I couldn’t even tell the difference between VHS and DVD that people were jizzing about 10 years ago, and I can’t tell the difference between DVD and Blu-Ray now. I won’t upgrade until they stop printing new movies on DVD.
The way I see it, the movie industry shot themselves in the foot with Blu-Ray from day 1. Having two formats (Bluray and HD-DVD) alienated SO MANY movie fans, most of whom didn’t want to spend $700+ to get a dual-format player, or two players, and so sat it out completely, not wanting to get stuck with the losing format. What are all of you that chose HD-DVD doing now? If they just reached an agreement and worked TOGETHER to release one superior format, these problems wouldn’t have happened, and there would have been WAY more early adopters.
The second problem is still cost. ANY Blu-ray player is expensive. You can get a DVD player for $20 at Rite-Aid now, but any Blu-Ray will set you back at least $200. Until they get a player out for under $100, most of the population is just gonna stick with DVD.
Thirdly, I was extremely offended by the way many of the studios were jerking around early adopters who wanted to upgrade their favorite movies from DVD to Bluray. In many (not all, but many) cases, the Bluray release will be either barebones, or missing many of the special features that a previous DVD had. Fortunately NEW releases aren’t getting this treatment, but if they want us to double-dip, at least give us a reason to not keep our older copy!
It’s gonna be very hard to take down DVD. I was an early adopter, so I remember how slowly it caught on at first, but once the players and discs started becoming way more affordable around 2000, boy did it catch on! And the fact still remains that if you have an HDTV, most DVD’s will play just fine. Sure, a 1080p picture looks WAY better than a 480p picture does (and uncompressed 5.1 audio is leagues above DD5.1, but I suspect MOST people who have HDTV are using the TV’s speakers and white&red audio cables so it won’t even matter to them), but unless you’re a movie nut, 480p looks FINE on your TV, and most movie-watcher can’t justify the additional cost of BL.
HOWEVER, I think that Blu-Ray WILL still stick around. The movie industry is NOT going to take a technical step backwards. Technology exists for 1080p video, and the discs don’t cost any more than DVD’s are to print, so why WOULDN’T the industry make it available to us? My prediction is that films are going to continue to be sold for both DVD and Blu-Ray for some time to come.
Urk? Casablanca was shot on Academy Format film with a four perf pulldown, giving it an aspect ratio of 1:1.37 and a film granularity larger significantly larger than the resolution provided by the DVD-Video format. Now, the transfer to BluRay may be superior to that done for the standard Warner Bros. DVD release of the film (almost certain, giving the paltry efforts made for earlier DVD transfers) but the medium itself is not superior in terms of presentation for this film. In fact, that’s the Achilles’ heel of hidef formats: they really aren’t much if at all superior to standard DVD for the presentation of older films (those before digital processing at 4k resolution), and efforts to “enhance” the innate limitations of older films have ended up with debacles like the infamous Patton transfer. On the other hand, BluRay is vastly superior for modern films recorded in a high resolution digital format.
As for the death of BluRay, I think projections are premature. It is certain that the format will not have the same penetration as DVD did; on the other hand, as BluRay players will play DVDs and CDs, it is not a completely competing format. That is to say, you don’t need to pitch your DVDs and start with a new library; you merely need to purchase new films and perhaps a few old favorites on BluRay. As production costs for BluRay players go down I’d expect to see more sales of BluRay capable machines over DVD, to the point that it becomes the default. However, competition with downloadable video will be an increasing pressure on physical media, both in terms of distribution and convenience. Viewers willing to pay a premium for high definition physical media over ready access are a minority share of the home entertainment market. In the end, BluRay will become something of a niche market, but one easily served without costly investment on either the production or user side, which makes it distinct from the laserdisc market.
In terms of replacement media, I think we won’t see a viable format for lack of necessity, or at least, not for a long time. UltraHiDef standards are still in infancy and for most films just don’t promise that great of a viewing enhancement.
Stranger
At the beginning of 2008 I got an HDTV and, a few months later, a PS3 - mostly to serve as my Blu-Ray player. I own around 100 DVDs and now about 20 Blu-Rays.
Newer Blu-Ray films look absolutely stunning on my TV. I have a more visceral reaction to the films I’m watching, in part because of the size of my new TV, and in part due to the higher picture quality.
Most Blu-Rays are large improvements over the DVDs they supplant in image and audio quality. Older films can look grainy but that’s to be expected.
Blu-Ray will be around for a while, at least for the following reasons:
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The studios have bought in, and the Blu-Ray library is growing weekly . Most of the films and TV shows released today will be available on Blu-Ray.
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When the choice is to buy something you don’t already own on disc, more and more people will be choosing the Blu-Ray version as more and more players are sold. The Dark Knight is a prime example.
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ISPs are a HUGE obstacle for the the Digital Download movement. Comcast recently announced bandwidth throttling and caps for its customers. Other providers will surely follow. Additionally, from what I understand, the HD downloads from sources such as NetFlix are highly compressed and not up to Blu-Ray quality.
