How so?

on blu the menu can be seen without leaving the movie on about 98%
of the discs.
on dvd menu stops the movie completely. I love being able to keep the movie on if I want to check the menu for something.

I think that Blu Ray absolutely blows away DVD. But, some films (like Lord of the Rings) look great on DVD still to me.

And deaf.

Ok, I can see from the responses that the people on the Bluray forum are clearly exaggerating when they say that those guys in the DVD forum are "still claiming" that DVD has better picture/sound than Bluray. Everything you all said is pretty reasonable and I agree with most of it.

Anyone who claims DVD has better pic quality is lying.

I just re-read the thread and I don't believe anybody here has made that claim. I'll be the first to admit that BluRay has that advantage, it's just not enough of an advantage for me to want to change from DVD to BluRay. -kd5-

I buy Blu for all new movies, favorites that I want to upgrade to a better picture quality and anything really inexpensive on Blu but I still buy dvds when they are catalog titles and am perfectly happy with it. It's great finding older movies on dvd that have commentaries, documentaries, etc for $3...it'll be awhile before Blu can do that. It's all price relative for me...I'll keep buying both for the foreseeable future.

Depends on what criterion one is using. Volume of titles, number of players in the marketplace, ability to play a disc pretty much anywhere, etc. DVD wins out. Picture and audio quality, Blue ray wins out most of the time.

All of Criterion's Blu-rays have been better than their DVD counterparts.

While that may be true, it still depends upon which criteria one uses.

Depends.
I own the movie Just Friends on DVD & Blu-Ray. The Blu-Ray has NO special features while the DVD is advertised "PACKED WITH HILARIOUS FEATURES!" and I have the Observe and Report Blu-Ray and DVD. The Blu-Ray is FILLED with bonus features while the DVD has NONE AT ALL.
The BD quality is excellent, but I can live with DVDs.
I only buy blurays when it is a combo pack or if I already own the DVD.

Something similar to this question was on the blu-ray.com site and almost unanimously people favored Blu-ray. After my own experiments, It's not as black and white a question as I thought. Personally I like Blu-ray but at the same time don't find it to live up to the hype. A very well transferred Blu-ray will be superior, but I am finding some titles are not good transfers and actually look worse overall than the DVD. I find too that consistent picture quality is an issue, one minute it looks great, the next minute the contrast and color is whacked out, almost as if a good Blu-ray transfer needs to be done very carefully, scene by scene. The DVD format is more forgiving, so it winds up a case where some scenes clobber the DVD and some scenes actually look worse. If the DVD is mastered really well and the Bluray just ok than it's a toss up, the 2 may be hard to choose between and you might find yourself wondering as I sometimes do "why did I buy that movie again?". Other factors will be the screen size of display (with Bluray presumably doing better on bigger screens), and the quality of your DVD upscaling- Denon or OPPO players that use the anchor bay 2010 chip make DVD look very close to Blu-ray (on my 40 inch screen anyway). Obviously the quality of the original production is a factor, some things just won't be much of an improvement on BD, others seem born for it.

At that site? Shocking.

If you have a good display upconverted DVD's of newer movies will look very good compared to the blu counterpart. However older movies on blu will look vastly superior. That to me is the real night and day comparison. The blu wow factor came to me when comparing John Carpenters Assault in Precinct 13 between DVD and blu. It was unreal how much better the blu looked.

Do you know of any online screeshots to compare this?

Here I thought you were going to tell us if they really were hilarious.

I have to agree with Demdiscus that sometimes the difference between the formats isn't huge.

The other day a friend had a PS3 hooked up to a 37" TV playing a disc. I walked into the room and mentioned how good Blu-ray looks only to find out he was watching the DVD.

Many of the DVD titles that were made from an HD source tend to look pretty close unless they're compared directly to the Blu-ray. When you throw in calibration (or lack thereof), screen size, sitting distance etc. there often isn't a compelling difference in some circumstances.

