This is a pretty nice price. I still remember paying $100 for a 3x cd reader. If I was still in college I'd be all over this. I am curious about the authoring software does anyone know about it?

Steven,

The contrast ratio of halo3 is unchanged due to the buffer use. You are referring to HDR lighting effects, which are pretty.

Dan,

I haven't seen any review that describes halo3 as a work of art. I have seen plenty that call it an exceptionally crafted game.

All,

The important thing to note in this is that to achieve the HDR look and solid frame rate of Halo3 Bungie had to give up many of the 'next gen' features of the 360 hardware. ATI did several very smart things in the design of the GPU for the xbox360. Among them they give good motion rendition,frame rate, and anti-aliasing.
The lighting model that Halo uses sacrifices the "free" anti-aliasing features of the 360 platform.

It looks like the xbox360 has already hit a fairly important graphical wall. I suspect that you may see more 30 fps games on the 360 like gears of war because the 360 has simply run out of bandwidth to provide the graphical effects that people expect now, such as motion blur, full frame anti-aliasing, 30+ fps and high dynamic range lighting.

Nintendo may have had it right. The processing may not have been there to do all of this in HD resolution. Sony hasn't shown that this can be done yet either. A nicely upscaled SD image with all of the rendering goodies will look better than raw resolution.