Here are a couple of interesting articles I found today. Just wanted to see what others thought. Who has what kind of player(s) and what do you think?

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/108...Vvmm5xRiaXMJA5

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=365

Interesting stuff, IMO. I have both an HD DVD player bought before the format war was decided and a PS3 which also has a Blu-Ray player built in. I mainly bought the HD DVD player because I had just bought a new 42" HDTV and had read that my standard def DVD player wouldn't quite cut it for my new TV. Man, I wish I would have waited I could have saved 300 dollars. I have very few HD DVD's and Blu-Ray discs. In fact all I have is 300 and The Bourne Identity for HDDVD both of which came with the player. I never bought any HDDVD's as it wasn't long before the format war ended. For my B-R player I have The Prestige, Ironman and Band of Brothers. Ironman looked freakin awesome, but I wouldn't mind borrowing a regular DVD and playing it on either player to see how well the upscale is vs. the actual B-R disc. I'm almost willing to bet that I won't be able to tell much of a difference.

After some thought, I kind of think that investing in a Blu-Ray player or the movies for them is more like throwing money away. Most B-R movies that release are priced at 30 stinking dollars, whereas the DVD is usually 15-20 bucks. That's the main reason I haven't bought very many B-R movies is the high price.

I'm interested to see what some of you think. Do you have a B-R or HDDVD player? Do you intend to buy a B-R player? Thoughts?

 

Like you, my B-R player is my PS3. Took a gamble that B-R would win out over HD-DVD, so I don't have both. And like you, we haven't bought many B-R discs because of the elevated price. We watch movies on our portable non B-R DVd player when we fly. If we bought all B-R, we couldn't watch them on that player. We usually watch for sales and then get B-R. I think we have 3-4 (Casino Royal, Surfs Up, 3rd Pirates of the Carib., ?) I want to get Planet Earth on B-R, but will wait for it to go on sale at Best Buy.
Like you, I also wonder if I can tell the difference between a B-R and an upconverted standard DVD.

~Rob

 

Here is my opinion on it....

I hate Sony. PERIOD. They try to take over the market with something that is theirs and try to force people and manufacturers to adopt it. Some day Sony will learn that you cannot strong arm manufacturers of your formats into paying for higher royalties.

Example: VHS vs Sony's Betamax. It was clear that Betmax was far superior to the VHS. Sony's tactics with their player rights forced manufacturers to go with the low cost option and Beta disappeared. You would think that sony would have learned by this. They instead reached agreements with retailers and tried to buy their way into the HD Player market. They got Blockbuster, WalMart, Target, etc to agree to buy their products, so goes the death of HD DVD, BUT toshiba is not stupid they shifted gears and started working on UpScaling DVD technology. I truley hope that Blu-Ray dies, sorry folks that paid all that money for their players.

Oh and pretty much anything Sony does you pay a premium of 30-40%+... Just look at their memory sticks... Long Live SD!

Hub

 

I bought a Sony dvd home theater for cheap.It was new but they where clearing everything out for the BR . So I thought they where a bunch of turds cause they did not tell me about the BR. Ha looks good on them.

 

It seems to me that when there is a format war, the loser is the consumer.

 

BD prices (players and disk) needs to come down to really catch on with the mass consumer. Rumor mills has it that BD players may hit the $100 price point by Christmas due to the slowing economy.

To get the benefit of BD it's best to have a 1080p HD TV instead of a 720p. Also upconvert DVD's through a BD player looks really good on a 1080p.

BTW, I'm using a workstation notebook with a BD optical drive to feed the HD TV via HDMI.

MikeyB

 

My TV is a 720p, and so far I'm very happy. All the movies I have watched in HD look amazing. Watching sports in HD is a million times better than ever before. I can actually see numbers and names very clearly.

Anyway, I'm not so much concerned about the price of the players, I already have one but might buy another for the upstairs room down the road. It's the price of the discs themselves that I feel need to come down a bit.

 

True. But the consumers ego doesn't help either...

 

I feel the same, I have the 1080 and love it, cant beat the picture especially with the BR disc, they're just a little $$$. Overall though Im very happy with mine.

 

it disappeared in the consumer world, but is still used heavily in the news/videographer world. which is lame because sony knew it was awesome for that, so a sony beta cam (new) costs about 30-60k. but now with HD coming out, they are putting everything on media cards, so beta is finally seeing its demise. but it still captures an amazing image.


this is true. the camera I am getting soon records only to sony's SxS cards which cost about a grand for 16gb (and you need two cards). its crazy! but now someone found a workaround for that, and you can get memory cheap, and all of a sudden sony is releasing new firmware that makes that option obsolete almost! sneaky.

but still I love their camera, so I cant hate sony all together.

back to the subject at hand. I cant say Blu-Ray is totally dying. if anything it will lower its price and revive itself, there is still a need for the actual DVD format for a lot of people. but pretty soon, when HD can be uploaded and downloaded over the internet at a lower cost, that is going to be the new big thing. then you can buy a HD hard drive and plug THAT into your TV and play it. you can actually do that now:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....=1218008588808

something to think about for those of you who dont have blu ray yet. you will still need a blu-ray burner to get the HD onto the drive, but its cheaper then buying the actual player right now.

 

Funny though that most VHS videos were recorded on Beta then dubbed to VHS.

Hal

 

Disney really helped Sony out by releasing all of their movies on BR vs HDDVD when they were both battling it out.

 

I could see how B-R won out seeing how it held nearly double the memory that HD DVD's did. I think it was 30gb to 50 gb for B-R.

 

memory had nothing to do with it.. It was agreements made with retailers.

Hub

 

Whenever the industry changes its format it is due in part heavily on the **** industry, as they sell more DVD formats than anyone else. If they go BR so does the industry.......

http://www.macworld.com/article/5062...05/pornhd.html

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6142519.html