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SuperWes
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: St. Louis, Missouri
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 Posted: Fri Jan 12, 2007 3:54 pm |
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Yeah, the PS3 already lets you get online to look at porn (or so I hear...).
-Wes
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SuperWes
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: St. Louis, Missouri
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| Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2007 5:45 pm |
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| Mister Toups wrote: |
| the problem is people aren't going to be willing to replace their DVD collections for such a weak incentive. |
Part of what's good about both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray is that you don't have to replace your old movies. Regardless of which type of player you have you can still play regular DVDs. Since people don't have to replace their collections I don't think Blu-Ray or HD-DVD will ever become quite as overtly successful as DVD. There's just not the incentive to rebuy your collection like their was with VHS-> DVD, but there's certainly the incentive to continue your collection in HD instead.
Personally, I probably won't buy another DVD unless it's incredibly cheap, but if the option presents itself and is under $25 I might go for the Blu-Ray. In a way, the new format has just decreased my urge to buy movies at all until a clear winner is announced. Thankfully Netflix rents all formats!
-Wes
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SuperWes
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: St. Louis, Missouri
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| Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2007 8:34 pm |
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| Mister Toups wrote: |
| Yes, but why would you even buy a player to began with, then. I mean unless you already have an HD television? And... even then, why would you? |
Because if you've got an HD Television there's a feeling like you're wasting it when you use it for non-HD content. Some people are convinced that Upscaled DVDs are nearly as good, but when you actually sit down and watch an HD Movie there's a noticeable difference. If blue skies matter to you at all you should really see them in HD.
But yeah. I agree with you that it's stupid to buy a dedicated player. The 360 HD-DVD drive is probably worth it given that it comes with King Kong, and the PS3 is worth it if you want to play PS3 games too, but to spend more than $200 on a player that might not have any more movies available come two years from now is just silly. And if you're buying HD movies when you don't even have an HD TV you're a complete moron.
-Wes
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SuperWes
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: St. Louis, Missouri
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| Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2007 9:12 pm |
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| Mister Toups wrote: |
| The only difference is the level of detail. Picture quality is just as good. |
You really need to explain this to me because it sort of sounds like you just contradicted yourself.
I watched King Kong in both regular DVD and HD-DVD, and the regular DVD was much blurrier. It looked like watching film where watching it on HD-DVD was more like looking through a window. Last week I compared the DVD of Ice Age 1 to the Blu-Ray of Ice Age 2. Ice Age two was more colorful by an incredible amount, and just looked a lot more detailed. It might have been the difference in 3D technology when the movies were made, but there was an enormous difference.
Also: Taladega Nights was an amazing movie regardless of format. Thank you Sony for the unexpectedly good pack-in.
-Wes
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SuperWes
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: St. Louis, Missouri
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| Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2007 10:04 pm |
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| Mister Toups wrote: |
| Were you watching King Kong through an upscaling DVD player? If not that would I was watching some upscaled DVD's on dalenixon's television the other night and they looked incredibly sharp. In terms of contrast, color depth, and all that other good stuff I have never seen a significant difference aside from increased detail. upscaled dvd's look just as vibrant and "really there" as any 1080p content I've seen. |
I was watching it on the 360's HD-DVD player, which is supposedly pretty good. But really I'm not sure it even technologically makes sense that upscaling could make things look as good as true HD. Regardless of the processing power, you can only do so much to make a small picture look nice at a larger size without just having a larger picture to begin with.
EDIT: Here's a comparison of a really good upscaling player and the Xbox 360 HD-DVD. In fact, it's the upscaling DVD player suggested in this thread. These images are pretty comparable to my experience with King Kong, but it's a different movie and a different player.
-Wes
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SuperWes
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: St. Louis, Missouri
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| Posted: Tue Jan 23, 2007 1:49 am |
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Yeah, that whole color TV thing? It'll never take off!
HD TVs are selling like mad to people who may or may not actually care about picture quality, but at least like to pretend that they do. These are the people who are going to end up with HD-DVD Drives and Blu-Ray players. They're not going to pay $500-$1000 for them, but when they get down to $200 and $100 for a stand-alone they'll be upgrading because, well, because then it's the same type of upgrading that they did to their TV.
It's not a question of if a next-gen video format will take off, it's a question of when. My guess is you'll start to see sub-$250 HD-DVD players as early as 6 months from now, with the prices of discs falling by $5 at around the same time. When the price gets more comparable to that of DVDs it'll catch on simply because it's backwards compatible and there's really no reason for it not to. The picture is undeniably better, and there's a large enough number of people who do want it to happen to keep studios interested.
