It may depend on your definition of “better”. Quite a lot of old TV shows were shot on film, so a new transfer from film to Blu-ray could look really amazing, depending on the care that is taken and the condition of the original.
On the other hand, I guess I could skip seeing The Brady Bunch in HD, but maybe that’s just me.
This thread was started by someone predicting the death of blu-ray within six years. On some other (dvd/film-related) message boards, I often see threads started by posters proclaiming that HD is all hype and that blu-rays are already a bust. For some reason, it’s like they want the improved formats to fail. (And they are roundly rebuffed by posters who actually have HD equipment and content.)
Without an HD picture feed to that set, your cup is half empty. Or half full. Either way, something’s missing.
It doesn’t matter that much to you–I believe you and I accept that. I feel that picture quality is very important and I think most directors and cinematographers would agree with me. Fortunately, we can both be happy at this time. You can continue to watch and enjoy movies with lower image and audio quality, and I can continue to watch and enjoy the same movies with better quality picture and sound.
This. You can buy a 64GB flash drives for around $100, and they’re bound to get bigger and cheaper. A dual-layer Blu-Ray has 50GB capacity and is not getting any bigger. Cheaper, maybe, but not bigger. When you look at what solid-state technology has done over the last few years, it makes you wonder what these Blu-Ray guys were thinking.
That’s a strange comparison, though. When you look at a photo, you are looking at it from inches away. Maybe pulling it right up to your face, to the limit of your close-in resolving power. At that distance, you can see a far higher pixel density than you can from 10’.
Do this experiment - go sit in your favorite seating position, and hold a piece of card stock up and measure the actual angular size of your TV. Now take a photo of the same size, shot at 1 mp, 2mp, and 4mp, and hold it at arm’s length. See at what point you can’t notice a difference.
Sure, if you had an ultra-high resolution device, you could sit right in front of it and see amazing detail, assuming the source was shot in that resolution. in fact, we do that with monitors. My monitor is 1920 X 1200 pixels, and it has amazing detail - but it’s 24" wide and my eyes are about 2 feet from it. If I were 10 feet away, there’s no way I could tell the difference between this monitor and an equivalently-size one that had 50% less resolution. So the rest would be pretty much a waste.
Is your hostility towards HDTV a vestige perhaps of some anger at your wife for buying an HD set? Because otherwise, I’m simply not getting it. Look, static screen shots don’t do the difference justice. I don’t know if you’ve actually sat in front of a big screen, properly calibrated HD set with a good HD transfer on it, but the difference is not subtle. I’ve had people over, and when I fire up a good good blu-ray on my screen, their response is usually, “Holy cow! That’s amazing!”. It’s a startling experience. I’d compare it to the first time I got a surround system instead of watching movies through my TV speakers. As soon as a jet passed overhead, I had a sudden shock at how realistic it was. HD is like that.
Look if you’ve already got the HD set, you really owe it to yourself to go rent a PS3 or a Blu-ray player and try it. Hook it up through the HDMI port if you have one. If not, use the component video (not composite or S-video). You’ve got a large enough TV that you should see a pretty dramatic difference.
One other thing - what’s the exact brand and model of your TV? Some early "HDTV’ sets were ‘HDTV compatible’, which meant they would take an HDTV source, but the display itself wasn’t capable of resolving the detail. If you have a TV like that, it would explain why you’re not seeing much of a difference. Otherwise, it’s baffling.
HD movies are very good, but not as good as Blu-Ray, but I will completely concede that most people will not care about the difference. I happen to think Blu-Ray is better still than HDTV, but that may change in the future. I think a fairer comparison is the cost of renting a DVD or a Blu-Ray.
And how easy would it be to make home video players and portable players that accept the same movies? Sure, there’s portable DVD players, and there’s the PSP with its proprietary UMDs :rolleyes:, but a portable player the size of a PSP that could accept the exact same physical movies that the home theater can would probably resonate really well with folks. Faster read time, less prone to physical damage…there are a lot of reasons to go solid state over optical discs. The only reason not to, which is admittedly an important one, is cost, and even then that’s a temporary barrier.
Not at all.
I’ve told you, multiple times, in this very thread, that I have.
Again, I agree there’s a difference (though not a huge one) - it’s just that I don’t care about it. I don’t watch movies to googoo-gaagaa at what they look like. And even moreso with television. Say I’m watching, I dunno, Jeopardy. Do I really need to see in between Alex’s teeth? When I’m watching Intervention, is my experienced dulled because the pus on the scab that the junkie is shooting into is slightly more blurry than it would be in high definition?
And it’s funny you should mention surround sound, because, unlike HD and Blu-Ray which I just don’t care about, I actually find surround sound annoying as fuck. If I found myself with a surround sound system I’d pay good money to have it uninstalled and carted away.
Not at all. Look at it this way: I have a 52" HD monitor, and my favorite HD moment was during the presidential debates, the town hall meetings specifically. When McCain and Obama were talking to their audiences at points during the debate, I got up and stood a few feet away from the monitor. Why? Because the shot I saw on the station I recorded (I don’t recall which one) showed the candidate talking standing in front of a short set of bleachers to 3-4 rows of undecided voters. Standing a few feet in front of my monitor, I could see the candidate delivering some impassioned point, and the reaction, and detailed facial expressions, of 9-12 people listening to him. Sitting down 10’ away, I didn’t get this much detail, but that’s not important – the resolution was there, and I could see this much detail, and it was something I hadn’t seen before and still wouldn’t have in SD – the posture and delivery of the candidate, AND the reaction of a half-dozen or so people listening to him. This had a very dramatic impact on what I took away from this debate, and HD was essential, and screen size was not all that important.
