI has a bunch of smarts built into it that allow the player and the destination device to negotiate playback rights or something. That the manual further warns that using the component or composite video out connections may not allow playback of certain content certainly bolsters this statement.

So why the hell do I have to tell the player what video format and resolution the display device is capable of?

Why do I have to go through a relatively complex setup procedure of the player just to get it to display properly? Could the appropriate information not be passed across the HDMI cable sometime? Did the consortium that created the standard decide to completely ignore “user experience” or “convenience”?

(4) During Playback User Experience Sucks

In the box with the player was a copy of 300 and The Bourne Identity. I tried turning on closed captioning during 300. Couldn’t figure it out. I managed to bring up French and Italian subtitles, but not consistently. I probably could have stopped playback and turned ‘em on from the setup menu, but I was actually trying to interrupt playback as little as possible. I failed.

Worse, there was no documentation on how to do this that I could find.

So, while HD DVD (and Blu Ray) offer all kinds of advanced tools for building complex human-computer interfaces, there doesn’t appear to be anything remotely resembling some kind of a standard for basic functionality. While not limiting creative flexibility is critical, the complete lack of usability guidelines meaans that the user experience is going to vary vastly from disc to disc and, frankly, is often going to be completely sucky.

That the player has settings for accepting cookies and phrases in the manual that allude to a “degraded or uncontrolled user experience when viewing content downloaded from the internet” does not bode well.

Some pretty harsh criticism.

Do I regret the purchase? Not at all. Currently, buying an HD DVD or Blu Ray player is the only way to consume 1080p content in your home without hefty recurring costs. The picture quality really is amazing. On a completely personal level, the folks that have seen The Planet Earth at 1080p have walked away impressed both technically and emotionally (yes, emotionally in the form of a deeper appreciation for the stunning gorgeousness of our little blue marble).