Video
All prices are quoted in euros unless otherwise noted.
1 €  is approximately 1.28 US dollars at time of report.

At High End each year, the German magazines Stereoplay, Audio and Video (all sister publications) do what most magazines fail to do -- inform, entertain and educate. These magazines' demos are, by far, some of the best of the show. For example, two years ago Stereoplay and Audio conducted the now-famous speaker shootout involving Thiel Audio, Wilson Audio, Focal, Sonus Faber, Audio Physic and TAD speakers. This year we slipped into Video's demo to see what they had cooked up on the home-theater side. This demonstration wasn't nearly as controversial, but it was very informative.

Instead of doing some kind of shootout, two representatives from Video chose the educational route and demonstrated the kind of perils consumers often run into when they simply choose to run their video gear "straight out of the box." By using the magazine's own test DVD, they showed the importance of making contrast, luminance, and gamma adjustments (the differences were profound), and also demonstrated the differences among source-material resolutions, which was capped off with the trailer of King Kong shown in the newly introduced HD DVD format. Immediately following the demo, the audience was offered free test DVDs -- everyone in the room lined up to get one. You can be sure that those who attended won't look at their video-display devices in the same way again.