Cheers.
Posted on 09/16/2008 3:09:27 PM PDT by Las Vegas Dave
Blu-Ray’s conquered the HD format war, but its design and technical limitations mean the current format is as good as it’ll get. Sony says it’ll be the last optical format, after which, we’ll move way from shiny discs altogether.
See, it’s all down to the limitations of lasers and the discs themselves.
Speaking at IFA, Taka Miyama, Sony’s product strategy manager for home video marketing in Europe told us: “Blu-Ray is the final format for the optical disc. We don’t have a shorter laser. In the future, if we have a physical media format, it will change physically. It won’t look like an optical disc.”
That suggests we’ll move to a Flash-based medium, or maybe holographic storage, but Miyama’s not giving anything away.
“I don’t know what sort of technology we will have in the future,” he said, “but while using lasers and optical discs, this is the final format.”
However, Sony’s chief technical advisor for home audio and video, Eric Kingdon, explained that the Blu-Ray format is still a long way from reaching its full potential.
“I’ve seen prototypes for 400GB discs,” he said. “That’s approaching half a terabyte. If you went to 4K (twice the resolution of full HD), Blu-Ray is still big enough for a full movie. If it’s enough, then there’s no need to do any more development.”
So Blu-Ray won’t, or rather can’t, see an upgrade any time soon, and the next generation of home video might still use the Sony format.
What do you think? Can you imagine buying a movie on a flash drive, or will we have switched to high-speed downloads by the time Blu-Ray is out-dated?
In my youth in the 1970s for some reason I became enthralled with quadraphonic sound. I thought this is the ultimate. 2 times better than stereo. Granted the systems developed for it were as usual incompatible among different makes and on the whole it didn’t work very well. (Imagine trying to get 4 discrete channels out of a two sided record groove) So while I really wanted one by the time I had enough money to buy one the thing had gone the way of the dodo bird. I did succumb to betamax however. Still have that one and it works but HDTV kind of makes it gather a lot of dust these days.
“HD-DVD was the better format”
Just curious, and this is by no means a flame against HDDVD or your opinion, but how is/was this the case? Off the top of my head, the benefits of BluRay were a much better manufacturing process (i.e. see various Youtube videos on the abuse a Talledega Nights disc went thru prior to failing) and scalability. The studios seemed to like the copy protection (heh heh).
I believe HDDVD was scalable and the format was a little more “open”, but it seemed to suffer from an inferior manufactuirng process. Both discs, price wise, were about the same.
As far as copying BluRay and HDDVD, I think both were cracked, but I could be wrong.
Finally, the market forces did come into play. HDDVD players were cheaper, but Sony used that medium on the PS3. While PS3 sales were sluggish at first ($600 price tags for a game console do that), they have picked up and I *think* that’s what gave Blu the edge.
In either case, I haven’t gone berserk buying Blu-titles as I did when DVD first came out. I only have 10 and 5 of those were included with my PS3 for free. However, I still cannot believe the difference in Casino Royale on DVD vs. BluRay.
As far as console games are concerned, I think this is where Blu will shine...I’m one of those fussy people who like to have a physical copy of their purchase...having things reside on a mechanical hard drive makes me nervous. I like what I see with solid state drives coming down in price, but we’re still a year or two away before something reasonably priced will be available for storage of video. Until then, I prefer an optical disk. With all the storage needed for textures, etc. in games these days, DVDs aren’t going to cut it much longer (I still cannot believe that 9GB is not enough storage for something....9,000,000,000 bytes...sheesh).
I doubt it is a dead end format...there is still going to be a need for a medium like BluRay...once broadband speeds are widely available at home that are capable of downloading an HD movie in under a minute, yeah, it’s dead then....I figure that’s at least 3 years away before it’ll even register as a threat.
Again, these are just my thoughts and opinions...sorry for the Biden-ing, uh, rambling...(I have a bad habit of Biden-ing on FR anymore)...and please don’t think I am flaming your opinion....experience has shown me that “attacking” one thing vs. another causes fights among us nerds :) (PC vs. Mac , Altera vs. Xilinx, Atari vs. Nintendo :P ).
CoCo used a 6809E ... the “E” meant “required external crystal”.
It was 1.0MHz if memory serves...there were other speed grades like the 68A09 and 68B09 which ran faster (1.5MHz and 2.0MHz respectively).
68B09 is what powered Star Wars (the classic Atari arcade game).
Your comment about 30MHz vs. 25MHz reminded me of a similar argument about harddrives....a friend bought a 100MB harddrive for $300 back in the early 90s....I remember me screaming about the complete waste of money all of that storage is....he’ll be lucky to fill it by the year 2000.
Check Pricewatch, you can find one there for about $130 for your computer
but you'll also need the software and video cards to send to your HD screen.
That's how mine is set up. And BTW, WINDVD-9-plus mimics HD very very well
without all the fancy equipment, so long as you have a 1080p screen.
Oh, I know that I can get local HD / QAM encoded stations ... I get it on a ATSC/QAM tuner on my PC. What I was hoping to get was a Cablecard so that I could play encrypted channels on a home theater PC. I know some companies provide these (i.e. you request a cablecard as opposed to a box). What I was trying to say was that the local operator I talked to was clueless....that’s all.
Ideally, I’d love to have a single box that handles all of this crap! They sell an add on in Europe for the PS3 that allows you to watch/record HDTV, but that is mainly due to some hybrid terrestrial/satellite broadcasting company they have over there. If they had that here, all I’d need is the PS3 and my amplifier :-)! I hate that ugly, grey Comcast cable box :-)!
Yea, but Blu-Ray really doesn't need to be any better. You can freeze a scene on a huge screen, walk up to it and it looks like a photograph.
“8 MB of RAM? You can’t be serious, you’ll never need more than 4, tops...”
Moving Picture format can’t be improved.
- Thomas A. Edison
If you really care that little about consumer electronics and entertainment, why are you even reading and posting in this thread?
I've seen the Blu-ray version of Disney/Pixar's Cars on a 67" diagonal Samsung HL67A750 DLP rear-projection TV and it's so sharp that any further improvements border on overkill.
Up yours, jackass.
Solid State WILL eventually replace mechanical. The key, for media (video), is longevity. They (Hollywood) will want it less persistent, we (for basic data storage and then some) will want it more so.
Classy.
The talk is increasing the amount of storage available on a single disc, which may result in an even high resolution picture.
I can beat that one easily.
Trying to get my boss to get a 300 baud VDT connection into the lab in grad school to replace 110 baud paper punch and Agile terminal: "Why do you need that? You can't read at 300 baud."
Well, actually I could...
Cheers.
You should probably direct that to #52.
Sometimes this seems more like the Luddite ping list.
HDTV for Amish folk. :-)
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