Now that the High Definition DVD war is over we could just enjoy buying our favorite version of “Blade Runner” without fear of it being obsolete next year. Instead somebody has to come up with some absurd reasons why BluRay is not relevant anymore, despite the fact that it is a novelty for most people. This ComputerWorld article is the sad demonstration of what happens when incompetent people are given the opportunity to yak about stuff that they don’t know. Let’s review it point by point.
- #1: Cost of the players. I remember the first DVD burner that ht the market. It was bulky, external and had a price tag of $10,000. Nowadays I have a dual-layer DVD burner inside my MacBookPro. The fact that BluRay is the established standard for High Definition DVDs means that manufacturers can focus on one product and conquer the market the good old-fashioned way: price war. You want a player today at a good price? Buy a PS3. I did and I love it. When I don’t use it as a DVD player I play “Heavenly Sword”. For $399.00 you can’t go wrong but there will be sub-$200 player soon if not already.
- #2 is hardly worth mentioning. This is such an absurd argument, I can’t believe Mr.Mearian was allowed to print it. The fact that a SD DVD player can connect to a 1080p TV doesn’t make that freaking picture any better. It’s still 480 lines upsized to 1080. If anything, the picture quality will be actually worse than when viewed on a SD TV! In fact, the only way to see SD content at a decent quality on a HD TV is by using rear projection. Upsizing a digital image to more than twice its resolution, when using LCD or similar technology, will turn the image into a “Lego” artwork. Obviously Mr.Mearian has never watched a High Definition DVD on a matched screen or he would not dare to compare the two. I’m actually amazed that the editors of ComputerWorld let this be published. I gues there is no editorial process anymore.
- #3: “why buy when you can rent?” Where are you supposed to play those rented BluRay DVDs? You need a player, no more no less than before. This is pure nonsense.
- #4: this is my favorite, nonsense-du jour, argument. The DVD revolution happened because of the convenience of the system. DVD releases have multiple discs with additional features that many film lovers enjoy as much as the main attraction. See the boxed versions of “Lord Of the Rings” and “The Matrix” or, of course, “Star Wars”. Many of us spent many hours watching the additional content and the fact that virtually every DVD release has a director’s commentary, something that doesn’t happens automatically, means that many people re-watch the movie just to listen what the authors have to say about it. All this is lost when you download a movie. Not only that but most people don’t have the bandwidth to download a high definition movie. Do I have to remind Mr.Mearian that a SD DVD is usually +7GB and that takes usually a few days to download even with DSL? How do you expect to download a High Defition feature within your lifetime? “But Paolo “, you might say, “I saw Steve Jobs announcing that you can download movies on iTunes”. Yes, sadly. Those are not the same movies at the same quality that you can get from your DVD. Why should I pay for a download, to watch on a computer, at lower quality than the standard DVD, waiting for the download to finish, when I can just go to my local video store and get a DVD that I can play immediately and at full HD quality and with the additional content. It seems to me that downloading movies, as it is today, is just trying to build a better mouse trap. It’s convoluted, reserved to a minority of super-geeks, lower quality and more expensive than just buying a DVD player and use the damn disk. Hell, you don’t even need a Internet connection for that.
The vast majority of people today don’t have the resources, then knowledge or the reason to download a movie. I bet that even pay-per-view which has been around for a while, can’t compete with DVD rentals and sales. People are buying HD TVs and they way to see that kind of sharp image when they rent a DVD. The disc is as valid today as it was yesterday. It’s convenient, inexpensive and rich in content. If you want to compete with that you need to provide something better, not more limited.
I find some of your arguments valid but on Point Two you are missing a valid point. Using a progressive scan up-converting capable SD-DVD player with HDMI (or even the older DVI cable) looks great. I know. I have a true HD flat-screen and also have a Blu-ray Disc player. The difference between the Blu-ray and the up-converted SD in line-doubled 480 is hardly earth shattering. In fact, my wife Kathlyn and I often remark that great SD-DVDs like Finding Nemo and A Bug’s Life look so real that when we play our BBC produced Blue Planet and Planet Earth series, there simply is NOT that big a difference.
Once again the wrong format won the war. In the past, Sony lost the VHS vs Betamax war and clearly the wrong format won. Fast forward to the present: Today, history repeats itself as Blu-ray wins over HD-DVD. But HD-DVD is a less compressed format, has a clearly more visually stunning picture, has more audio capabilities and formats — not to mention acuity — and yet it lost.
So, Kathlyn and I bought a Blu-ray Disc player. Even using the Sony recommended HDMI cable interface (we bought a Monster brand, so it’s not a cheapie) the picture on our latest generation 1080i Polaroid 46″ flat screen (which was clearly better than any other model in the store, except for the Plasma screens and I am not going to pay thousands of dollars difference to go that way), there is still perceptible banding seen in areas of subtle gradients in Blu-ray. This is a known issue in the format and people have bitched about it since its inception.
Bottom line?
Our Polaroid has two HDMI inputs on the back and allows us to use both 1080 Blu-ray in one port and an up-converted 480 standard definition DVD player in the second HDMI port. Which looks better? Blu-ray, by an inch — not much more.
It’s hardly an issue and when you are next down from Santa Cruz driving through Paso Robles, give me a call or shoot me an email. You are welcome to see it for yourself. But bring some ear plugs if you don’t like your soundtracks loud; me, I like my home theater to shake as much as Paso Robles in an earthquake.
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom creativecow.net
PS: And yes, I do know what true broadcast-calibrated HD video looks like on a broadcast monitor. And I wouldn’t waste that kind of money on the Blu-ray signal. It’s nice but it’s a long way from the original General Instruments/Toshiba HD signal that I saw all the back in the late 80s at a satellite TV convention. To me, Blu-ray is little more than a temporary stop-gap format on the way to real HD one day, in a galaxy far far away.
I wanted to clarify that our BBC Planet Earth and Blue Planet series are Blu-ray Discs. They look very nice but as I said, not all that different from our SD up-converted Disney discs for Finding Nemo and A Bug’s Life, et al.