I am not predicting the end of bluRay,, but I will say I love football on HD, golf, nature stuff shot on HD. But I don;t get a huge difference when playing a bluRay movie over the sd widescreen..... just aint there,never was.Film to my eyes looks good on sd widescreen. Course I have old eyes.. I see the difference, but it aint great
IMHO

To be honest I can live without the Blu Ray movies too. It's my HDV on Blu Ray that I don't want to lose. It's just such a HUGE difference from dvd.

I really hope blu-ray picks up. The way I see it it's a great format and I'm absolutely opposed to internet distribution of media, both music and movies. I don't care if they distribute crappy reality shows online, but I imagine when they start putting HD movies online they won't have anywhere the quality of Blu-Ray, but more like current HDTV broadcasts, which in many cases are plain horrible. Even the highest quality channels look terrible when there's too much going on.

Besides, maybe it's because I'm 37, but I like the concept of having a physical media like a CD or a DVD, or BD, or some disc of any kind, with its cover art. I feel I own a movie if it's in a file in my HD.

Besides, I really don't understand how can most people be so blind that they don't care about the picture quality difference between an upsampled DVD and the BD. I wouldn't say it's day and night, but it's a big difference to me anyway. And I love being able to play my AVCHDs made from my HD camcorder in my Blu-ray player, as well as anything I create in HD.

"Besides, I really don't understand how can most people be so blind that they don't care about the picture quality difference between an upsampled DVD and the BD"

Are you kidding?
I can't tell you how many homes I've walked into and seen a tv sitting in the living room with the color so out of whack that the faces are bright purple..... and nobody seems to care. I've seen 4:3 pictures stretched out over a 16:9 screen.... and nobody seems to care. I truly believe that the people actually concerned about picture quality are of the MINORITY.

Now once you get somebody HOOKED on a hi def picture then it's a new ball game, but until then they're perfectly happy with the stretched purple faces.

"I truly believe that the people actually concerned about picture quality are of the MINORITY." So true! The public is slow to maximize their "toys", whether its cameras to the family car. More users operate their "items" at minim standards than expected designed "average" conditions, whether it's software, hardware, etc....

Yup--people can get used to anything, from what I can tell. One word: MP3

When the value of having 1000 songs with crappy audio quality on your iPod outweighs that of having 250 songs with excellent audio quality...that should tell you something right there. Unfortunately, there's almost an entire generation of people that have grown up, or *are* growing up, on the crummy audio quality of MP3. So I really don't think sub-par video quality is going to bother most of these people...

TB

For the price of a BD, the wife and I can go to a real theater and have some money left over for popcorn. It's a rare movie that makes me want to watch it more than once.

Also, given the fees associated with releasing a BD, it's unlikely that some of the really interesting indie films will ever be distributed on BD. Hollywood's safe "formula" movies will be available, but for the most part, who cares?

The only way for BD to succeed is to do forward pricing that reflects the price point of a mature technology. There is no "Gotta have it!" factor here as there was for the VHS to DVD leap. Pricing is the only thing that will drive this product.

"There is no "Gotta have it!" factor here as there was for the VHS to DVD leap. Pricing is the only thing that will drive this product."

I completely agree with you... that and the fact that you can't just plug it into your existing tv like you could with the vhs to dvd change over. But I think the likely-hood of prices dropping as fast and as furious as needed isn't going to happen. As mentioned above, Sony has made it clear that there is a certain line that they will not cross with the profit margin. It's also clear when glancing at how little the price has changed since HD DVD threw in the towel...that they're telling the truth about it. My guess is that they would rather drive it into the ground than cut the profit margin much more than they have. :(

What I would love to know about however is what would happen to the avchd-cam industry should Blu Ray fail. One of the BIG parts of avchd is being able to pop your memory stick into the port on your blu ray player and away you go..... and it can't be done with a dvd player.

I just noticed that Netflix's Watch Instantly service is now supported by two DB Players:
LG BD300 Network Blu-ray Player
Samsung BD-P2500/BD-P2550 Blu-ray Player

With XBOX360 support for Netflix coming later this year, it will be interesting to see how this changes the game. Netflix in the first place changed movie rentals.

And I agree, BD is way overpriced.

What exactly does BD give us, it seems to be just the same as SD DVDs with more pixels. Same 8 bit, same chroma sampling, same yuck.
The difference between the OTA DVB signals and what I watch off SD DVD is pretty obvious.
If we give up our obsession with shiny disks there's no reason why we couldn't be downloading movies at much higher quality than BD can deliver. A 4K 10bit movie will fit onto a pocket sized HDD, probably even in 3D.

Even Sony know BD is sunset tech, they too are slowly easing into online content delivery.

Bob.

I'm not surprised that most people don't care.

Portable formats are the in thing in video and audio,

I love my BD Netflix rentals. HDTV is great on my Sony 52XBR4 but it aint 1080p at high bitrate.

