Buying a product with an unknown Chinese brand can sometimes bring you an unwanted surprise and not to mention some additional headaches or even serious problems. A fresh example I had was with such product was an ExpressCard reader for Compact Flash cards that I picked up because of the very attractive price it had. Of course the product worked without any problems, or at least most of the time, there were just a few times that my laptop froze when inserting the reader. So I decided to open it up and see if there is any problem with it that might be causing the freezes and imagine my surprise when I’ve found the piece of solder on the picture above freely moving inside the case of the reader. I was quite happy that it did not do any serious damage to my laptop besides the few times it froze up the PC without any permanent damage. But if I was not lucky enough it could’ve shorted something important and could result in my laptop being seriously damaged, so next time when buying some item like that I’ll have this in mind…

ATI/AMD sometimes is making some good moves, but they often seem to be done in half, for example the latest one – producing a limited edition of 6500 plastic figures of Agent Ruby Revenge. Good idea to make the fans happy, or at least at first sight, but then again when you take a closer look at the Rubi figure you can easily see that the result from this move might be just the opposite. Who in his right mind has designed the plastic figure, it has nothing to do even with Ruby’s picture on the box, the face of the figure is awfully designed and the colors of hair etc do not match a lot. You can even say that the Ruby figure looks more like a transvestite than a hot and sexy girl as it should’ve been, but that seems not to bother ATI a lot… the marketing guys are probably thinking that the figure is a big hit.

Shame on James Cameron for not releasing a stereoscopic 3D version of the trailer for Avatar, but just trying to convince us to go watch the movie in 3D by just showing us some “flat” teasers and trailers with scenes from the movie. Luckily now there is at least a stereoscopic 3D version convert from the official trailer of the movie that looks nice, but don’t expect anything to hit you in the face with this one. Converting 2D to Stereoscopic 3D video does not provide the same great results as when shooting the video in S3D and then providing it in that format, but still it is better than plain 2D, so you might as well enjoy the trailer.

The Avatar S3D trailer is encoded in Windows Media Video format in Interlaced format (Field Sequential) so you’ll need to tell the Nvidia 3D Vision Stereoscopic Player to use Interlaced, Left Line First mode when opening the file with aspect ratio of 16:9. You should of course be able to play the video with other respective video players and 3D setups that do support this format, although this 2D to S3D convert was made especially for 3D Vision owners.

- To Download the Avatar HD Trailer in Stereoscopic 3D Format go here…