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Image quality-wise, it really can’t get much better. At a given distance and a given screen size, the human eye is only able to discern a certain number of lines of resolution. Most houses aren’t laid out to allow for 100" screens.
This stubborn refusal to accept the fact that HDTV looks MUCH better than SD is bewildering to me. Is it just sour grapes on the part of people who don’t have it yet?
The difference in image quality between a good Blu-ray transfer and a DVD is much greater than the difference between DVD and VHS. If you can’t see the difference, then either you have bad eyesight or you’re not watching a good setup.
The difference becomes much more noticeable the greater the screen size. I have a 65" screen and while an upscaled DVD looks good, Blu-ray discs look MUCH better. On a smaller screen (say 37"), the difference will still be noticeable but it won’t have that “Wow!” factor.
As others have noted, if you buy a Blu-ray player you can still use it to watch your DVD collection. But you can make new movie purchases in Blu-ray and enjoy the HD picture. And many Blu-ray movies can be bought for not much more than the price of the DVD. Amazon.com, especially, has lower prices than most brick-and-mortar stores. And, in fact, I was in a Best Buy yesterday and noticed a few instances of the Blu-ray version of a movie being LESS expensive than the DVD.
As to the OP’s prediction, Blu-ray won’t be gone by 2015, but I certainly won’t be surprised if there are some new formats (like flash drives) competing with it in the market by then. DVD’s didn’t surpass VHS in rental sales until 2003–six years ago.
FWIW, here’s a CNET article on 9 reasons why Blu-ray will succeed.
:rolleyes: The acting is better in Blu-Ray? I’ve fucking heard it all now. HD/Blu-Ray nut-huggers have finally topped themselves.
One, the whole point of buying a Blu-Ray player is to get an upgrade in picture quality with Blu-Ray discs. Why buy a Blu-Ray player and then not upgrade the disks? My existing player works just fine.
Two, my entire library does not consist of movies. I have many single seasons of TV shows as well.
I’m going to say it again, but so what? Blu-Ray has better capacity: that translates into greater image fidelity. But that’s it’s only advantage.
The upgrade between DVD and VHS offered convenience in addition to picture quality. You could fit The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on one slender DVD instead of two fat VHS tapes. You could store the discs anywhere, in any position: stacked, on end, on the coffee table, wherever. DVDs don’t get those little crinkles on the tape if you play them over and over, and they don’t demagnetize over time (at least, not as short a time as tapes). You can go right to where you want in the movie, skip whole sections, go back. DVDs never need to be rewound; you can watch the movie over again immediately (a big advantage for parents who put on Shrek all day for their kids). There’s no moving parts on a DVD like that little slidey piece of plastic that protects the tape. VHS won’t play in your computer or your Xbox. DVDs can even be copied without a loss of picture quality. DVDs can have special features built in, subtitles, other languages, and you can stick the widescreen version on the flipside of the fullscreen version. DVDs can let you choose between plain Stereo and 5.1 Dolby. And the picture is better.
By comparison, the upgrade of Blu-Ray over DVD offers … image quality. No additional convenience or features.
Do you see what I mean, now? Blu-Ray is trying to convince people to upgrade based from DVD based almost solely on picture quality. It just isn’t enough of an upgrade for me to lay out the money for a completely new system.
If you’re upgrading from VHS and you have to choose between DVD and Blu-Ray, of course go Blu-Ray. But why upgrade from DVD?
P.S. I should add: there simply aren’t that many movies coming out that I would ever want to buy. Blu-Ray is going to have to convince people like me, who don’t see many new movies, that Blu-Ray is the way to go. I already have almost all the movies I want.
Well, sure, if you’ve got the money burning a hole in your pocket then go ahead and upgrade your whole collection.
But some people are complaining that they can’t afford to do that and the thing is that they don’t have to. A Blu-ray player lets you watch your old SD DVDs and you can make your current and future purchases in HD. Best of both worlds, if you don’t want to spend the money to upgrade all your DVDs.
I have a little over two hundred DVDs. I will probably only upgrade to Blu-ray on about 10% of them–the ones that I rewatch regularly and that will benefit the most from HD picture and sound.
Fish, I agree that DVD was a bigger advance from VHS in term of utility and convenience. I am speaking solely of image and audio quality.
The drastic improvement that HD offers in these areas is, to me and many others, reason enough to buy a blu-ray player so that my future movie purchases can make the most of my HDTV.
If someone is satisfied with their SD DVDs and just doesn’t want to spend the money on upgrading, that’s fine. Nobody’s twisting your arm to do so. I just get frustrated by people making ignorant claims about the image and audio quality of HD versus SD.
I understand what you’re saying, Tangent, but honestly I don’t think picture quality alone is enough to get people off the dime. As was pointed out, DVD had tremendous advantages of convenience and picture and size and utility, but it still took years for people to upgrade. Blu-Ray, with picture alone as its advantage, doesn’t seem like it’ll move buyers as quickly.
