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Sundance Film Festival 2011

The news out of Sundance this year was that business is once again booming. We could tell that things were hopping well before the festival too because the online ticket system was showing many shows as sold out. We may have compounded the effect by shifting our attendance to the opening week of the festival. For the past couple of Sundance's we had attended the less populated second half. This year, for the first half anyway, it was just plain hard to get tickets. Using the online system during our allotted time slot, weeks in advance of the festival, there were many movies already sold out. Red State, the new movie from Kevin Smith (Clerks) sold out in all time slots in 1 day, including a showing at 8:30 am on a Monday morning.

Samsung BD-P1400 Blu-ray Player

Samsung was the first on the block to release a Blu-ray player with the BD-P1000. This first model had a few hiccups in design, but ultimately after a few firmware updates, it provided decent performance. They followed up that model with the BD-P1200, which featured Silicon Optix's Reon video processing.

Pioneer Elite BDP-95FD Blu-ray Player

Without a doubt Pioneer represents the high end of the Blu-ray camp at this point. While we've seen Blu-ray players from several respectable hardware companies already, I don't think any of them carry the clout that Pioneer does with home theater enthusiasts like the Elite line. Pioneer Elite has a solid reputation when it comes to DVD playback and I was excited to finally have the opportunity to review one of their higher end Blu-ray players.