More resolution is always better, and as above, it is better in unexpected ways.
When I look at a photo, the result is always quantized to some pixel resolution. I don’t care if it is 20mp, 10x the size of 1080 HD, there is detail lost. Recording at a lesser resolution is silly if you have the option not to do so. Recording at 2mp is a small travesty. I’m glad that some of these original signals are recorded on film, because HD resolution is just a really really basic, barely adequate archival format for video. It is the bare minimum that video should be recorded at, and we should strive to do better.
Yes, HD is worlds better than SD. It is not some marvelous tipping point. It is a beginning.
And I dispute this. Do you feel that we should take down all the paintings in the Louvre and replace them with digital replicas at 2mp ? If not, what resolution should they be at then? I maintain that the originals are sufficient, and a digital replica should be at the greatest possible resolution, be that 20mp or 200mp. With a painting, I can stand 1 foot away and discern more detail. Why should video be any different?
I can promise you, with 110,000% confidence, that you could do this for me, and I would not even notice that I was looking at HD or Blu-Ray or whatever unless you told me. I don’t know how I can get through to you that resolution is just not what I’m looking for when I look at a television screen.
Enough said.
C’mon boys, lets take our toys and get off old man Cisco’s lawn.
Said in jest, Cisco.
No we just need to augment what we have. FiOs is getting there and I would be willing to bet FiOS download speeds will be at least double what they are today by the 2015 mark. It’ll be there sooner rather than later.
As for the rental vs the buy argument. Right now I rent something On-Demand for $ 5 and then it’s on the premium channels periodically or I can DVR it on some other channel half the time for free after that. It’s only a matter of time before streaming hits prime time and it’s all streaming all the time.
Nevermind the added expense of actually going to the store, which IMV basically adds 50-100% to the cost of the DVD in terms of the value of my time.
I can see the pixels on most Hi Def TVs. It’s off-putting. I am certain I wouldn’t notice on some ridiculously expensive TV, but the mid-range hi-def TVs while they are nice, I can see the pixels so that kind of puts a damper on the extra fidelity.
And yes, I’ve seen blu-ray movies on hi-def screens before.
There are all sorts of considerations otherwise. When I had Netflix it didn’t work for me because I would get my 5 movies and then never be in the mood for any of the ones I had. So I’d send em back, and there went like a week of time. With On-Demand, I can just watch it when I want to. It’s at my fingertips. I don’t need to put a disc in. I don’t need to worry about my daughter destroying it like she does to my DVDs and CDs when she Macguyver’s her way past the security measures we array against her. I don’t have to keep track of them, I don’t have to worry about whether or not the disc made it back into the right box. I don’t have to store tons of discs in a New York apartment.
I can understand you not caring about what the resolution is (of course, I assume you have to be able to see some sort of picture), but that you can’t tell the difference is another matter entirely. You’ve already said you have perfect vision, so the other options are:
[ol]
[li]The systems you’ve looked at are not setup correctly or are not displaying true HD material.[/li][li]Something wrong with the way your brain processes certain signals[/li][li]You’re just being obstinate[/li][/ol]
You’ve eliminated #1. That leaves 2 and 3. Lets assume that you’re not being a prick and eliminate #3. Number 2 is the logical choice remaining. Some people can’t taste or smell as well as others. It seems processing visual information is your Achilles’s heel.
You are sitting too close. Also, the level of detail can be disconcerting after a lifetime of blurry images on regular TV.
Like I said . . . I’m pretty neutral towards HD and Blu-Ray, besides the cost and the rabid hornblowers, but surround sound is a straight-up hinderance to my movie-watching. I watched Burn After Reading on my father-in-law’s surround sound system over the holidays and it annoyed the holy shit out of me. I don’t want to be looking at 2 people talking on the screen and hearing their voices come from a second and third location. It’s distracting.
Did someone else post this? If you can honestly say that you can’t tell the difference between a sports presentation, one in HD and one in SD all things configured correctly, without someone telling you which is which, then I stick by assumption #2. There is no way you can’t tell the difference unless you have difficulties with how you perceive things.
I have 11 posts in this thread. Please read them before continuing to insult me.
Nope, we have an HDTV and HD channels, and I share that view. However, there was a study during the fall that showed that a lot of people, mostly women, don’t really perceive much of a difference between SD and HDTV. I’m one of those people. The HD channels look almost exactly the same to me as the regular channels, so I can’t figure out why we’re paying extra for those channels. The only difference I see is that the HD channels are the tiniest bit sharper. That’s all. My mom and my brother’s girlfriend can’t see much of a difference either, though Vynce and Dad insist that the HD channels look a lot different and better to them.
I’m not attempting to insulting you, so don’t read it that way. I’m addressing why you say you can’t see the difference between HD and SD until it is pointed out. Read elfkin477’s post.
I already told you why. It’s because I’m not looking for it and I don’t care about it. Going further into it by saying something is wrong with my brain is insulting me, whether you’re attempting to or not.