I don't get this. If your point is that nobody will buy "Die Hard" anymore, why are you bothering comparing prices? Does a $5.99 price point prompt people to buy an additional copy just cause it's cheap?

Those are seriously loaded questions you're asking. You first ask whether someone would dispose of one format completely, then you change the rules so that they can never even watch the other format again. With BD, the whole point is that the players are compatible with DVD, so one doesn't have to throw out or give up watching DVD just because they bought into the new format. On the flip side though, if one only has a DVD player, they can't play BD.

However, since the timeline is never, I don't think I could live the rest of my life only viewing SD video. So even though I own hundreds of DVDs and don't even currently own a BD player, I'd choose BD over DVD.

Maybe if the timeline was for, say, the next five years, I could live with sticking with DVD for a while longer.

Of course I would. Why wouldn't you?

Almost 99% of my dvds aren't on blu-ray. (not to mention, I wouldn't be able to watch that 1% anywhere other than my living room).

I guess it would be nice to have a slimmer collection, but not that slim

Actually, isn't the Earth and oblate spheroid?

Is space really that much of an issue? I guess I'm in the middle--I have more DVDs than your 'average Joe" who might pick up a couple big new titles or a couple kids titles every few months, but far fewer than many "professional" collectors on this site. Still, my collection doesn't take up that *that* much room--two bookshelves on the walls of my living room. The dog's crate takes up much more room.

I think BD, done right, on the right equipment, is much better looking and sounding than even the best DVD, even upconverted, and I don't think that can really be argued. What can be argued is--what level of equipment is required to really get full use out of it, and is it worth it? That can be argued and is different for every consumer. To me, honestly, it's not really worth it yet. I agree with the reasons from the original article, and they are in line with my reasoning.
It's Cheaper Than Blu-ray - yep. Esp. given the content i'm interested in, and the additional upfront expense I'd have to spend to get into BD.
Mo' Technology, Mo' Problems - Never actually used BD, so I can't speak to this one. Portability is definitely and a good point, though--I am going on a business trip tomorrow and I'll probably bring a DVD or two for use in the hotel (or I might just catch up on the Simpsons via Fox.com)
You Already Own A Ton of DVDs - Yep. But as has been said, my buying a BD player doesn't render these unusable, so this is sort of a red herring.
Up-Conversation Really Works - Again, yep--but I'll admit it can't compete with a good BD disk on a good HD system. And sometimes it's a little wonky-I've been watching Alias on an upconverting player, and some scenes look great, and some scenes look snowy as hell (not that Hell is all that snowy, of course).
You Can't Get That on Blu-ray - This is the biggest thing for me. I'd rather watch the Simpsons in black and white on a 13" screen than Family Guy in 1080p on a ten foot projector. It doesn't matter how nice it looks or sounds, if I don't want to watch it, that won't matter.
Blu-ray is A Stop-Gap - I agree to an extent (as I've said before). I think BD will still be supported, but it might not receive the most attention from the content owners.

I like that they did a counterpoint, and I'll even grant all their points in the BD > DVD article. Still, the points I agree on in the DVD > BD article outweigh the others, at least to me at this time. The biggest two being price and content.

What Slop said. 99% of the good movies aren't out on blu yet. And the jury is still out on whether the classic and TV libraries will ever make it to blu. Most think that downloads or some other format will take over before blu reaches even close to the saturation point of DVD.

I'd rather watch virtually everything on home video anywhere I want, than 1% of the good stuff in just my living room.

Blu Ray actually has a lot of good titles. Every week Blu Ray get's almost all the new releases and is slowly releasing the classics. And Blu Ray has already over thrown DVD in Japan, and it will continue to grow a customer base in the United States. In the next five years most classic and oldie titles will be out on BD. Sure, right now there are quite a few good movie not out on Blu Ray but they will eventually be released.

I thought "totally discarding any remnant of the one you don't choose" was self explanatory, but perhaps I could have phrased it better.

I agree that the formats are complementary, and there is no need to choose one over the other right now. But if you had to.....

I understand your argument up there, but I don't have the faith that you do that enough good stuff will be released on blu-ray. If I could choose 10,000 movies and 2,000 TV series to own on home video, only about 100 of them are even available on blu-ray, with no signs that the majority of them will be ported to blu in the near future. They are all on DVD right now.

Plus, I'm one that mainly is into film for the story, the A/V presentation is only a very small part of the equation.

