Comments on: Dvorak on Blu-Ray Bashing

By: Trigga_Tybalt

Trigga_Tybalt — Wed, 28 May 2008 17:04:49 +0000

i must admit i haven’t got any blu rays yet. i own a HD TV too so its not down to that. its just i haven’t been able to justify the price tag of them over DVDs. i remember i only started buying DVDs when they had the good multi buy deals out and i think shops are starting to do them now so my opinion might change soon.

By: Paranoimia

Paranoimia — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:31:49 +0000

@ Meresin – then you’d be one of the hard-core movie buffs I was referring to!

By: Whooka

Whooka — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:17:54 +0000

I’ve seen several articles proclaiming how people aren’t jumping on the blu-ray bandwagon. The first thing that comes to mind is Blu-ray ‘won’ the format war only very recently. I don’t know about other countries but here in the States we are in the midst of an ongoing economic recession (as much as current gov’t officials dance around that ‘R’ word). I suspect many people being broke and now paying 2x as much as they did last year for gas to get them to their jobs that are most likely no longer in the smaller towns where they live thanks to offshoring of manufacturing jobs and places like Walmart, is requiring many people to forego alot of recreational purposes like blu-ray players and blu-ray format movies. Sure they will pony up for video games and consoles but that’s because movies, unlike games, will eventually be ‘free’ on tv or available on pay per view and the like, so in times of cutting economic corners people will wait the additional two weeks and just watch a movie on cable/pay per view. The current economic climate in the States is no time to judge how anything is selling right now.

Also, as far as Microsoft and other companies trying to excuse their short-sighted decision of embracing HD-DVD by claiming ‘oh, who cares, everyone is just going to download HD movies in the very near future anyways’, all I can say is maybe in Europe and other countries but no time soon here in the States with the slowest Internet backbone in the free world and ISPs already engaged in traffic shaping and other bandwidth curtailing activitites. No one is gonna want to wait the amount of time it’ll take to download HD content, which it will have to be as streaming this sort of thing is almost impossible to achieve with a solid framerate over North America’s antiquated infrastructure.

As far as people who don’t see a difference between DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray, I suggest you get a new, proper, LCD TV or the like. Blu-ray clearly (no pun intended) is the closest thing to cinematic 35mm as you’re gonna get right now, at least in the films I’ve seen. It easily crushes the competition and has so for over a year now. get some new glasses!

By: Disappointed

Disappointed — Wed, 28 May 2008 09:23:10 +0000

The PC Magazine columnist has it right. Of course BD resolution is better, but it isn’t that much better than an upscaling DVD player. Certainly it isn’t worth paying five to ten (!) times the price for a slight improvement in picture quality.

There are other factors, too, like region coding. Regionfree DVD players are cheap and commonplace. With BD you have to specifically check beforehand if the disc will play on your player.

By: pyrolock

pyrolock — Wed, 28 May 2008 04:19:54 +0000

BLUE RAY, the best thing is not only quality, but how well they stand up to punishment of every day life, such as scratches, finger prints, and so on. now when i lend out a movie or a ps3 game, i don’t worry about if it’s going to work when i get it back, unless they took a stake knife to it. don’t believe me, look it up on youtube, blue ray scratch test or something like that. it sold me peace

By: Meresin

Meresin — Tue, 27 May 2008 23:45:55 +0000

@Paranoimia:

I own a 61″ DLP HDTV. Repurchasing all my movies on Blu-ray is a necessity.

By: Meresin

Meresin — Tue, 27 May 2008 23:43:56 +0000

People have very short memories, apparently. DVD wasn’t adopted by the world overnight. Cost kept a lot of people from buying into the new standard initially, as is the case with Blu-ray. However, as costs went down, the higher audio and video quality of DVD finally convinced the vast majority of people to make the leap. We can expect to see the same thing happen here, regardless of the yammering coming from a few idiotic, fear-mongering journalists.

Digital downloads really won’t be a competitive solution for some time to come, either. The average internet connection in the US isn’t fast enough to download a 20+GB HD movie in any reasonable timeframe, and given that downloaded SD video quality isn’t on par with DVD, much less Blu-ray, I really don’t see it replacing either form of optical media any time soon. Further down the road, when everyone has fiber to the home or access to some supercharged over-the-air network, it might be viable, but that just hasn’t happened yet.

By: Paranoimia

Paranoimia — Tue, 27 May 2008 21:28:53 +0000

@ mcloki – I don’t think re-buying movies you already have is necessary. Maybe for the hard-core movie buffs, but not the average user. Since a Blu-ray player will play your existing DVDs, it’s not necessary.

The PS3 and any other decent Blu-ray player will do an excellent job of upscaling your DVDs anyway. In fact, even my standard DVD player (Sony RDR-HXD870) does an awesome job of upscaling. I won’t be re-buying any of my movie collection, but I will be buying all my movies on Blu-ray in the future.

There is one very good reason to buy a Blu-ray player, though: within a few years, movies will only be released on Blu-ray. It won’t be long before studios start releasing major films only on Blu-ray, to force people to upgrade.