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Back To School Book Savings
Books | Aug 27, 08
With money tight, it’s worth reminding the millions of students about to buy textbooks that they may well save serious money checking for lower prices online.
This time of year I invariably hear from both faculty and students about savings they find on required books by buying online as opposed to from on-campus brick and mortar stores. And now, with the PriceSCAN toolbar, finding savings is even easier. Just install our spyware-free toolbar, and when you’re surfing your course’s syllabus pages, highlight the title of the book you need to buy, right click and choose “search PriceSCAN for selection”. You’ll see displayed the same price comparison you’d get by coming to our site and searching for that book. Of course, if you prefer you can just use the book search option on our site. Either way, comparison shopping for books on PriceSCAN.com can help protect you from overpaying. And as I’ve argued before (see “Syllabus Savings”), if you want to support your school, do it at a fundraiser, not at the campus bookstore.
Posted by jeffrey.trester at 12:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Could A Poor Man's "High-Def" Alternative (With Region-Free Playback) Be A Blu-ray Killer?
Electronics | Aug 5, 08
There are some very inexpensive DVD players out there offering high-def upconversion for regular DVD disks, and at least one can be set to provide region-free playback.
Upconversion of a standard DVD uses interpolation to add extras pixels so as to create a picture with the same number of pixels as high def. Of course, this mathematical technique produces a “false precision”, with "higher resolution" detail a product of a mathematical algorithm’s “guess”, as opposed to the image actually shot. However, many people apparently find the resulting picture quite stunning, including a film-scholar friend of mine who recently bought the Philips DVP3960/37.
As of this writing, the Philips DVP3960/37 Upconvert DVD Player with DivX is available from a vendor on PriceSCAN for just under $40. With HDMI connectivity, it provides 720p/1080i upconversion for standard DVD disks. Formats supported include DVD video and video CD (i.e. play of DVD+R/+RW, DVD-R,-RW and CD-R), as well as JPEG, MP3, DivX, and WMA. Further, this model can be set to play DVDs from any region, not just the US – a significant advantage for lovers of foreign films.
The cheapest Blu-ray player on PriceSCAN, the Sony BDP-S300, is going for over $320 (of course the PlayStation 3 comes with one for just under $400). And that’s not taking into account the value of your old DVD collection or the price and availability of new Blu-ray content. Considering the economics, forty bucks for an ersatz “high-def” experience does sound like kind of a deal, even if some of those pixels are born of an equation.
Posted by jeffrey.trester at 8:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
