Slayer2005

Many of my DVDs processed with FFDShow on my CRT projector blew it away from what I saw and my screen is 9' diagonal compared to a 50" screen. The Best Buy guys, of course, only had their overpriced $1,000 Blu-Ray players hooked up, but not the Toshiba HD-DVD player. Shocking huh? So, unfortunately I didn't get to see it. There were a few times when the Blu-Ray player looked decent and then suddenly horribly grainy with bad artifacts.

Most of the LCD TVs looked like complete crap and everything there that section had an HD feed. The DILAs (my first time seeing one) I saw looked beautiful though, even better than the DLP next to it. Smooth like a CRT and simply stunning picture quality.

I have no doubt that most, if not all, of their sets (probably all of them) are HORRIBLY miscalibrated. I adjusted one of their LCD pc monitors and discovered that contrast was at 100% and Sharpness was at 100% (much like I had anticipated). I had wondered why the X-Box 360 looks like complete garbage on another LCD monitor (mainly because of the jagged edges), yet looked fantastic on my 480p 4805 DLP projector.

What is wrong with these people? I thought that they are trying to SELL sets not make people not want them. I honestly think they'd sell more sets if I went in there and recalibrated each one.

dharding

If you want to evaluate the Toshiba HD-DVD player (apparently, trying to find a reasonable demo in the chain stores is nigh unto impossible with BB and CC pushing BR as hard as they are), just buy it and then return within 30 days.

There's no restocking fee, although you would be out the cost of any discs you purchase (Netflix?).

Best "eye candy" on HD-DVD:

Chronicles of Riddick
The Rundown
Blazing Saddles
Serenity, although the film is somewhat grainy (not the fault of the format)

mbs

Or buy it from Costco. There you can return it at any time in the future for a full refund.

darkside

I've said it before, but I still think Best Buy is doing more harm to Blu-ray and HD DVD than good. These hidef formats look terrible with the poorly calibrated LCDs that Best Buy is using to display them. They crank the sharpness and brightness really high and it looks like both formats have a ton of artifacts in the image.

There was a guy looking at the Blu-ray demo today (all of the local Best Buys in my area no longer demo HD DVD) at Best Buy and couldn't understand why it looked that awful. The Best Buy guy kept droning on about how perfect the image was and the guy just kept shaking his head and saying it looked worse than his HD cable. I stepped in and explained most of the problem was the fact no one working at Best Buy has any idea how to set up a TV, but the store guy started talking over me and I just gave up. Let him lose a Blu-ray sale, what do I care.

Coral

I dropped by FutureShop the other day and got my first view of Blu-Ray as well.

To say that I was not impressed would be an understatement. I was shocked at how awful it looked. I swear DVDs playing on TVs next to it looked better.

FS also had HD-DVD playing and it was consistent with the first time I saw it... simply stunning PQ.

A friend was with me and had the exact same reactions to BR and HD-DVD as I did. In fact a few customers commented on the big difference between the two.

The FS salesperson was trying to sell me on the HD-DVD player instead of the BR player. He stated that he and his co-workers were extremely dissapointed with BR and have been recommending customers avoid paying $1,400 for something that looks terrible when a $700 unit looked amazing - even though BR gave them a bigger profit margin.

The Bus

I went out to see if I could find any demo versions of Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Best Buy and Circuit City both just had Blu-Ray. The Best Buy guy actually told me, "We don't have HD-DVD." He was standing ten feet from the display.

I was not impressed by the displays at all. I'd like to see HD-DVD in action though.

BravesMG

My local Best Buy here in Boise, Idaho I just noticed switched back from BD to HD-DVD. They started with an HD-DVD display, changed to BD about 2 weeks ago, and yesterday had a real nice HD-DVD setup going. It looked really good, either they didn't fiddle with it much or had somebody that knew what they were doing set it up. They also either moved the BD display to a different area or pulled it completely because it didn't have the same location next to the HD-DVD player it had last week.