With BD that were compressed by someone that knows what they are doing you get pretty much the quality of the original prints from what I can see. NO macroblocking or image break up or tearing during high motion scenes. There is nothing like watching the bitrate shoot up to 40+Mbps on high motion scenes. This would be a high H.264 bitrate for a CBR camera recording. But done with a multipass professional encoder you know there is a serious amount of detail in that image.

When another format comes along that can carry these high bitrates at a $10/month subscription (Netflix) I'll jump on it. Pretty much every high profile new release is available on BD now and more and more past releases are becoming available.

- Mark

I tend to agree with the author as well, and to a degree I think it is a little sad. I cringe every time I watch "HD" broadcasts on my TV, compared to Blue-Ray they are terrible. As I have said before, the best HD production to show this is the Planet Earth blu-ray since there are a few up-sampled SD parts in that video. To me, whenever it changes to a SD scene it feels like a slap in the face. To most of the people I have shown it to, they go... "Huh? Oh, yeah... maybe... did it change back now? Yeah... if you say so".

As Bob says, it could be even better with better color and higher resolution and all that, but to me it is currently the best there is. Whenever the next best thing comes around I will upgrade again.

The fact that Sony and the BDA, through massive incompetence, is killing the format prematurely is sad though. Very sad.

I am amazed that some major company (or country) has not snapped up the intellectual property rights to the defunct but perfectly servicable HD-DVD format and re-introduced it as a low or no-cost alternative to BluRay for anyone shooting in HD. In other words, screw the studios; go after the home video market. Man, if it were up to me, I'd PAY Apple, Adobe, Sony (ha!), anybody, to quickly introduce HD-DVD authoring software. It would literally swamp BluRay in a year. Then, once everybody had an HD-DVD player in the house, the movie studios would suddenly see great value in releasing their HD material in that format, even if the copy protection was not quite as robust. It'd be good enough protection fto cover most users, and for dedicated cloners it would be a moot point, since even BluRay can be cracked.

Yeah, I know it'll never happen, but it would make sense. Meanwhile, I have zero interest in buying Blu.

"What exactly does BD give us, it seems to be just the same as SD DVDs with more pixels."
Frankly I would rather saw my knee caps off with a rusty hack saw than go back to doing my HDV on dvd. What's the point of hi def video if I have to downgrade to that stinking dvd at 8000Kbps?

So tell us , what does BD give us apart from more pixels, exactly?

Bob.

BD is not dead, but if it makes you happy, go for it. Tho, I like the Downloading push, we can see already that hi-speed providers are promoting dl limits. With MS,HP,DELL and IBM pushing "cloud" computing and storage, we will see increase fees on dl's for sure. Can you image storing your photos and mt2's and editing them thru a "cloud" app, rendering speed will be impressive, but TL work will push the connection limits, $$$$.

I just shot a project at 1920 x 1080 on an EX1, edited it and rendered in Vegas to a "stinking" DVD. The other night I viewed it on a friend's 42" plasma and it looked bloody fantastic.

But, to make sure I haven't got this wrong, I'll try sawing my knee caps off with a rusty saw and see if that's even better.

Well, more pixels provide a lot better resolution. The popularity of DV always demonstrated to me that people didn't care about image quality, and especially DV on VHS. The quality of DVDs is a huge improvement over VHS, but whether that was "good" depends on your standard. I think the best achievable on DVD is "acceptable". HD does start to approach good, although much that is broadcast as HD isn't. Blu-ray is short of excellent, but the best currently available. Download isn't an option at current broadband capacities, but that varies depending on location. I'm really surprised that people can't see the difference between DVD and Blu-ray. But then I found that many people thought that their VHS recorders were broadcast standard -- until demonstrated by comparison.

Serena, I don't think it's that people can't see the difference - to me it's more like I know there are cars much better than my "ancient" model, but mine does everything I need, and in fact it's a very nice car which I enjoy.

Plus, at present, not many people actually get to see Bluray. I haven't yet.

One day this will probably change, especially if Sony don't continue pumping bullets into their foot.

It's all about the money. If you have the money you invest. If you don't have the money - you can't.

For "people" to be engaged you could do it on a flip book of stick men. It is, as always, about how the "people" get engaged. When I have a client say to me:"How DID you make them appear so real?" - it wasn't about the clarity nor the number of pixels. It WAS about the "people" and how I shot for the edit and then made edit selections. Period! - BTW, that was the BEST comment I could ever have had from a client.

A video lacking a certain emotional engagement remains sterile and barren. Having it shown at its utmost clarity is a neat thing to do. But that is, I would humbly submit, as far as it can ever go. Without emotional sincerity, video can only remain a clever party trick. And that, my friends and other "people", hasn't changed and will not change whether it is BD, SD, VHS, or flicked through stick men!

I rarely enter into these threads about things HD, but this time I just feel I wanted to. Now I have, I am not so sure I should have . . . ?

Grazie

Nice post Grazie.

It points back to the more important issue - not " How much resolution" but "What does it do for you"

- in fact, next time a client asks me to do a project for them, I may ask them "would you like it as flick through stick men?" [and/or women .... although sticks don't really do them justice ...]