Inspired by this thread , Why are computer Blu-Ray drives so much cheaper than standalones? - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board
What is Blu-ray and is it really taking over?
What exactly is it suppose to be taking over?
Is it connected with blue tooth?
Blu-ray is an optical data format for CD- and DVD-sized discs. It stores lots more information than a DVD and so is being used for releasing movies in HD video formats.
It’s called Blu-ray because it uses a blueish laser, as opposed to the red lasers used by DVD players, and the infrared lasers used by CD players. The shorter wavelength allows it to focus on smaller bumps on the disc, meaning you can cram more data in the same space. A Blu-ray player can also play regular DVDs and CDs.
Its chief competitor was the HD-DVD format. While these two camps were engaged in a format war, few people bought the discs or the players, because they didn’t want to be stuck with a collection of this century’s version of Betamax tapes. Blu-ray won the battle eventually after a couple major studios which had been supporting HD-DVD announced their intention to support both. This resulted in a critical mass of Blu-ray support by Hollywood and HD-DVD imploded spectacularly within days.
So is it taking over? Not really. Yet. Pretty much everything is still being released on regular DVD. But most big-budget Hollywood stuff is now coming out on Blu-ray also. If you want to watch it in HD, you’ll need a Blu-ray player and an HD television. But fear not! You can still play all your old DVDs on the new Blu-ray player, so you won’t have to repurchase all your movies like you did when VHS became sucky.
Thank you friedo
So will I have to get a Blu-ray player in the future to watch the newer movies that come out? Or will it be a choice thing. I like the picture as I see it now on my current television. High Def tv does not really interest me. Sound quality so I can hear the whispers, or the creature sneaking up from behind is of utmost importance.
Since you didn’t mention it, I probably should start a different thread for Blue tooth then?
DVDs are still going to be available for the foreseeable future. It will be many years, perhaps a decade or more, before they will be obsolete, and they can play in a Blu-Ray player anyway.
More significantly is that Blu-Ray has a reasonably assured, but not guaranteed, future. It may be rapidly superseded by an even higher capacity storage medium. Hard to say for sure, but it’s a reasonable guess.
That is good to hear. My dvd surround sound system may be a few years old, but I am not ready to trade it in yet. I even like to play music cds in it.
The leap in quality from VHS to DVD was easily noticeable. I don’t know if the same can be said for the difference in quality between DVD and Blu-Ray.
IMHO yes. If you have an HD television and access to HD programming (cable or dish), there is a noticeable difference between regular programming, DVDs, and HD programming, with quality increasing in that order.
For a long long while I felt the same as An Gadaí, until I walked into a TV shop and saw an HD program on a quality television.
But in order to get that extra quality you’ve got to have every component right. Player, Disk, TV and your eyes.
For example, a cheaper TV working at 720 lines rather than 1080 is still technically HD but it’s not the upgrade it could be.
I’ve downloaded some videos that are HD but there’s no noticable difference with the previous versions, even when watched on my 42’ HD Plasma screen.
As a related question, given the difference between NTSC and PAL. Will Americans see a bigger leap when moving to HD than people using PAL in Europe? I’m told PAL is technically better but more expensive, but I’ve never seen an NTSC transmission.
Also worthy of note, for people like myself and An Gadaí who don’t see a major benefit in HD, you can get DVD players that “upscale” your DVDs to HD resolution. To claim they make your films look like bluray versions would be wrong, but they do look good.
Some say that Blu-Ray and DVD’s will be made obsolete by on-demand, on line access to content. Maybe, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting hi-def movies now and Netflix does a good job of satisfying that need without accumulating a bunch of disks I’ll never watch again.
No. The only similarity is “blue” in the names. Bluetooth is a short-range wireless concept.
Anywhere I’ve seen displays that purport to be blu-ray/HD etc. I haven’t been impressed. My friend went into the local Dixon’s to find out about it and they showed him a display. He said “That doesn’t really look all that different from my set up at home” and they kept replying with lame replies like “Oh that’s because this tv’s not hd-ready, over here in the window display we have blu-ray on hd” and they’d look at another screen and my friend would say “That still doesn’t really look all that different from my set up at home”. The guy’s reply was that they were looking at it through glass.
Perhaps the difference is abundantly noticeable with a proper set up but it’s sort of the visual equivalent of the audiophile phenomenon. For many people, most of the time they don’t notice or care IMHO.
The jump from a regular DVD to Blu-ray is as big as the jump from broadcast 480 to HD (1080)
Even with an upscaling DVD player the Blu-ray looks better, much better.