I also understand that I don’t have to upgrade. I certainly don’t plan to do so any time soon. That’s the problem with Blu-Ray. It’s just not that much better that buyers feel they have to upgrade. But in addition, I don’t want to upgrade because I predict that in a few years they’ll be asking us to upgrade again for some meaningless reason.
Look at it this way: it’s like Star Wars boxed sets. Lucas has released so many over the years and people are tired of buying the same movie over and over again. VHS/Laserdisc/DVD/Blu-Ray is the same thing, writ large.
I have no doubt that if you put a HD/Blu-Ray picture next to a standard picture I could tell them apart (actually I do have a little bit of doubt but I realize you people are rabid and I don’t want to argue that point), but the fact of the matter is I don’t care. I don’t watch movies for eye candy. I watch because I like to be told a story, and that has very little to do with resolution or dpi or whatever particular technical aspect you’re obsessed with.
I have several friends who have HD & Blu-Ray setups. My wife’s uncle has an honest-to-god professionally built and set up movie theatre in his house with row-seating and a popcorn machine, in which he plays blu-ray movies on a 120" screen. My friend gets every other UFC fight in HD on his brand-new flatscreen plasma HDTV. It’s not that I haven’t seen the shit. It’s that I don’t care. At all.
PS3 and Xbox 360 have graphics that were literally beyond our wildest imaginations as kids, but I’d still rather play Super Mario Brothers, because it was fun. I’m not going to enjoy Citizen Kane any more than I already do if I can see Orson Welles’ boogers and hear Dorothy Comingore queefing.
As been mentioned several times in this thread, Blu-ray players will play standard DVDs. That advantage needs to be underscored, as you couldn’t exactly fit a laserdisc or VHS tape into a DVD player when they first came out (yes, combo DVD/VHS players were eventually released, but the quality wasn’t too good, and they were rather bulky)
So no need to rebuy The Empire Strikes Back, unless you really want to. But when *Star Wars: Episode IX * gets released (if ever), why not buy it on Blu-Ray instead of DVD?
Which is what will keep BluRay alive, even in competition with improvements in download bandwidth. BluRay can be profitable as a niche format, provided it retains industry support, because it is backward compatible with previous DVD libraries. I’d expect adoption of BluRay to be even quicker than the transition from VHS to DVD. But Fish is essentially correct; whereas DVD-Video offered numerous improvements in options, quality, functionality, et cetera (and also made widescreen formats more widely available than the craptastical pan’n’scan transfers), BluRay offers better image quality…which is not crucially important to the majority of viewers. (The extra capacity can also be used to put all the extra features on one disc instead of two or three, but that’s hardly a big selling point.)
I doubt we’ll see another media format war; I would expect, one way or another, that future distribution channels will be purely digital and subscription or pay-as-you-view. This, of course, is predicated on not only an infrastructure that can support sufficient download bandwidth but an encryption scheme that the movie studios (or whatever marketing and distribution principals that replace the existing studios) will accept as secure and profitable.
Stranger
- Because even the most expensive Netflix/Blockbuster account would be cheaper.
- Because you’ve come to the realization that having a physical copy of a movie is no longer important.
- Because you just don’t watch the discs anymore and “having a collection” has become irrelevant to you (or you just don’t want to deal with the hassle/clutter).
- Because you want to enjoy films in greater visual and audio detail in your home from this point on.
Let’s put it this way … for those without HDTVs and blu-ray players, I bet if costs were not an issue, you would all switch today. I think that the arguments about picture and audio quality are really silly. Blu-rays are better. I just moved from SDTV and DVDs to HDTV and the difference was startling. Couple that with blu-rays was a mind-blowing experience. Since costs will come down for sure, all the naysayers of blu-ray will upgrade when their DVD players go dead. After all, the blu-ray players will play their DVDs just fine and will even do some upconverting to the higher resolution HDTVs. And as blu-ray discs come down in price, they’ll occupy more and more of the video library. My approach has been to go with blu-ray discs for new titles and selectively for older DVD titles that I already own.
You have to see the detail of eyes that Blu-Ray shows. There is so much more of the acting that was always there that is revealed. I find this in modern movies too.
I have not yet seen the Patton transfer. I have it, but have yet to see if it is the disaster claimed.
I get about 90% of my content by download now. Blu-Ray is already obsolete.
You sound like a perfect target of ISP bandwidth throttling, and what you’re downloading doesn’t look or sound as good as blu-ray.
For the moment it doesn’t, and if my ISP throttles me for using services they are selling me I’ll switch to a new one.
At the moment I don’t have any of the equipment that will take advantage of the extra blu-ray advantage, but I think 2015 is a good time frame for when On-Demand video will be a fully viable delivery method.
Physical media is obsolete, and besides the extra picture quality isn’t worth it to me for a movie I am going to watch once, when it costs about 8x what I am paying now.