Mr. Cinema

I think my Best Buy put it another disc for their HD DVD setup. Whatever it was looked incredible. I wasn't there along, but the images were popping and you could easily see the increased resolution. They have the player connected to a Samsung plasma.

Pointyskull

This weekend I happened to wander past a Blu-Ray demo at BB on a 42" screen and Chicken Little looked absolutely three-dimensional. I was impressed, but at $1000 it's a bit out of my league right now.

awmurray

Be careful. The Chicken Little clip is from the demo disc. Actual titles vary considerably in quality vs. the demo disc. From what I've read they will NOT play an actual movie on one even if you bring your own!

Pointyskull

Yeah, it was a demo disc, but from a purely 'wow' perspective, the image quality was really stunning.

Like I said, I'm not that concerned (yet) over the playback quality of Blu-Ray discs because I'm not in the market for one.

maingon

I wasnt impressed either, HD-DVD's that I saw (Chronicles of Riddick and Serenity) looked AMAZING, the Demo I seen of Blue-ray wasnt very impressive only alittle better then DVD if that. If Blue-ray doesnt improve I dont see them winning the HD war especially with BlueRay player double the price.

Spiky

Well, duh. You shouldn't even BE in Best Buy. Certainly not to compare with home.

Easy

I was in Best Buy today and couldn't believe what I saw. They were displaying a split screen with one side labeled "Standard" and the other side labeled "High Definition". I asked an employee about the source of the material and I was told it was an "in store loop" and "standard definition". Bottom line; the side labeled "high definition" wasn't high def at all and the side labeled "standard" had to have been intentionally screwed with to make it look as bad as it did. It was one of the most dishonest things I have ever seen. I have to admit I never thought Best Buy was that bad but this was flat out crooked.

digitalfreaknyc

That's standard on BOTH sides: HD DVD and BD both have a demo set up that way.

bboisvert

I remember seeing something like that at a Blockbuster when DVD first was being introduced (~1998). They did a split screen of VHS vs. DVD, but the VHS side looked about 80x worse than anything I had ever seen. It was really laughable... doing a before/after shot that even an half-blind idiot could see was faked.

The (few) Best Buy HD setups I've seen have been pretty bad. They're so inept at setting up monitors correctly that everything ends up either looking mediocre (at best) or riddled with artifacts (at worst). I can't imagine many people being impressed enought to plunk down $500-1000 for HD movies looking at this stuff.

That being said, *all* of their HD TVs tend to look like crap too... and they don't seem to have any problem selling those.

HiFiLux

Yeah - the demos are recorded at the maximal bitrates - the BD movies, however, are lower bitrate and look terrible. I returned the Samsung BD player - $1,000 isn't to be spent on a nice demo disc - the movies on HD DVD are WAYY better!

digitalfreaknyc

If that's the case then "Houston, we have a problem."

So I too just went to see BD at my local BB for the very first time. It was on the same endcap that HD DVD used to be on. There was a cardboard carton of BD discs underneath and it didn't look like a damn one had been removed. It was overflowing.

I want to be as honest as I can be. At first look, it's not horrible. It's not very good but it's certainly not atrocious. I wanted to make sure that my obvious bias wasn't getting in the way but I know that if i was "wow-ed" it wouldn't be too difficult to hide. If you re-read my posting when I first saw HD DVD on the demo tour, I certainly was surprised at how impressed i was. At that point, I was a SERIOUS BD freak and even with that bias, I had to admit that it looked pretty damn good.

Anyway, I kept looking at the demo (which showed trailers for Manchurian Candidate and Sahara, amongst others) and something looked off. Peoples faces were moving. Then i realized that it was all the compression. I noticed there was compression in everything. The green "preview" screen. Backgrounds. Faces. Everything. All over the place. Liev's stubble in the MC trailer was crawling. To me, it looked like a TNT HD broadcast. Not horrible. Not good.