Anyway, don't want to repeat all those arguments, I just though it might be interesting to ask, "if you had to choose only one". Can't fathom anyone expect a very patient person with a ton of faith in the format who mainly likes Hollywood fluff even considering blu in that choice.

Maybe. It would certainly be hard to go back to movies that i've seen in HD. Given the silly premise, i'd probably pick Blu-ray and just download anything else I want to see But yeah, I don't really see the point of the question since it doesn't really have anything to do with the debate and will probably just lead this thread in a different direction.

You say that last line as if it would be bad thing.

Yep. It has about ran its course it seems....

I don't think anyone thinks $16.99 for a Blu Ray disc is too expensive. But when someone can get a DVD that looks just fine for $10, or a Blu Ray version for $28...money does talk for some folks. And since I own both formats I don't think your conclusion rings true. As I've stated in other postings, I have opted for the DVD as opposed to the BD on some occasions, for different reasons.

To each his own I guess. I have a Toshiba XDE500 player and I get a pretty astounding picture from my DVDs. If I toggle back and forth between it and my Blu Ray player (a modest but well rated Funai-built Sylvania model) on most comparisons I've done I can detect slight improvement on many basic titles, and a huge improvement on a few.

I have to point out that your grandfather apparently is watching DVDs on a non-HD TV...perhaps he would be thrilled to see the quality of an upcoverted DVD picture on a HDTV set.

Well, what can I tell you? It's odd the other members on this site haven't expressed any confusion with regards to my posts...

Peace brother! Over & out!!

Why not just dust off that VHS player and upconvert it to your HDTV. I mean, why even buy DVDs. VHS tapes are so much cheaper now, anyway. You can buy 100 of them for under a $1 each on eBay.

And believe it or not, my grandfather likes how HD looks. He's had a few salesmen push the upconversion thing...and they failed. Even he asks why is everyone buying large HDTVs when they are only viewing the same DVDs in the first place.

"99% of good movies" aren't out on blu yet? When is the last time you browsed through the bluray section at any store?

Price is not the issue for me. I pay an average of $14-18 for four 25-minute episodes of R1 anime on DVD, and that's the sale price. Since I always wait for bargains, I settle for buying my BDs for $19.99 or less. I think people have been spoiled by $4.99 DVD sales. *shrug*

Personally, I think Blu-ray is a worthy format for the picture quality alone. When I play some of my DVDs on my PS3 and HDTV, the grain is very noticeable. Most of my friends don't really care, don't see the difference, and don't want to support the format because they either don't have a BD player or are too "poor" to buy BDs (even though they go and buy a retail priced DVD on release day). It's their preference and I'm not knocking it. Building a movie collection alone is a costly hobby, and I'm sure not very many would want to actually rebuy and upgrade their library. Still, I like the "modern touch" Blu-ray has. I like the smaller cases, the online capabilities, and the fact that R1 on BD includes Japan.

Almost every day. I'm not saying there is nothing good on blu, I own about 100 blu-rays.

"Best" is subjective of course. Sounds like most of your favorites are made by Hollywood in the past 30 years.

Jesus, you own, or want to own, 12,000 DVD titles? How much free time do you have? Personally, 100 BD releases would probably last me a year, if not longer, at which point there will probably be 100 new BD titles that I'd want, etc.

Again, the point about the availability of titles is the same as it was with the VHS/LD to DVD conversion. I'm sure the vast majority of people did not instantly stop viewing VHS when DVD was released. The former format is always going to at least start out with a larger catalog, and may even have a few titles that will never be released in the newer format. If the catalog size comparison was truly a deterrent to a format succeeding though, then no new format would ever succeed.

BTW, I found this post from you from 1998 (not really):

A few reasons come to mind not going the VHS route...

I may be wrong, but I don't believe anyone made an upconverting VHS player. Tapes wear out, although that factor doesn't seem to have been important in the semi recent vinyl revival among audiophiles. But that is a microscopic market.

I suppose the biggest reason is movies are no longer being released on VHS tape.

I think its a dead commercial format. DVD seems to be doing pretty well though.

Just because it hasn't been expressed by anyone else doesn't mean nobody else finds your reasoning muddled. But if you'd rather act defensive about your posts instead of attempting to clarify your points and continuing the discussion, that's your choice.

You don't need upconversion on the player to get upconversion. HDTVs upconvert the video input to the TV's native resolution anyway. So if you have a HDTV with good upconversion, you don't even need an upconverting DVD player.

