News Blu-Ray 8 percent of home video market

lazer?!

 

This is exactly one of the reasons I dont want to switch to Blu-Ray. I enjoy DVD quality films, as far as I'm concerned there is nothing wrong with them. I have seen high-def content and know the difference in quality but I would hate if high def-content ruined my experience of DVDs forever. I would hate to be in a situation where I had to fork out extra for high-def content because I couldn't stand to watch DVDs anymore. Ignorance is bliss

 

I wonder if it would be the same if HD-DVD won the war, toshiba really had cheap players, and the disc wont cost that too much to develop, since it was almost identical to dvd/cd discs (i read somewhere that bluray was a bit thinner and there was some notable differences that required manufactures to upgrade/replace their existing equipment to manufacturer bluray discs, might add to the price of bluray discs if so), oh well, I guess we'll never know..

 

i have no interest in Blu Ray .. despite my dislike of Sony as a company ... my TV is no where big enough to notice much difference anyway.

 

ehh its no surprise DVD took a while to adopt so I dont see why this would be any different although hardware wise prices are real nice, media wise prices are to high so once that drops I think people will be more eager to get on board, I for one love my Blu-Ray setup ^^

 

Why do people keep saying you need a 40+ inch tv to notice the difference between a dvd and a bluray? That is complete BS. I have watched a BluRay movie on my 19" monitor and I notice a huuuuuuge difference.

Anyways, wait till holidays, more people will be buying hdtv's which will result in more bluray sales. I only have one bluray movie that I got for free from someone and wont be buying any right now as my family doesnt have an hdtv or bluray player so i can only watch them on my room on my monitor with my ps3.

once my family gets an hdtv and bluray player we will switch over and only buy bluray

 

i watch blu-ray movies on my 32" 720p Tv and i notice a huge difference.

and BTW sony didnt creat blue ray ¬_¬ it was created by a group of companies.

 

I've been slowly buying Blu-Ray films, but only when they're on sale (Amazon, etc). I still can't really justify the $28-35 regular price for a single disc, but I don't mind picking them up for $18-20. The BBC's "Planet Earth" 550 minutes of 1080p content for $70 was probably the best deal I've bought in awhile... it's almost 8 DVD's worth of content and looks awesome on my 42" 720p TV. Watching it on my PS3 on my 24" 1080p LCD monitor has a huge difference over regular DVD's as well. It's just a matter of price per disc now, and once they bring them more in-line with DVD prices then I'm sure it'll start taking off much quicker. But I can't complain, I'm an early-adopter and I consciously knew I'd be paying more for content -- but I could afford it so I don't complain much.

 

Lets all try to remember how long it took consumers to drop VHS! Atleast Sony is the same catalyist for that movement, DVD's cost just as much when they where new and adoption was just as slow, any1 got stats? I think the majority of the world is still watching there 16:9 dvd movies on old 4:3 screens after all.

 

I've got i 20inch samsung and 1080p content (scaled down to 1050) looks amazing i've got 3 copies of terminator 2 one dvd, one ripped and one on blu-ray, the difference from the ripped dvd or the dvd to blu-ray is huge and amazing, playing on the ps3 so the dvd gets upscaled aswel

 

VHS was roughly equivalent to 320 x 240 resolution (NTSC). DVD is 720 x 480 (NTSC). DVD is around 4 times the res of VHS. BR is 1920 x 1080. BR is about 6 times the res of DVD. ...Not an big jump, eh?

Using your argument, the only 'jump' we had was going from analog to digital, right? But a digital to digital jump (that is, in fact, quite a large step in comparison) doesn't count? Using that logic is basically saying a low-res desktop wallpaper is the same as the high-res version of the same image. i.e. for example - 1024 x 768 is the same as 1600 x 1200. Not really logically sound.

Just some food for thought.

But I understand the misinformed consumer's stance on things too. People just don't understand things like that. Honestly, I'm amazed people with HDTVs actually like DVD's picture on it, considering you're blowing up the signal quite a bit to display it on an HDTV, but I digress. I'd always choose to have media played at a higher res than the display is capable of (i.e. standard TV's when DVD came out, DVD looked awesome).

Keep in mind that the price argument is a bit of a fallacy. BR Media just doesn't cost much more than the DVD counterpart for the most part, but it also depends on what you're buying. There are plenty that are all over the map price-wise, of course (depends on the studio too). And in its defense, BR media prices are quite lower in comparison to DVD when DVD was at BR's current age now. I can recall my first DVD player in 1997 cost me over $800, and it was a POS. My first DVD was $40, and it wasn't even an anamorphic-transfer!

A little exercise in media pricing...

Let's look at the upcoming Iron Man film...(mods, I'm not trying to post prices and links or anything for business purposes; merely for arguments' sake! If it's an issue, kindly remove the links)

For the 2-disc DVD version of the set: Amazon.....$22.99

For the 2-disc Blu-Ray version of the set: Amazon...$25.95

Of course, retail prices in stores are going to be higher, because they have a bottom line too and are closer to that MSRP.

Hardware, of course, is going to be at a premium too. But the players are cheaper by far than DVD players 10 years ago were.

But the main reason for slower sales is the economy (the world over now it seems) is in utter shambles. No disposable income = no sales. Simple as that.

 

I'm surprised it's as high as 8% tbh.

 

So let me get this straight, hd/br discs have better resolution? I don't understand this. Compact discs, wether br/hd or normal cd/dvd are all forms of stored media correct? So if I rip an iso of a BR, (lets just forget drm here for sake of argument), then split that iso to several normal dvd's, it somehow changes the resolution it plays at? Ok, say the read/write laser component can read/write more data per second than the normal dvd component, buffering/cache or even virtual mounting would solve that right?
I am not trying to put anyone down, but I think this is a valid point that gets extremly overlooked due to marketing tactics.