Then I looked to the HD screens perpendicular to it. They were showing Showtime HD. My god did it look gorgeous. That's when I realized that this had nothing to do with bias. It's really just not good.

I asked the guys if they had sold any of them and the guy said "we can't keep them in stock. every time we get a shipment, we sell out." Although it sounded rehearsed, I guess I have to take him on his word. He used to tell me the same thing every time I went in asking about HD DVD. He also said they haven't gotten any returned.

My final thoughts are that if this is supposed to be the best they can look (being that it's a demo), HD DVD has absolutely nothing to worry about. This was BD's war to lose and they seriously need to get their shit together. I did have to wonder what I would have thought had HD DVD not come out yet. Thankfully, we don't have to worry about that.

Oh...and they had 4 of those HD DVD players. Just got them in 2 days ago. Unfortunately, it's not hooked up to ANYTHING at the moment.

Dan

I was just at a Futureshop in Calgary, Alberta. When I finally found the Blu-Ray setup (it wasn't near Home Theatre stuff at all, just on a random endcap), they were playing Hitch, and it was playing as bad as a scratched DVD would play. Meaning, the video and sound kept stalling every second or so. It was disturbingly sad. after the movie ended, they restarted it up, and it didn't glitch as much (maybe once per minute), so it could have been that the disc was dirty (not likely), or they changed the audio setting or something. As for picture quality... it was clearly better than DVD, but I still saw blocking/crawling/etc.

The HD DVD setup was down one of the aisles. It was playing on a Toshiba DLP set, although I don't think it was 1080p. Rundown was the disc inside, and it looked and sounded much better than the Blu Ray setup. I played with the remote a bit. The menus were a bit jerky, but the actual movie played perfectly fine.

It's funny... the Futureshop flyer had a big 2-page spread on Blu Ray. One of the "special features" is:
"Upconverts your CDs and DVDs so they look better!".

CDs can look better with Blu Ray?!?! I'm totally buying one now!

digitalfreaknyc

Oh yeah...forgot to mention that lovely hourglass that came up between each and every trailer.

Oy.

Just....oy.

Blitz6Speed

Finally, i got to see BR in action today and i realise that you all have been itching to hear my thoughts on it, so here we go.

First off, ive seen HD-DVD previously at best buy with Serenity on a Westinghouse 1080p 42" LCD. It looked so grainy that it turned me off to the picture, although i have to admit it looked sharp. I was far from blown away however.

So finally i got some free time and headed out to frys to check out blu-ray. I get to the big screens and had to search around. I finally found the BR player hooked up to a samsung 1080p plasma. It was the clock demo, and i was shocked at the blocks and noise i saw. I thought, there had to be a messed up setting, so i check and its outputting at 1080p. Hmm, i thought.

So then i remembered, those samsungs have a bunch of crap you need to turn off. So i turned off all the options, and wow, it looked a lot better, but still had some noise that was noticable. I would definetly chock this up to bad compression, as the image itself was REALLY sharp and clean, but i could see defects that literally shouldnt have been there. After that, i realised another thing. Im standing less then 2 feet from the TV. I go back to about 7 feet back and wow, picture started looking damn good. Any display you're too close to, especially plasmas, you see a lot more noise then if you're at proper viewing distance.

So then i went to the menu and checked out chicken little. It was absolutely STUNNING. Gorgeous. Then pirates came on, and man was it grainy. Obviously they didnt do a great job on the transfer, but you could easily tell how sharp the colors are and how detailed the faces were. I began to think that they made these transfers a long time ago and just released what they had just to get it on the market. After that, Ultraviolet demo came on, and WOW, gorgeous. The movie itself has a ton of contrast, so it took out a lot of detail, but what a picture! Was gorgeous.

