Posted on 10/29/2008 11:02:59 AM PDT by savedbygrace
1) The premise that Blu-Ray offers no advantage over upscaled DVD is total garbage. That might be true on a 32” TV, but buy yourself a 1080p home cinema projector (90”+image, baby!) and a copy of Blade Runner and then you can see what the format can do. There is simply no comparison. Image quality can exceed your local multiplex.
2) Agree that Blu-Ray discs are too expensive, studios are trying to milk things as they always do with new formats. But then, I only rent movies these days, the only discs I buy are TV series.
You can buy a terabyte of HDD storage for backup at a little more than $100 nowadays, store full DVDs for less than a buck apiece.
DVDs store a small amount of information compared to Blu-Rays.
I got three disks with Iron Man. That would take up the majority of the backup AND I don’t have the ability to use BD Live.
I suspect that over the next couple of years, the number of folks who are going to want to put $3000+ on their credit cards for a TV set will be greatly diminished, and the Blu Ray consortium would do well to keep that in mind.
Re: Price.
I got Speed Racer (for my daughters) and Forbidden Kingdom (for me, Love Jackie Chan) for 42.00 on Amazon. Free shipping.
Check out this Amazon link
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw_1_8?url=search-alias%3Ddvd&field-keywords=iron+man+blu+ray&sprefix=Iron+man
Iron Man Blu-ray is 25.95
DVD is 22.99
Not too much of a difference there.
No pipe dream (clever phrasing, however!). Broadband providers will find a way to deliver you movies for less than the cost of a physical CD, even if they have to charge for it. Mostly likely, they’ll find a way to charge iTunes and other music sources for delivering a movie to the end user.
More than that.
I have an upscaling DVD player in the living room, a regular DVD player in our bedroom and one downstairs in the rec room. I also have a portable DVD player, as does our eldest rug rat. Then we have a DVD player in the back seat of the van.
If I have a choice between buying a $35 disc I can only watch in one room of my house, versus a $15 disc I can watch in six different places, plus my PC, plus rip it to my Palm TX, it will be, and has been, an easy decision.
In addition, the millennial generation believes in bits, not atoms.
True, but compare to rental cost - here in the UK about $2 to $4 depending on how many movies I can watch in a month.
I won’t make the mistake I made back in the eighties with the beta vs. vhs videotape fiasco. Naturally I went with beta, and we know how that turned out. This time I’ll wait until one or the other has definitely emerged victorious. Then I’ll wait some more.
absolutely. same could be said for cd and dvd vs tape and vhs respectively. the primary question for bd is the value of the improvement in picture and sound to the consumer. prices will come down on bd material once more players are out... chicken and egg problem for sony though. studios are happy selling dvds. studios like bd as opposed to pc-based solutions though because they feel they have more control over it... if they gain enough comfort with downloaded HD content (at BD bitrates), bd might just be doomed. As it is, just because you upscale a standard def picture to 720p, compress the hell out of it, and offer over the internet, does not mean it is comparable to bd for everyone (thought it is for those with small displays). things still need to shake out more. I bought a combo bd/hd-dvd player with a nice scaling chip open box on clearance for what the better scaling dvd players run. I certainly would not have paid the full cost for the player given the uncertainty, and I only buy the discs at a reasonable price (<$20 on sale or used, with a number of hd-dvd discs bought on closeout for <$10). win-win as I see it. At worst, I have the best upscaling dvd player on the market :)
Seriously. What Sony should have done is make DVD's that would be read like a DVD on a DVD player, but read like a Blu-Ray disc on a Blu-Ray player. They had the technology years ago, but never did anything with it. Instead companies went with dumb double-sided discs or packaged a DVD with a Blu-Ray disc.
If Sony had just sold all their DVD's with a Blu-Ray layer for a couple of years, then they could just tell customers that they can take advantage of the movies they already own when selling the Blu-Ray players.
Maybe Apple should use their iTunes strength to sell high definition H.264 DVDs at kiosks in their stores, and allowed for similar DVDs to be burned off iTunes when videos were purchased.
If only AppleTV had a DVD drive in it, they could have had it all.
Sorry, Dave, I forgot to give you a head’s up as soon as I posted this. I meant to.
I wanted to start purchasing all my new videos on Blue-Ray. I purchased one last year. It’s a nice unit. Didn’t cost me an arm and a leg, but the video is incredibly clear. Still, my old DVDs look quite good on our HDTV, using the Blue-Ray machine’s upward processing of the old DVD format.
I’d like to see them iron this out. I think Blue-Ray does have a future, it’s mass storage for computers among the best reasons for it to remain around.
If it doesn’t, I wonder what the next big thing will be. DVDs are destined to be swapped out at some point.
Then I am smoking crack also. I am happy with my up-convert DVD players on my 40" and 52" TV's and love my DISH HD.
You may be right with regard to certain DVD/BR comparisons. I have run some comparisons with my own DVD/BR movies, and the difference was nowhere near as much better as I had thought it would be.
My old DVDs look pretty great upped. Yes the BR version is better, just not ‘as better (;-)) as I would have thought.
We have a 56” 1080p set that provides an amazing picture.
The pipe is going to have to get a lot bigger for download to become the primary medium. I’ve got a nice fast cable internet connection but in the time it takes to download a movie I could go to Target buy the DVD and watch it.
Streaming might replace rental but the pipe needs to get a lot faster for download to replace ownership.
Do you think the monthly download caps, will negate any benefit of downloading?
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