DVD Beaver might. Otherwise it was just my own comparison.

There were a few dissenters. While reading the thread I got the feeling several posters thought since blu-ray has better technical specs, it is automatically better and had not done same title comparisons for themselves. With one saying "If it did, it would be an issue with the source and possible transfer alterations to the material. There's not really anyway a BD can look inferior than a DVD on a technical level. A BD of the exact same transfer on DVD will offer improvement everytime."

I'd say it's more of an issue with the source and/or what they do with it, than any format differences. Compare the 2 DVD versions of Red Dawn. It's a big difference between the two but they're both still the same source.

A studio could also take a DVD they've previously released and just put that on a Blu-Ray disc and call it a day. It's the same exact item, just put into a different box.

It's all about what you do with the item. Now we just have a new box that can fit more features, as long as the studios are willing to use them.

Not sure I would agree with this completely. Most of the time "yes", but there are always exceptions. For example, I remember when I first got a scanner and tried scanning pictures. I just assumed scanning in at the highest resolution would be best. When the quality of the print was good this was the right way to go. However, I noticed on some older prints with various types of damage or grain that the higher resolution actually made the damaged areas stand out more leaving a less desired effect.

I think this has been proven to be true in some cases with Blu-ray as well based on what sources are available, the film stock used, how well it was preserved and what types of remastering can be done. Obviously, we are talking about a small minority.

Blu-ray is a half-baked format but even with all its flaws its still superior to DVD. I made the DVD-to-Blu change pretty much kicking-and-screaming but I'm glad I did.

Another thing to understand is that Blu-ray will never replace DVD for some things. There are DVDs that will never make it to Blu just like there are titles on VHS and Laserdisc that aren't available on DVD. Unlike that situation, however, DVDs will play in Blu-ray players so right off the bat the format is not asking you to abandon your previous software. There are also titles that don't benefit from HD. My favorite release (DVD or Blu) of 2010 was Shout! Factory's complete "Larry Sanders Show" set, even after I finally embraced the DVD format. There's no reason for Shout! to release that title as anything BUT a DVD.

Nobody wants to invest in new hardware that will only lead to a feeling of inferiority over what they've already purchased and/or a compulsion to spend money on something they "already have" but that's nothing unique to the DVD/Blu situation. It's something you need to accept in regards to any technology.

I can't harp on the people who are stubbornly clinging to DVD when I was one of them like a year ago but I will say this: whenever the right title comes along that pushes you over the edge (for me it was the "Back to the Future" trilogy and "Apocalypse Now" but I suspect the "Star Wars" saga will do this for a lot of people) you'll just regret the last couple years of DVD purchases.

I have a BD player and about 10 BD discs. I'm not anti blu-ray, but I'm suspect of the staying power and viability of the format, it is wise that you point out many titles will not come to BD. I'll keep all my DVD's just like I kept all my vinyl Lp's. If they mastered BD's right the first time I'd be more enthusiastic. Even on the bluray.com site the reviews point out transfer problems with some discs.

I would never argue that DVD has a superior picture to Blu-ray. That's just silly.

However, I maintain that dipping into the Blu-ray pool would lessen my enjoyment of my collection. With just over 1000 titles on DVD, I'm not eager to upgrade everything. I have yet to purchase or even see Blu-ray, and I hope to continue that as long as I can, because once I see that better picture, it will cheapen the picture on all my others in comparison, thus reducing my enjoyment. Ignorance is bliss, quite literally.

Coupled with a distaste for some past Sony practices, that reasoning makes me content to sit out the Blu-ray era and hope that a non-disc solution progresses fast enough for me to bypass Blu-ray entirely.

This is quite true actually. What I found is that after a while, Blu Ray didn't so much look better, but it made DVD look worse. BD became the new 'normal' & I had a hard time watching smearly looking old DVD's.

Still though, I've never been unhappy to replace anything. Actually just the opposite, I can't wait to double dip on some of my favorites when they're released with vastly improved picture quality.