This might take multiple discs to take in account media capacity, but I'm either missing a huge detail or just don't understand media storage very well, and would like to be informed.

My own thoughts are so far, is BR is great for a storage medium, but honestly, I think that buying this format in it's current marketing form is big mistake. Even though I think the DRM schemes have gone way to far, I have very mixed feelings on the new HD content. When I watch movies at the TV stores, or at a friends house with HD cable/satalite/BR player/PS3 on their TV's, I can't help but notice that dark areas of the played screen are pixilated, or shaded in a very poor fashion. Perhaps it is a limitaion of that particular Tv or they don't have it setup right, but I have yet to see a movie played that has any areas of dark, that doesn't look like the black/dark area has a "square" are of different shades of grey/black that taper to the darker areas.

 

Actually downscaleing the image can get pretty nasty too, if you can, you should always buy a format that matches the screens resolution but more is better than less in this case if you have no option. DVD also looked awesome because it supported a larger color gamut and video was often better quality because the connections bettween devices were better.

BlueRay allowes the convinience of having the whole thing on one disk, this coupled with the fact that the new BR standard supports many more menu features than DVD makes it a more functional and better overall standard. There's no dvd player on earth that's powerful enough to decode a 1080P stream with PCM (uncompressed) 7.1 audio, not to mention PIP (picture in picture).

The dark areas on the screen are caused by bad compression quality which is nutorious on cable/satalite feeds. Blueray disks can deliver alot more data (at the moment) than a telecom company can over fiber optic so the video is higher quality and uses better compression making black areas smother. Finally it could just be the screen, HD tv's especially LCD's have a hard time producing grey's and shades near black, they somtimes have to jump from one drastic shade to another so instead of a smooth gradiant you get a patchy picture. For example my jvc projector is a nice quality projector and I don't notice patches when I'm watching BR content, but I do when I'm watching tv. On my LCD upstairs I notice patches occasionaly (god bless samsung) on either medium.

 

I don't understand your argument. BR media is entirely different from DVD's structure. The pits of data are way more closely packed than DVD's are. Which was why new tech was needed; i.e. BR's disc structure.

It's the limitation of the display or they don't have it set up right. BR has a rather high transfer-rate in comparison to DVDs' by far, essentially eliminating the banding or artifacting issues that DVD is plagued with due to compression artifacting/other. It all depends on the particular transfer too. If you're talking HD on cable, that would make more sense because although the resolution is higher, the transfer rate is low.

 

You said it, on my 42" plasma there is NO difference. Long live Oppo and the standard DVD.

 

Let me try to explain my question better.
The data on the disc is increased by more layers/ smaller pits, (and in HD discs, different color of pits), right? So this enables a larger capacity per disc. Also I would expect a faster data transfer rate from the disc. My question is, even though it is a new cd type, with faster/larger capacity, it still just holds data, and the data can be copied to other storage sources. So I could rip the iso from a BR disc, and burn that to multiple dvd's, or to a hard drive, and still maintain the same picture quality right?
I guess what I'm getting at is that dvd's and BR discs are really only different in the amount of data they hold, (even though the pits maybe arranged, imprinted differently).
In a similar way that dual layer dvd's hold more than the older single layer, the physical dvd drive has to be able to play dual layer to get to the added information, a BR disc and player are doing the same thing, new disc technology, same movie with extended data.
But if you broke the menu down to allow disc swapping when the dvd ran out of space, you could pack the same BR movie into multiple dvd's.

On a side note, I also forgot to mention on how I also don't like that the BR discs don't come packaged in a protective sleeve like the minidisc's did to protect from scratching.

 

B3CK: You can put BD structure on DVDs. Think of a DVD or a BD just a storage medium, you can put whatever you like on either disks, limited by their capacity. Then you've got the DVD structure, and the BD structure. Each of which have their own video and audio formats that they support in their own filesystem.

You can make a DVD structure on a BD disk if you like (will only play in a BD player) and would result in the same quality as a standard dvd, but with the benifit of more storage.

You can also make a BD structure on a DVD disk. Would also only play in a BD player as DVD players don't support BD structure. This can result in the same quality as an off the shelf BD movie, but with storage restrictions (most likely resulting in two disks per movie, or even one disk with no extras if done right).

You could, but this would only be playable in a BD player (assuming it's done correctly), or Software BD player on your PC. It would maintain the same Quality.

Exactly right, but they do introduce a new software structure/format.

 

Yes you are correct, it's the amount of data, not the media.

What many BR fan boys hate to admit, or know, is that many of these "high-res" movies are not re-sampled, but only software upscaled, much in the same way an Oppo upscaling DVD player works.

Long live the DVD

 

I have to disagree with you their, that's incredibly rare to have a BD movie simply an unscaled version of the DVD equivalent.

The way it works AFAIK is All(well, the vast majority) of movies are and will continue to be filmed with film. Then scanned in Digitally and edited at the full 1080p resolution. Then formated for the various mediums it's distributed in. So with a DVD it's downscaled and compressed with very lossy MPEG-2. Then when they release it in BD, or for HDTV they go back to the digital 1080p and Compress it to the particular format/standards required without downscaling.

Even with really old shows/movies they can still be released in Quality HD that is no where near the poor quality of DVDs (or upscaled SD for that matter). For instance i've been enjoying Seinfeld in HD because Sony went back to the original film plates and remasterd the series. Not to be mistaken with upscaling.