High Definition DVDs are just around the corner, assuming a single standard is properly established. Will you be buying in HD?
It seems to me that they’re expecting the demand for HD DVD to be as high as regular DVD was when it first began, but I disagree. I think this is more like laserdisc, that only the obsessive movie geeks will go all gaga over the image quality, and regular joes will be more than happy with standard def DVDs, especially since they probably won’t have a system that will display HD anyway.
Add to that the expense of re-buying all their movie collection, and the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD mess that threatens to become just like the VHS or Beta debacle, I really can’t see that the demand will match the projections.
What say you? Are you going to leap onto the bandwagon when it arrives?
I doubt you’ll see much uptake. You need a HDTV to see the difference, most likely–and that in itself is a high-ticket item. The step between DVD and videotape was relatively huge; by comparison the difference between HD and DVD is just not that big a deal.
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-Unless, that is, the movie companies put different “special features” on the HD disks that you can’t get on the regular DVD’s… But what do I know? I am still mystified that fully half the damn video department at the local mega-bookstore is season-collections of TV shows that you could have recorded off broadcast TV for free.
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I don’t think there’s any way HD-DVD could match the popularity of DVD. DVD was probably the single most successful advance in technology we’ve ever seen. Far more convenient and higher quality than the existing VHS, and dovetailing with the prior success of CD. The CD experience got everyone recognizing immediately the benefits of DVD, and you could replace your old CD player with a DVD player whenever you wanted.
HD-DVD is nothing more than an improvement in image quality, and only for people with true HDTVs. They’re a small but growing segment of the market, eventually all TV will be HD, just like all TV went color, it may take 20 years, but it will happen.
Assuming HD-DVD is backwards compatible with DVD/CD, when players get priced competitively with DVD, people will buy them in droves, even if they don’t have HDTV sets, just so they don’t have to rebuy later. They can also build their collection in HD format, so they don’t have to rebuy later. If HD is significantly more expensive than DVD, none of that will happen in volume.
People who have shelled out the big bucks for an HDTV are likely to go out and buy this technology. You don’t drop thousands on a TV to only get partial use out of it. I’d say the players need to get under $300 to get a lot of traction in this market. You’ll get some sales at higher prices, but it wouldn’t be a standout success.
In my case, if HD DVD becomes a recognized standard, at some point, I would replace my current DVD player – when my current player dies. Converting or repurchasing my existing library would not be an issue, as we currently own all of two DVDs, both kids movies.
I really do not understand this business of owning a library of movies. A library of audio CDs, yes, that I get. But, how often do you want to watch the same movie over again? Three times is about my limit, even for LOTR.
I won’t spend $1000 on a player that will only have 100 titles (hello Michael Bay flicks) for the first year or so. The only thing that will get me on board early is a player in the $200 range that will play both HD-DVDs and old school DVDs. That way I can slowly convert the collection over to the new format.
I think most of us that are looking forward to it are also looking for a reasonable price/benefit ratio. Today I can get a servicable DVD player for as little as $30 and recorders are under $100. I’ve got a 44" LCD projection TV with true HDTV resolution, 1280x720 pixels and my DVD player is hooked up with three coax component video. At normal viewing distance I can see virtually no difference in sharpness between it and a plasma screen. I’m not seeing limitations in my anamorphic NTSC disks, at least newer releases. There isn’t as much tiny detail as a really good HDTV broadcast but it’s really damn good, better than I thought possible with NTSC. I really considered getting an EDTV (852x480) resolution TV since it theoretically is all you need for best viewing of an NTSC DVD but I’m glad I didn’t.
Yes, I will buy HD-DVDs and player eventually but I won’t pay a huge premium just to be on the bleeding edge. I also doubt I’ll be replacing any of my existing DVDs with the new format unless a particular HD release is significantly better than the NTSC release.
Speaking of bleeding edge, isn’t there a format war that has yet to be settled in HD-DVDs? I heard a report on NPR some months ago comparing it to the VHS/Beta war and how that video porn, one procuction house in particular, would likely lead the way in which format becomes the dominant one. Based on what I’ve learned from that and outher sources the Blue format that Sony is pushing looks like the horse to bet on but I’ll let others put their money down first.
Sometime over the last decade I got old and dropped out of the gadget race. The last bleeding edge tech toy I bought was my first digital camera and even that was well after they had been pushing toward the mainstream. I don’t care about my choices for multi-channel sound systems and I’m not going to buy another television until the ones I have don’t work anymore.
Will I buy an HD-DVD player? No. At least not until they’re under fifty bucks like the current DVD players. I don’t find myself craving extra detail in the movies I watch now. Will Napoleon Dynamite be a better movie if I can see the zits on the characters? Are there subtle clues hidden in the detail of Alien Vs Predator that expose a deaper subtext?
My cynical side is saying this is just another way to sell me more junk I don’t need.
Another similar situation exists now with regular CD players (that I’d bet everyone has at least one of) and SACD players and disks. I’d bet less than 2% of all the people who have regular CD’s have any SACD titles. Many DVD players now cna play them but the price difference in titles is huge, there’s a very limited selection of titles and the audible difference between SACD and regular CD is–quite frankly, in most home-listening situations–extremely small.
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If the players become reasonably priced (sub $200) and are backwards compatible with standard DVD players, and the HD DVDs are comparable in price to DVDs, I certainly will. I have a 1024x768 projector. Not quite full HD, but I bet I’ll notice the difference. And I won’t bother replacing much of my video collection. Probably just Star Wars and LOTR. I’ll just add new videos in HD as they come.
I’m betting I’ll have one about a month after intro because I need it for my work. I work on HD editing systems.
It’ll sure be nice to have an HD content provider other than broadcast (which I can’t recieve) or satellite (which I begrudge paying for – yes, work covers it, but it’s a paperwork hassle) for my development work. I also use one of these, but it sure is nice to have available prerecorded footage for testing; I only have so much time for shooting HD stuff of my boring life.
And it will be cool to see movie content in HD. I disagree with some of the posters who don’t call it much of a difference. I have a 23" HD LCD on my desktop (this one), and drive it from my PC using an SDI HD board and SDI->DVI converter. The resulting output just whomps SD DVD output viewed from my DVD component feed. It really is breathtaking.
I also disagree that there won’t be much content available, but this is just my guess. IF (big “if”) the studios want to generate HD content from movie content, it doesn’t seem like it would be much more of a production hassle than for SD content – the file still needs to be digitized, mastered, and compressed, the same process that’s done for HD. There will of course have to be a financial incentive for doing so, but that isn’t a technological hurdle.
