htfreak Posted September 6, 2006 Posted September 6, 2006 Read through this article and form your own opinions. I have reproduced a short excerpt of it since the system does not allow any posts exceeding 1000 characters. http://www.projectorcentral.com/retailing_HD-DVD_Blu-ray.htm Recently I stopped into a prominent consumer electronics retailer in town to see how they were promoting the new HD disc technologies, HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Just inside the front door was a riveting demonstration of Samsung's new BD-P1000 Blu-ray player. It was connected to an impressive Pioneer Elite 50" 1080p plasma display. The video material that was playing was a loop from a Blu-ray demonstration disc that had been shot live with a high resolution 1080p video camera -- not a transfer from film. If you ever see a product demo of this type you will be blown away by the spectacular image quality. The plain ole TV at home certainly never looked this good. When I asked if they had a similar demo of HD-DVD, the salesman took me on a long walk to the back of the store. There on a small shelf was Toshiba's HD-A1 HD-DVD player. It was driving a 27" low resolution widescreen monitor. An HD-DVD movie was playing, and on this monitor it looked like pretty good DVD, but nothing special. That's because the monitor was incapable of displaying the full resolution of the HD-DVD format. If this retailer's objective was to make Blu-ray look as good as possible and HD-DVD as bad as possible, they could not have done a better job. Any typical consumer walking into this store and seeing these demos would naturally assume, quite erroneously, that Blu-ray was a higher resolution format than HD-DVD. We have visited over a dozen retail stores in the past month, including big chain stores like Best Buy, Fry's Electronics, Ultimate Electronics, Sears, and Tweeter. And with rare exceptions, the story is similar from store to store. Blu-ray is being featured as the premium solution, and HD-DVD is being downplayed as the cheaper and lower performance alternative. In some stores there is an active demo of Blu-ray, whereas there is none of HD-DVD. In others we found Blu-ray being demo'd on large native 1080p video displays, while HD-DVD was being shown on smaller 720p or lower resolution monitors. One store had Blu-ray on a beautiful 46" 1080p LCD flat panel monitor, and HD-DVD in a separate room on a 1080p DLP rear projection TV with ambient light problems. In only two of the stores we visited did we find both technologies being shown on similar 1080p video displays. In addition to the favorable Blu-ray staging being done on retail floors, most of the sales reps we encountered were armed with a set of talking points. When we asked about the differences between Blu-ray and HD-DVD we got four stock answers: 1. Blu-ray is higher resolution 1080p, whereas HD-DVD is only 1080i. 2. Blu-ray has more storage capacity, so they can put more video on the disc. 3. Blu-ray is faster, so it can deliver a better picture. 4. Blu-ray has more Hollywood studio support, so you'll see more HD movies in Blu-ray than with HD-DVD. That's a pretty compelling list of reasons to buy Blu-ray. It is hard to believe anyone would end up buying HD-DVD after a pitch like that. But let's take a look at each of these issues more closely. 1080i vs. 1080p On our tour, one sales rep said pointedly, "The whole world is going 1080p; why would you lock yourself into something that was only 1080i?" It is tough for the typical consumer to argue with that since it makes perfect sense. As one of our readers said in a recent email, "Give me 1080p, 1080p !!! Nothing less will do." Absolutely. We agree wholeheartedly. The newly emerging, cutting-edge video displays, both projectors and flat panels, are 1080p, or to put it more precisely, they have a physical pixel matrix of 1920x1080, and they are progressively scanned displays. To get the very best performance from these 1080p displays you need a 1080p source. Contrary to popular misconceptions, HD-DVD and Blu-ray are both 1080p sources. As far as movies are concerned, both disc formats are scanned and encoded in 1080p from the original film. So why the confusion? It comes from the fact that the first HD-DVD player, the Toshiba HD-A1, outputs 1080i, while the first Blu-ray player, the Samsung BD-P1000, outputs both 1080i and 1080p. That sounds like a big deal, but in reality this is more of a marketing/perception problem for the Toshiba player than a technical limitation. Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray have all of the progressively scanned 1080-lines per frame of information on the disc, and this information is not lost or compromised in 1080i transmission. The transmission interface is simply a matter of the order in which the scanlines are read and transmitted to the video display. If they are transmitted in 1080p, they are sent sequentially. If they are transmitted in 1080i, they are sent in two fields, with one containing the odd numbered lines and another the even numbered lines. These two fields are then reassembled into sequential frames by the video processor in the TV or projector. Either way you end up with the full 1080p frame being used to create the picture, so there is no difference in the end result.
armoury Posted September 6, 2006 Posted September 6, 2006 Go read Bill Hunt's comments on thedigitalbits.com at http://www.thedigitalbits.com/mytwocentsa126.html for real-world experience on the two formats. So far some of Blu-ray's advantages are illusory, e.g. 50GB discs are not available yet. The reason they get so much exposure is simply because there are more manufacturers and studios behind it. Whether it really is a superior format or not, who knows? I'm on the fence on this one. Best solution is a universal player (like SACD & DVD-A ultimately wound up with), but given the vested interests, I am not certain that there will be very many, if at all, and not from the top manufacturers -- so far I think only LG has announced that it will make such a player, and with all due respect to their HDD recorders, they are not top-notch when it comes to DVD players and I have no reason to think it will be any different with HD DVD or Blu-ray players.
Doggie Howser Posted September 6, 2006 Posted September 6, 2006 Good read.. Jeff and Armoury :) ps Jeff, is it a Freudian slip? "BluR Ray" haha
htfreak Posted September 6, 2006 Author Posted September 6, 2006 Oops.. The E and the R keys are next to each other you know but I think people in the know will excuse me for it. ;D
SiriuslyCold Posted September 6, 2006 Posted September 6, 2006 i believe it's called "accidentally on purpose" ;D doggie howser .. at least it isn't the Exterminated Vanishing Disk format
Quest88 Posted September 6, 2006 Posted September 6, 2006 Oops.. The E and the R keys are next to each other you know but I think people in the know will excuse me for it. ;D but blu-ray doesn't even have E in it right?
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