Recent Comments:
More research asserts that Blu-ray adoption isn't apt to surge soon {Engadget HD}
May 14th 2008 10:35PM It definitely won't be "ridiculously" overpriced in 18 months, when Super Upconversion is supposed to debut in laptops according to your link.
More research asserts that Blu-ray adoption isn't apt to surge soon {Engadget HD}
May 14th 2008 10:31PM Disregard post. Original phrasing silently changed to "isn't taking off" by Mr. Murph.
More research asserts that Blu-ray adoption isn't apt to surge soon {Engadget HD}
May 14th 2008 10:24PM Nfinity, what you should be asking is why would Toshiba just happily continue to lose a half-billion dollars a year subsidizing hardware if they didn't have to fight Blu-ray for market share? If there were a single Blu-ray company of the half-dozen or so that are currently producing players, that could afford to put one out at $199 today and make a profit on it, don't you think they'd do that in a heartbeat? What a coup it would be to grab a ton of market share and goodwill early in the game like this. If it were possible to sell a Blu-ray player at $199 and make up the loss in royalties, certainly Matsushita, as the majority holder of Blu-ray patents, would do it. I'm sure they'd just love to undercut the PS3 on price right now. There's a reason it hasn't happened yet: It's just not economically viable. Enjoy your downloads, and I hope you'll be man enough to admit you were wrong when prices decline to the point where you think they should be today.
Also h0mi, just to correct something you said... Warner actually announced they would start out as HD DVD only, and ended up going neutral just before launch. Their first Blu-ray efforts were really pathetic. Among all companies, I think Warner, maybe most of all, was responsible for perpetuating the format war. Fortunately, they've proven to be an excellent studio as far as giving us top-notch remasters of classics, and not needlessly gouging us on price.
More research asserts that Blu-ray adoption isn't apt to surge soon {Engadget HD}
May 14th 2008 10:13PM Jake, I totally agree. We old timers know what suffering for quality really means. I'll bet that old LD player of yours required a manual flip in the middle of *every* movie, but it was so worth it to have that glorious OAR presentation of a movie, wasn't it? :)
More research asserts that Blu-ray adoption isn't apt to surge soon {Engadget HD}
May 14th 2008 9:26PM Well, Gus, I guess we'll be able to see see what kind of a job it does in realtime upconversion... In a year and a half, minimum, that is. If it's a great algorithm, I'm sure Sony will license it for improved DVD upconversion in a future PS3 firmware update. Same processors, you know.
Despite that, why would you want to wait a year and a half for some kind of fake HD when you can have the real thing right now?
Disney pulls back the cover on Sleeping Beauty's BD-Live features {Engadget HD}
May 14th 2008 8:24PM Disney's notorious for dribbling out the classics, but the rumor I heard was that they are so smitten with Blu-ray that they want to do an accelerated release schedule this time around. Of course, knowing Disney, that may mean they take five years to release their classics instead of 10 like DVD. :(
Fortunately this doesn't appear to apply to the Pixar releases. I think they are almost all in production for Blu-ray already, so hopefully next year we will get a bunch. I'm personally most anticipating Nemo and The Incredibles.
Disney pulls back the cover on Sleeping Beauty's BD-Live features {Engadget HD}
May 14th 2008 8:21PM Most of those features are of no interest to me, but "the iconic castle will feature a backdrop sync'd with weather conditions in the viewer's hometown" sounds really cool!
Unfortunately that also means that Disney is going to know whenever this disc is put into my PS3 (if I enable the BD-Live features). Not that they'll necessarily know it's *me*, but it's one of the downsides of interactive features.
More research asserts that Blu-ray adoption isn't apt to surge soon {Engadget HD}
May 14th 2008 8:17PM Who are these "loads of people" you speak of? The public who are purchasing HDTVs? Why would they spend all that money if SD is good enough for them? If they're being persuaded into buying expensive HDTVs by salespeople, they'll certainly be persuaded into buying Blu-ray players so they can get the most out of that investment.
Hey, if realtime Super Upconversion lives up to its hype, which I seriously doubt, I will welcome its inclusion in a future Blu-ray player. It might just let me enjoy my existing DVD library again, but it will never match 1080p quality. You can't get something for nothing. Heck, apply Super Upconversion to Blu-ray and feed a 4K projector. Now that would be something.
I called it mythical because chances are, realtime implementations of a technology like this will cause all kinds of resolution pumping artifacts, depending on the motion in a scene. This would be much worse than the artifacts caused by motion adaptive deinterlacing. I'll bet that SU will be primarily used as a preprocessing step to convert existing SD libraries into as near HD quality as possible. With multiple passes forward and backward looking through the material they'll have a much better chance of coming up with something worthwhile. Where this would work best is in converting SD video for use as supplements on Blu-ray releases. In fact, I believe something like that was done in the supplements on I Am Legend. One of the interviewed doctors looked a bit strange, and I believe some heavy duty processing was done on SD video of her to make it appear near-HD quality. It was well done, but still distracting.
Oh, and I saw your post below about HDi. Wow, you seriously think people are just itching for fancy menus, and HDi will make them stick with DVD? If they don't care about getting six times the picture resolution they're certainly not going to care about nifty menus.
More research asserts that Blu-ray adoption isn't apt to surge soon {Engadget HD}
May 14th 2008 7:52PM StealthMonkey, we can rehash the format war until the cows come home, but for better or worse now the only choice for 1080p video with lossless audio is Blu-ray. That's the world of reality, but I honestly have no problem with your grieving process. I admire that you and others in this thread will be willing to move past your legitimate disappointment and resentment, once Blu-ray drops enough in price. Despite what some claim, those price drops will definitely come. The marketplace always pushes down electronics prices over time, and hopefully one day we can all come together in our love of HD. Well, most all of us, at least. I think we know who I'm talking about.
Let's hold hands and sing Kumbaya now. :)
More research asserts that Blu-ray adoption isn't apt to surge soon {Engadget HD}
May 14th 2008 6:58PM Warner's last HD DVDs are scheduled to come out this month.
Don't kid yourselves that Fox would have done anything to help HD DVD. They are notorious for expensive, bare bones releases, all the way back to the early days of DVD. All that would have happened was a $40 MSRP, bare bones Master and Commander on HD DVD today. Actually, they probably would have charged $50 MSRP for the TL-Twin version of Master and Commander.