After that, i confirmed what i'd always known, everyone and their mom was blowing everything out of porportion. The potential is there, and all BR has to do now is prove it with some recent encodes and show the public what it can do. Id also like to note that the laggy buttons on the samsung was pretty crappy, but otherwise seemed like a solid player. I also beleive the pioneer/panasonic/sony players will be WAY better then the samsung. The best is yet to come im sure, but im already impressed by the meager rushed outing just to get it out to the market.

So, end result, at this time, HD-DVD has a slight edge due to more advanced codec and space. However, the difference between the 2 is NOT what the forums make it out to be. I too thought it would be crappy by the time i saw it and was pleasently surprised. Everyone writing the format off will be shocked by what the media and public will be saying about the format once the new wave of flicks and players hit.

I tried to be as UNBIASED as possible when i went in, i went in with the mentality that the picture would barely touch a dvd like so many had wrote on the forums, even tho i prefer BR, and then saw the truth there. Take it as you will.

Supermallet

You hadn't even seen BD yet? So all of your posts up to this point have been based on, what, your imagination? Come on.

I'm confused by your comment about Serenity being grainy as hell, because it was nowhere near grainy as hell on my 55" Mitsubishi CRT. Yet, you decided it was grainy as hell and went on your way.

Then you get to the BD display, you change all the settings, and then you stand 7 feet away, and suddenly it looks good?

I almost expected you to say, "I saw BD and it had all these artifacts. Then I stood 20 feet away, and squinted real hard, and it almost looked like a regular DVD!"

I think you had better go back to the HD-DVD display, change all the settings, and then stand 7 feet away and see how it looks.

Actually, a better idea. Find a friend who actually owns an HD-DVD player and has it calibrated correctly with a good sound system. Watch that and then come back and talk about BD.

spainlinx0

That's the first thing I thought as well. He sees HD-DVD, and is not that impressed, and chalks it up to apparently HD-DVD not being good. He checks out BD, is disappointed in how bad it looks, and decides to take it upon himself to fix a bunch of settings, and stand farther away so that it can compete with HD-DVD. Hmm, now if you had made equal changes for both, perhaps you would have been back at square one don't you think?

You mention they didn't do a great job on the Pirates transfer. So how exactly is a different player going to address that issue? Isn't grain simply grain?

Eric D.

I still can't get over the fact that this was the first time he saw Blue-Ray despite all of his posts. Unbelievable.

Slayer2005

Well, those who have seen both on calibrated displays would tell you blu-ray is teh suck. If you took the time to also make adjustments on the crappy LCD they had Serenity playing on you'd most likely come to find out that the contrast was set to 100% along with sharpness and it probably had the saturation way too high as well. Of course plenty of the LCD tvs are garbage compared to Plasma, DLP, SXRD or CRT displays regardless of their settings. Most likely it was one of the worst calibrated display ever though just like most of the sets in stores like Best Buy.

Blu-Ray has potential, but that's all they have right now. Blu-Ray shoud currently be considered unacceptable to all of those with front projection systems (like me, for instance).

Bottom line, Blu-Ray looks god awful most of the time, especially if you have a large projection display. Even most of the former Blu-Ray fanboys are complaining and that is not good. My upconverted DVDs with FFDShow piss all over a majority of what I've seen with Blu-Ray so far. I figured part of the awfulness was due to the miscalibrated set and it probably was, but even those with calibrated displays who bought one are saying it looks like crap compared to HD-DVD. I read that one Best Buy took their Blu-Ray player down because it looked so terrible. Of course that's shocking since they usually have shown a clear bias do to the high profit margin.

BTW, incase anyone is curious the HD-A1 is currently ranked 427 in electronics at Amazon.com. The Samsun BD-P1000 is ranked 7,932. The average ranking for Blu-Ray is 2.5/5 stars. 3 of the last 4 reviews gave it a one star. The HD-A1 has a 4.5/5 star rating.




That's what you call a hardcore Blu-Ray fanboy. He doesn't even need to see it to know it's better. Seriously though, he sure did make a big effort to try to make Blu-Ray look better than the HD-DVD did on a piss poor setup.