MovieBeam Hi-Def Movie Service Reviewed
By David Walker |
March 16th, 2006
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It wasn’t very long ago that we reported on a new Hi-Def movie service – called MovieBeam – that would hit the market shortly and offer users one of the first options for watching Hi-Definition movies from the comfort of their own living rooms. Well, the service has hit and Ben Drawbaugh at HD Beat took the dive and reviewed the service. Going in with tempered expectations, Ben ultimately concluded that the service still disappointed him…badly. Ouch. That would equivocate to expecting a middling 1% raise and instead getting fired.
This quote from Ben says it best:
The best news is that the box worked fine with my Vonage VOIP phone. The bad news is that the Picture Quality was the worst HD I have ever seen, well maybe not the worst, but it is in contention.
The box and interface were nice, and setup was easy, but of the 100 movies available out of the box, only 7 were in HD. Also, only HDMI is supported for viewing the HD movies. On top of that, the selection of movies was old and unimpressive. Ben had to haul the unit to a neighbor’s house to utilize the HDMI output, since his 2 year old Mitsubishi TV wasn’t up to snuff. The movie they tested, Deep Blue Sea, had “unbearable” compression artifacts, even in scenes that were almost completely still! This is certainly not a good start for the year of HD movies. Hopefully, the issues can be addressed or MovieBeam may be extremely short-lived.
Filed in: Content Providers