However, I think DVD Polizei's point:
Goes back to this post by you:
If price point is such a large factor, enough that people forgo BD for DVD why aren't more people keeping with VHS, or at least why didn't they before the format died out? Obviously, price is not the only factor people use to determine their purchases, and a good number of people find superior quality/features to be worth extra money, even if the cheaper version looks "just fine."

I can tell you that until we closed our family shop in 2007, we were still successfully selling used VHS tapes. There are, even now, a lot of rural people who 1) watch movies as something to do, not as a hobby to which they have dedicated themselves and 2) have absolutely no interest in OAR, behind-the-scenes featurettes or commentaries. Call it an over-generalization if you want, but way too many of our customers kept buying VHS for me to believe that the format died entirely because of their lack of support.

I suppose DVD buyers should watch those Blu-ray penetration numbers carefully; once they get high enough, the decision will likely be taken out of your hands by the studios.

Anyway, in the middle of the night a though occurred to me about this whole Blu-ray thing. Supporters of the format frequently insist that no one is saying that, in order to "go Blu," you need to replace your entire library. My problem with this is as follows:

The argument in favor of BD is that 1) it is the superior format and 2) we should want to watch movies in the superior format. The only options are to either replace everything with Blu-Ray (as it becomes available, of course) or to suffice with upconverted DVD. Of course, if upconverted DVD were, in point of fact, entirely acceptable...then it does not follow that we need a superior format. Ergo, by upgrading to the Blu-ray format, it is expressly implied that we will (or at least, should) replace our inadequate DVD titles with their superior Blu-ray counterparts.

Whether Blu supporters want to admit it or not, their very argument rests on an "all-or-nothing," "either/or" mentality. It's either "the best" or "accept inferiority." Once you've accepted that, there is no middle ground--as outlined by the Blu-ray format itself.

No, it really doesn't. When I upgraded to DVD, I absolutely could not watch VHS anymore. It's not the same this time around. I'd prefer to watch everything on Blu-ray if the option were available, but I don't feel like I'm slumming it when I watch DVD. It's noticeably inferior but not a miserable experience the way VHS was in the DVD era. I'm not going to upgrade everything I own, and I'm about as avid and rabid a Blu-ray enthusiast as you're likely to find.

It didn't die because of their lack of support, but the lack of support from vast majority of people buying new copies and/or renting videos. Vinyl has consistently had a niche market of supporters, but it lost mainstream support decades ago.

Why should studios continue to produce in a format that's no longer viable? DVD may no go the way of VHS though. There's the aformentioned vinyl, which shows that a format can continue as a niche for decades. But there's also the prevalence of VCD in Southeast Asian countries. It was a successful format before DVD premiered there, and it has continued to persevere to this day as a purchase option; likely because most DVD players support VCD, and the VCDs are cheaper. So BD could come to prominence, but that doesn't necessarily mean the demise of DVD.

The point is that you don't have to upgrade all your DVDs to BD, which is different than wanting to upgrade them all. I'm sure that if studios offered free upgrades from DVD to BD, simply turn in your old DVD for the new BD version, there likely wouldn't been anyone that'd turn them down. It's the cost of upgrading, and the fact that not all DVDs are currently on BD, which are the major limiting factors (along with less major factors like player compatibility, etc.)

It's the same with DVD double-dips. Typically, a new DVD release of a title that came out years ago is going to be of superior quality/features. Naturally, most film fans would want the superior DVD, all other things being equal. However, consideration of all other factors may lead them to be content with the older DVD that they already own, or maybe even to purchase the older title over the newer. Some may eventually purchase the newer version, especially when the price comes down, and may even keep both copies if the original release had something unique to it.

So most BD boosters when they write, "don't worry, you don't have to replace your entire DVD collection," are really meaning, "don't worry, your DVD collection isn't going to instantly become worthless the moment you buy BD." There's going to be titles you own that aren't out on BD yet. There's going to be titles that you feel aren't worth the upgrade cost, at least not currently. Ideally, you'd view and own everything in BD, but this isn't a perfect world, and real-world factors must be taken into consideration.

So it's not really an "either/or" mentality, but an "eventually vs instantly" mentality. It's like how most people who owned vinyl eventually transitioned to CD, likely replacing a huge portion of their collection over a course of years/decades. They may still have certain LPs that never made it to CD though, although they might've converted them to a CD-R (or now MP3) copy themselves. A number of DVD proponents, like Trevor, are acting like purchasing BD flips an instant killswitch on one's personal DVD collection. In reality, BD will slowly take over the collection, but may never completely replace it, the same way newer DVD releases have slowly replaced older DVD releases in many people's collections.