This isn't PSP movies, which anyone (including hopefully Sony) could have told you was a bad idea, it's a format that genuinely does let you take advantage of your HD TV.
The only real question is whether or not a discless format will take off before one of the tangible formats really gets going. For that to happen the US Government would have to make a concerted effort to get cheap, ultra-high speed networks going in all major cities or someone would have to write an insanely good, mostly lossless video compression/decompression algorithm that lets them use existing network speeds. Neither is likely to happen within 8 years, and it's more likely that they'll both happen at around the same time.
In any case, the formats are currently too expensive to be mainstream at all, but as soon as they drop it'll take off. We'll discuss this again next Christmas.
-Wes
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SuperWes
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: St. Louis, Missouri
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| Posted: Tue Jan 23, 2007 2:52 pm |
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| Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh wrote: |
1: will the hardware indeed come down to a reasonable level?
2: will there be enough media to warrant the upgrade?
3: will the average person understand the difference? The purported benefit?
4: will DVD still be a thriving format in its own right?
5: will standalone DVD players (without HD-DVD or Blu-Ray capacity) still exist? |
I'm not even sure what the argument is anymore, but I just wanted to point out that once #1 happens, #2 will happen naturally, which will make people like Toups and ShaperMC upgrade even though they're not particularly interested at this point. #1 will continue to drop until #5 happens, and at that point it won't matter whether #3 ever happens (it never will), and #4 will slowly be taken over by the new format. But this is more than a 5 year plan, and it really all depends on how long #2 takes.
This isn't a Neo-geo or the laserdisc. Backwards compatibility ensures that it won't be. It's more of a Game Boy Brick -> Game Boy Color or Playstation -> Playstation 2. Eventually people will be forced to upgrade even if they're really not interested.
-Wes
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SuperWes
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: St. Louis, Missouri
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| Posted: Tue Jan 23, 2007 3:57 pm |
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| Shapermc wrote: |
| That said, referencing what Wes linked above (comparison shots between up scaled DVD and HDdvds) if anyone honestly believes that each movie is worth a $10+ entry fee and $400-$1000 worth of early adopter hardware let me know. |
I've already stated that it's not worth the cost to buy dedicated hardware right now. If you've already got a PS3 or Xbox 360 though I don't see why you wouldn't be at least curious. That extra $10 per movie might not be worth it either, but I'd be more likely to not buy a movie at all before I bought it in a non-HD format at this point. It just seems more prudent to rent stuff when owning something means a better version may be just around the corner.
| Shapermc wrote: |
| As gamers we have the benefit of being able to cheaply test these formats, but if past generations of videogame hardware is any indication anyone who knows what the score is won’t use their console as a movie player. |
I've heard the rumors about this, but I've also heard you can fix a broken Xbox 360 by wrapping a towel around it. This doesn't mean either one is true. But even if watching DVDs does wear out your drive, so does playing games, and if you're going to treat your system like anything you do with it might bring it closer to breaking you might as well not use it at all. Also, buying a second PS3s to replace a broken one would be cheaper than buying a dedicated player in the first place at this point.
| Shapermc wrote: |
| Also, as eric-jon said before, a lot of this has to do with paused images. |
Except for this is pretty much exactly on par with my experience. If you've actually spent time with more than just the store demo it's pretty clear that an HD image is significantly clearer and more detailed than any upscaled image you can get. But defending the upscaled image is sort of telling anyway, in that it shows that you very obviously care about your image quality. Putting the cost aside, why are you not interested in the best?
| Shapermc wrote: |
| If in five years all this stuff is the price of DVDs now and there’s no format war going on I may switch over to HD. |
You say this now, but I know that within two years you'll have a PS3. If at this point new Blu-Ray movies are closer in cost to DVDs I know you'll be buying those too.
To be clear I'm not saying that HD formats are going to catch on now. They're not and they have no reason to at their current price and movie selection. But to say that there will never be a significant number of people who are actually interested in watching their movies in HD when it's more in line with DVD's pricing is just silly given the growth in HD TV penetration.
-Wes
EDITED for clarity and to not sound like as big of a douche.
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Last edited by SuperWes on Tue Jan 23, 2007 8:33 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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SuperWes
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: St. Louis, Missouri
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| Posted: Tue Jan 23, 2007 8:31 pm |
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| Moogs wrote: |
| A friend of mine used his 360 as a game console, DVD player, and music player. He used it for several hours everyday. It's currently with Microsoft waiting for his $140 so it can be repaired. |
Really? Mine broke after 14 months of just playing games on it. The replacement was free though.
-Wes
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