I received a new HDTV today, 32″, 1080i, HDMI. It won’t be used as a “home TV” though, but rather as a testing ground for my video editing station — in other words, for computer-related purposes only. I will be writing a review about it soon.

Additionally, Tiffen is sending over 6 filters for the HV20. I love playing with filters and provide “before” and “after” clips/images. I am still deciding if I want to actually buy 52mm telephoto/macro/wide-angle lenses or 43mm. The HV20 is 43mm, but all my filters are on the more popular 52mm size now, so I think it makes more sense to try to buy stuff at that size.

There are two mp3 players on the plate too, and an upcoming cellphone review for August. I am supposed to pick which phone model I want to review next, I just don’t know what I should pick. I have pretty much everything in my collection except an HTC, a Blackberry and a Treo, but because there are cost restrictions about these review devices that I pick, I can’t really have these devices (except if I pay extra). I don’t blame the retailers of course, it doesn’t make sense for them to send over too expensive devices. I will have to decide between some less-expensive Nokia and Sony Ericsson models and most Motorola, Samsung and LG models.

I hope they had more BenQ/Siemens phones though. I don’t have any of these in my collection. It’s funny too, because I have only one phone that uses my husband’s browser! And that browser version is 3 years old. BenQ/Siemens usually ships with more recent 7.x Openwave browser versions, but these phones are hard to come by here in the States.

Now that I can export to HD, here is a quick quality test. It seems to me that quality at the same bitrate between WMV and h.264 is similar, although WMV features more of the original colors. I tried giving more kbps to h.264 but it didn’t got much better, while mpeg2 at 25mbps (that bitrate is the standard for .m2t HDV files) has really nice punchy colors and detail. Mpeg2 and wmv were exported by Vegas, while x.264 via ffmpeg on 2 passes:

ffmpeg.exe -deinterlace -y -i “lossless.avi” -threads 2 -an -pass 1 -f mp4 -title “My JBQ” -vcodec h264 -level 41 -refs 2 -loop 1 -deblockalpha 0 -deblockbeta 0 -parti4x4 1 -partp8x8 1 -partb8x8 1 -me full -subq 6 -brdo 1 -me_range 21 -s 1920×1080 -r 30000/1001 -b 9216k -bt 9216k -bufsize 20000k -maxrate 25000k -g 300 -coder 1 -acodec aac -ac 2 -ab 128k “1080p-30.mp4″