The Blu-ray experience is orders of magnitude better than DVD.
Somebody's hardware is cheating them.
Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.
My understanding is that in many cases either the original show was not shot with hi-def in mind or the disc producers don't bother to get a hi-def master and just upconvert the standard def material they already have on hand.
If you're talking about videotaped TV productions of a few years ago or more, that's true; there's no point in going for Blu-ray. Of course, I haven't seen any distributor even try that.
If you're talking about a recent feature film, or one of the many TV shows shot on 35 mm film, then Blu-ray usually makes a difference, because the DVD standard-def format captures less of what's on the film than Blu-ray does. This assumes that the Blu-ray distributors actually rescanned the film at high definition. Up-converting from a standard resolution scan in order to put out a Blu-ray version would be stupid and borderline unethical. Fortunately, out of the many Blu-rays I have viewed I have never seen a case of this.
It's even easier to 'rescan' any digital animated production to hi-def. You type in two numbers on the command line and hit ENTER. A quintillion calculations later, voila!
((Okay, it's a little more involved in that, because you have to continually adjust the framing to account for going to 16:9 from either a narrower or a wider format that the animation was originally designed for.))
With regard to certain older films, including classics such as The Third Man, there is evidently nothing to be gained by rescanning to hi-res, according to reviews I have read on the Blu-ray edition. The restoration job they did is plenty good enough when viewed on a regular DVD.
Of course, if some people are satisfied with DVD; then I am happy for them. Some DVDs are mastered at a higher bitrate and look pretty good (though many look awful). Some Blu-rays are little more than upconverted DVDs. As someone posted earlier, I check the AVS FORUM and usually know up front if a new Blu-ray release is a waste of time.
I also still buy DVDs. Some movies will not come out on Blu-ray for some time, if at all. Old TV shows and some old movies will only come out on DVD. As great as Blu-ray is, DVD does not suck and is still quite watchable.
The Blu-ray experience is orders of magnitude better than DVD.
Somebody's hardware is cheating them.
(( ping ))
Yeah, that’s pretty much the story. Vidoe taped series TV shows up to the mid 90’s were shot on 525 line media, and they’re not going to get any better. Filmed shows were usually transferred to SD tape for post. One exception is those shows that were sold to European syndication, where the original negative was cut subsequent to the US airing. A re-transfer off those negatives is pretty attractive.
Studios started converting movies to DVD back in the mid 90’s, and all those transfers were 525 SD, so there’s a lot of that product sitting around, and an upconversion from those tapes is pretty lame. You have to find a Blu-ray disk where they actually retransferred the film in HD in order to really get the quality improvement.
It depends on the source and the mastering technique. Some sources are barely better than DVD, so you won’t see an improvement. I bet sometimes they take the DVD master and convert it into Blu-Ray. I saw some horrible conversions in the early days of DVD too. I swear they either ran the cassette tape into a digitizer, or they just straight digitized old film without cleaning it up.
However, there is no competition with some movies. What is most clear is in dark scenes where you will see compression artifacts in DVDs, or banding especially with a gradient such as a light in the dark. A good Blu-ray has none of this, the scene just looks perfect.
We own a SONY VPL-VW60 front projector combined with a 100 inch STEWART Firehawk SST screen. We also have an OPPO up-converting DVD player along with a SONY BPL-550s Blu-ray player, both players have excellent DVD up-converting capabilities. I have an extensive DVD and Blu-ray library and have had the opportunity on numerous occasions to A/B the up-converted DVD with the Blue-ray of the same movie and there is a tremendous difference between the two. The visual difference can be readily seen in the sharpness of the image, higher resolution, the fine DETAIL, the depth of image and overall picture quality. There is such a striking difference between the two formats that we no longer buy DVD's at all and have been in the process of replacing much of our DVD library with Blu-rays.
Some great examples of movies to A/B demo in order to see the difference = Peter Jackson's King Kong, Flight of the Phoenix, Casino Royal, The Wild Bunch, Spielberg's War of the Worlds, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Matrix trilogy, Toy Story 3, Avatar, GLADIATOR to name a few. If you have a decent HD set up: 1080p TV, coupled with a good Blu-ray player, the difference is clearly visible.
There is one more element that figures prominently into purchasing Blu-rays instead of DVD's and that is the AUDIO. Because Blu-rays have much more space available on the disk, most Blu-ray movies come with DTS HD Master Audio or DOLBY TRUE HD 5.1/7.1 codices. The striking sonic difference between these codices and regular DTS and DOLBY that come on standard DVD's are worth buying Blu-ray over DVD in and of themselves. That said, one has to have a home theater set up/equipment capable of reproducing the audio codices. Ultimately it all comes down to the quality of a person's Audio/Video set up. AVS is an outstanding website to go to regarding ALL A/V Home Theater questions, advice, reviews or needs. :
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/
Are there lousy/poor quality Blu-ray disks out there? Yes, but one can avoid them if one does their homework BEFORE the purchase. I strongly recommend checking out the following web pages before making any Blu-ray purchasing decisions:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1168342 Video picture quality
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1190265 Audio quality
Blu-ray disk reviews:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?s=c26508ddc2122b825edc6c2d5a4ea56b&f=187
One more thing, the good news is the movie studios are responding to the consumers demand for high quality Blu-ray transfers. A good example is GLADIATOR. The first Blu-ray release was TERRIBLE. Immediately word got around that the release had major problems, people complained and refused to buy the Blu-ray movie. The studio got the message loud and clear and re-released GLADIATOR on Blu-ray. They also had a free replacement for anyone who had bought the previous release. Let me tell you, GLADIATOR is STUNNING on Blu-ray!
I can’t tell any appreciable difference in quality between a Blu-ray and a good standard DVD in a progressive scan player. I’ve seen big Blu-ray demos in places like Best Buy — that ought to be using ideal equipment and source media for obvious reasons — and I’m just not that impressed.