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.
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.
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.
I saw the price of a Blu-Ray burner and I thought, I can’t afford that!
Yes. Buying an upsampling player means that I don't need to replace my existing DVD library. I have well north of 500 disks. I know people who have libraries that number nearly 2,000.
Will the upsampling player be as good as Blue Ray? No. Will it be close enough? This is for each person to decide. But in my case it is a significant increase in quality for little money, and even less aggravation.
Let's consider what is involved in replacing a library. Forget the money for the moment. Let's just talk about the time and effort. I went through this once already with an audio library, moving from LPs to CDs. I am _not_ going through that again. In the first place, it wasn't worth the effort. In the second place the increase in quality is only incremental. In the third, some works just are never converted, and thus are orphaned.
And then there is the fact that many "artists" simply cannot survive the conversion to a more exacting format - many audio artists, particularly vocalists, just didn't have the pipes. Many actors and actresses don't have the looks to convert well to a higher resolution format - they don't age well, they have serious complexion problems, and so on. They are, after all, selling illusion.
Finally, let's consider the economy, both currently and going forward. How likely is it, under current economic conditions, that people are going to plunge for Blue Ray players, replace their libraries with Blue Ray disks (ignoring for the moment that Blue Rays cost quite a bit more), and just trash their current stuff? My guess is that there will not be nearly enough people willing to do this to make Blue Ray economically viable. I think that it is doomed.
> Blu-ray is in a death spiral. 12 months from now Blu-ray will be a videophile niche, not a mass market product.
I think there’s an FR topic (and forgive me for not checking the rest of this one) regarding the recent statement by Sony that Blu-Ray will be the last optical format. Not only d/ls, but also the crashing price, better portability, and lower power requirements, and ease of reusing, of flash memory products will have some kind of impact. Also, hard drive densities have gone up and price has dropped. In the summer of 2007 I saw my first terabyte drive (external USB), which was around $400. Now, it’s trivial to find a 500 gig external for $100, making the price per gig $200, so the price per meg (which used to be a standard, heh)...
Flash drives (iow, not just the camera chips, but the USB gizmos with the RAM installed) have really fallen in that same interval. I think I paid over $40 for the 4 gig flash drive I carry. Those are under $20 at the wholesale clubs (probably in the big office supply chains as well), and the 8 gig drives are about $30 I think (I was in a couple of the clubs yesterday, but can’t remember exactly, the prices had fallen since the previous visit); WalMart has 16 gig (I think SanDisk) for under $60 I believe. Obviously this is tiny compared with the terabyte drives, but they use little power, are tremendously portable, and last I knew Samsung has a 128 gig flash drive coming out early next year (if not sooner).
Sony lost a format war with ONE format!
the sad part is this is not the first time.
The average consumer will probably pay $50 more for a Blu-ray player that is competitive with the average up-sampling DVD player. Most of the current Blu-ray players are junk: slow, feature-poor and way over-priced. Disk price margins can't be higher than DVDs and probably should be less.Newer DVD players are mostly not too good either, IMHO. But anyway, that's a good point about pricing -- the alleged entertainment industry prices CDs of classic titles higher than classic movie titles on DVD, and spent their spare time, which is more than ample, complaining about piracy and how they can't make any money.
BS Hit piece. Blu-ray is doing just fine. It has had less than a year as the sole HD format and is already ahead of where DVD was in its lifespan. The HD-DVD people are still simmering over their loss. Time to get over it.
The same article could have been written about DVD in 1999. Players too expensive. Incompatible disks. Few titles. DRM problems...
Blu Ray will eventually take over when the price drops. Since the players are also great upscaling DVD players, there won’t be any reason to buy a DVD player when you can buy a Blu Ray player.
I don’t know where these $150 Blu-Ray players are. I’m not paying the market price for Blu-Ray until they’re in the same ballpark as up-convert DVD players. This technology is 3-4 years old already and prices are still sky high.