Thanks for the kind words, gang. I've never really been "away" although events of the past six months have had to make a lot of web surfing with active participation take a back seat for a while.

I'm still here, enjoying the 950 at the one year mark. Yes, the beta units probably didn't have some of the idiosyncracies of the production units (due to some vendor changes that have been worked out) so I never had a "hiss" issue (or I certainly would have mentioned it.)

In fact, until a few weeks ago I was still running with good old "Number One." Peter graciously did a swap out with me since there are a couple of features (I like the ability of defeating the On Screen Display) that finally had me give in to a blue dot model.

All in all, I have no reason to change statements I've made over the past year regarding the quality and the sound of the 950. Any problems I have are nit-picking, at best, to me. For example, when they added OSD = 0 seconds (On screen display OFF) I would have preferred if they retained the 3 second choice and dropped one of the longer intervals. In fact, as you approach a 30 second On Screen time for the display you might as well add an "Always ON" option and ditch the longest settings. I know it's a question of MIPS, but that a suggestion for a future iteration of the 950.

And, even though the acquisition time of the 950 is now much, MUCH faster than my beta unit I still have a slight issue with delay when running a Dish PVR as the source. However, this might be an anomality of the PVR, not the 950. (I own both the Dish 501 and the 721).

All in all, well worth it.

For those interested...

I'm so happy with the 950 and all it provides that it has become completely transparent to me. Now I'm working on the video end of things. Some of you may already know that I won a Runco CL-500 on the HT Cruise 2002 and Don Stewart convinced me to think hard before replacing my SONY VW10HT. The Runco is a DLP unit (the SONY's an LCD) but the Runco is not native 16:9 (the SONY is). So it would have been a trade off.

However, Sam Runco allowed me to barter up to a CL-700 (native 720p) unit at a remarkable price (lips sealed) and I recently heard that he will allow me to wait for the just announced Runco CL-710c (3rd Generation DLP with the HD-2 "Mustang" chip and other visual upgrades) with no additional cash outlay by me.

Therefore, sometime in the Spring I should have a new unit hanging from my ceiling. A fitting complement to the 950. And, of course, I'll be talking about it once it arrives.

Take care.

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RAF

My HT (latest update 04/17/02) Now includes Outlaw 950 and Outlaw 755