Go visit your local Costco, Sams Club or Sears. they will have sets on display with a sample disk that will show DVD and Blu-ray side by side on the same screen.
When you do this, keep in mind that the store is nowhere near as good a viewing environment as your house. It will look even better installed in your house.
Rick
Who just bought and installed a 52" Sony XBR in a custom wall unit.
I can kind of understand this. When I first saw DVD side by side on the same screen as Blu-ray it was a clip from the movie Cars. It a scene similar to this one Cars in the foreground, grandstands in the background. At first I did not see much of a difference, as I was looking at the track and the cars in the foreground.
Then I looked up into the stands. Instead of just being blobs of red, blue, yellow and green, they were individual cars. Detail abounded individual windshields, wipers and faces. Unbelievably clear. I could for the first time see everything the animators drew.
But why does anybody need that? Does that make the movies better? I am constantly surprised at how HD is being taken up by consumers, I really thought people wouldn’t be quite so superficial.
I mean, humans are definitely a very superficial bunch, but I didn’t think it was this bad.
I do not (yet) have a BD player, and I am wondering: is colour fidelity and contrast better that on DVDs? (Obviously, perceiving this requires a display that can handle the better colours…)
Why is wanting to see exactly what the film maker intended superficial?
Take your position to its logical end, we should all be watching 16" round tube televisions with yellow glass, like this one because any improvement would be superficial.
You don’t need to see the detail of the background characters to enjoy the film. You do need to see the detail of the foreground characters, which Standard Def does just fine, and the ancient TVs of 1950 did not.
The improvement of DVD over VHS is more than just image quality; it’s repeat viewings, it’s extras, it’s value for money, it’s reliable playback. But HD does not improve on any of those factors, it only improves on image, and arguably sound, quality.
I know a lot of people do love those aspects, and will completely re-buy their movie collection and upgrade their TVs just for that, but I didn’t think it would be at this level of uptake.
HD does not improve the plot or the movie consumption experience. It just makes the pictures marginally prettier.
ETA: Choking hamsters, please delete this post.
In practical terms, the difference between a SD broadcast - like NTSC - is as noticeable as the difference between setting your monitor to 800x600 or 1280x1024. To some, very, to others pedantic and meaningless since you can see the content in each.
You do need some expensive equipment to achieve the top marks in terms of potential quality - like a Full HD TV, a Blu-Ray player (the most prominent of which currently being the PS3) and an HDMI cable or quality equivalent component. The fact that most people don’t notice is because most retailers still sell a lot of middlware, like so-called HD Ready TVs (which display in 720p or 1080i, IIRC, unlike full HD which display in 1080p) and so the leap seems more like a phaze-out. One of the nice things about these standards is the fact that the signal is going over to digital HDMI, in which the low-line cables deliver within the range of very few percent - unnoticeable - of the high-range, expensive ones.
To quantify it, I would say the leap between DVD and HD-DVD/BR is as big or bigger than the quality leap between VHS and DVD.
If you want in on BR, the best advice I can give you would be getting a PS3. Aside from full 1080p support it’s also the only player out there that I know has BR Profile 2+ on it, which is an interesting feature. It’s also relatively cheap as BR players go.
(BR Profile 2+ can download and update content on a BR disc you have. Say, for example, you get the Dark Knight on Blu-Ray when it comes. They’re in the works with the third film in the trilogy; you could easily be offered exclusive sneak-peaks, teasers and trailers as an owner of the Dark Knight BR, if you have it in your disc. Or they could release extra bonus material over the course of time and so on.)
ETA: To go to the technical side of things, the DVD has achieved its max capacity of data: around 9,4GB on a Dual-layered disc. The theoretical limit of the BR disc is 200GB on a multi-layered disc. The entire Lord of the Rings discography with bonus content discs in SD would take up just above half such a BR disc, rather than 12 DVDs.
This also means that we will in the close future may be watching uncompressed film, which will do miracles for the quality.
Seriously? I just watched Batman Begins on a 1080p projector on Blu-Ray, and didn’t enjoy the film any more than when I watched it on DVD. I can’t denounce your opinion of course, but I really don’t think it’s reflective of the masses. VHS to DVD was a pretty significant upgrade (even excluding the numerous navigational and bonus features enabled by DVD), but Blu-Ray doesn’t quite offer the same visceral impact, imo.
True, but (and correct me if I’m wrong), most players don’t support anything more than two-layers, so we might as well be discussing an entirely different format if/when it comes to that. So as a dual-layered disc, blu-ray roughly provides 5x the storage space – not an insignificant figure to be sure, but no where near what 12 dvds would store.
