ericbee,
No comments about how people may feel about TAW Inc. but, there is something I need to point out:
>>"The Rock can never and will never be able to scale like a Faroudja"
Now, that's a pretty strongly biased statement. There are many people who will disagree with you, including Vern Dias and Patrick Bennett. I do consider Faroudja a worthy competitor. They are more close to the same level than you think now. You can simply ask tommyboy when he compares the latest Faroudja NR and the latest ROCK Plus. Hyperlinks to several Faroudja-ROCK comparisions reviews are available if you look for them.
Correction to your misinformation #1: The only place where the processing power is limited is SOLELY to Y/C delay and ClearMatrix ... No other function are disabled! You can do Y/C delay or you can do the improved ClearMatrix algorithm. ROCK Plus allows you to do both.
Correction to your misinformation #2: The ROCK is fully upgradeable to ROCK Plus. We haven't misadvertised the ROCK's hardware and software upgradeability. We are actually following up on that with a generous upgrade discount to existing ROCK owners. Many of our ROCK owners are ecastic that they are able to upgrade their ROCK to ROCK Plus to inexpensively get the extra processing power that they need for this feature. People have noticed that the picture quality leap between ROCK Firmware 1.x.0 and ROCK Firmware 2.2.1 is actually bigger than the upgrade from a very old Faroudja LD-series line doubler to a Faroudja 3000, even including improved sharpness caused by the ability to make Y/C adjustment that didn't exist in 1.2.0 firmware. Pratically all ROCK owners don't share your sentiment. And when/if RADEON becomes pratical and stable for our needs, we'll most definitely offer that upgrade down the road.
Correction to your misinformation #3: Faroudja are excellent scalers and we do consider them one of our primary competitors. We are happy to be able to compete with them. You make it sound like we're so far behind Faroudja. Your arguments make it sound like you're comparing an old ROCK to a top-of-the-line 5-figure-priced Faroudja 5000 scaler, which is not an apples-to-apples comparision! Instead, please let the professional reviewers rip apart the good and bad of ROCK and Faroudja. You'll see that the two are much more balanced than you think, with some favours going to one and others going to the other. I am going to refrain from elaborating any further, since I would sound like I am marketing the ROCK - I stop only to correct your misinformation.
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Correction to your misinformation #4: "scale" could be construed as a generic word so there is room for misunderstanding. Taken literally, you mean the interpolation in adding scanlines beyond 480p. If this is the case, why did some people find that the current ROCK units sharper in this than many of Faroudja units including Faroudja 3000 in its ability to do interpolation, especially for film mode? Why is the clarity of the 6.75 Mhz pattern better looking than Faroudja 3000's own? On the other hand, did you mean one carefully-selected characteristic of the ROCK scaling that compares poorly to Faroudja - Did you mean Deinterlacing or scaling? Realtime image processing? (noise filter, chroma, sharpness, etc)? Film mode? Video mode? Antialiasing? Which ROCK compared to which Faroudja? You may want to point out if you're comparing a super-top-of-the-line Faroudja 5000 to a super-early pre production ROCK. Depending on which Faroudja unit, we clearly know one of the units is clearly better in some categories and the other is clearly better in other categories. Obviously, if you meant Firmware 1.x.0's video deinterlacing or the early combing problems, yes, that really clearly and obviously sucked compared to Faroudja current catalog of units. But you didn't specifically point which part of ROCK's scaling capabilities was so terrible compared to Faroudja. It's the overal picture quality experience that counts the most.
No comment to any of the other things you said, except most of it is behind us now, and I no comment to people's opinion of TAW in this thread... You're pretty much describing an early pre-production ROCK with Version 1.0.0 firmware. You've clearly missed the massive picture quality improvements offered by the firmware 2.x.x for both film mode and video mode.
ericbee, I get the hint that a Faroudja engineer who looked at an older ROCK, have been feeding you some exaggerations. .... (This is just an impression, that's all - no offence intended to Faroudja themselves, I'm just observing an impression). They probably wouldn't update you on any positive changes they observed when they upgraded to Firmware 2.2.1 .... While Faroudja units are most certainly respectable, neither unit is perfect, but what you've said seems to insert a false interplanetary distance between ROCK and the sub-$20,000 Faroudja units.
Normally I won't be posting in this thread, yes we clearly had teething problems, but very good portions of your post contains very clearly obvious misinformation! People can make a more accurately informed decision to buy Faroudja / ROCK, than that!
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Disclaimer: Portions of my post may look like that I am advertising the ROCK. Really, I'm not trying to get anybody to buy a ROCK from this post. Faroudja is a pretty good competitor and they contribute quite an amazing amount to the home theater market. I respect them for that, in the good sportmanship manner. I am defending against the following chasm-like generic statement: "The Rock can never and will never be able to scale like a Faroudja" ... My goal here is to defend against misinformation. Leave it to the professional reviewers, not biased information from me or a Faroudja engineer!
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Thanks,
Mark Rejhon
www.marky.com/hometheaterLead Software Engineer for The TAW ROCK
[This message has been edited by Mark Rejhon (edited 07-13-2001).]
