You really have no concept of this little hobby.

1. Buying HT gear is not an investment!
If it was... none of us would open our hardware and actually use it. We would simply leave it "Mint-in-the-Box" and hope it would appreciate in the coming years.

2. Since HT gear is ever-changing, we HT enthusiasts never settle for anything. If we did.... we would've been content with VHS.

3. Bluray officially launched on June 2006. Where the hell were you?

Now that we've got a lot of titles selling in each format, why don't we compare them against each other?

Here's what we're looking at: I track the average of a basket of titles that are available in DVD, Blu-Ray, and HD-DVD. Unless noted, they are all similar releases, and I track only the best-selling widescreen edition DVD of the film.

8/16/06 (1 title tracked): Kiss Kiss Bang Bang tracked
8/22/06 (2 titles tracked): Training Day added
8/24/06 (4 titles tracked): Rumor Has It... and Good Night and Good Luck added
8/25/06 (6 titles tracked): Mission: Impossible III and Mission Impossible: Ultimate Missions Collection added
8/29/06 (10 titles tracked): Blazing Saddles, Firewall, Full Metal Jacket, Lethal Weapon added
8/30/06 (13 titles tracked): Tomb Raider, Sleepy Hollow, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow added
8/31/06 (14 titles tracked): A View From Space with Heavenly Music added
9/05/06 (18 titles tracked): The Fugitive, Swordfish, Space Cowboys, Guitarscape Planet added


The graph speaks for itself. The drop in DVD's ranking as time progresses occured as older catalog titles were added. DVD still vastly outsells either format, but on 8/31/06, HD-DVD's average sales rank surpassed that of DVD's: don't get too excited, A View From Space... was added that day and that title sells very poorly on DVD. On 9/1, Rumor Has It... and Full Metal Jacket both skewed Blu-Ray and HD-DVD closer to each other.

So far, the only title that sells better than DVD in both HD-DVD and BR is A View from Space with Heavenly Music.

Yeah, DVHS is great.

In AV terms it is the difference between a soft launch and a hard launch. This winter looks like it'll prove very interesting for both formats. The main question for HD DVD is whether they can gain some more hardware and software support soon.

Yeah, HD-DVD had a soft launch too, theirs was just better than BD. They will truly launch this Q4 also.

http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/news/...t_Out_2006/163

http://www.videostoremag.com/news/ht...rticle_ID=9494

Have there been additional HD DVD player manufactuerers set to launch this winter?

I can't wait for the TRUE launch of BD format come this holiday season!!!


Give me a break. Is that all you guys can hold on to now? Why can't you just admit to yourselves that it was a launch, a hugely FAILED launch. A launch is a launch. Will they improve? YOU BET THEY WILL, because that is the only place they can go, up.

"True launch"? "'Settled'"? Do you have any idea what you're talking about? I agree that Blu-rry is gaining momentum. Last week saw Fox announce its first wave of titles(although only 2 are even noteworthy). Disney will be releasing titles soon(although again, they're mediocre titles at best). WB today is releasing its first batch of BD discs using VC-1. Tears of the Sun just got a great review for its transfer from HDDVD Digest. And of course, the PS3 is 2 1/2 months away.

But let's not candycoat the situation. Blu-rry's launch(and yes, its "true launch" occurred months ago) has been a disaster thus far. When a title doesn't look like crap, it's a revelation. Sony is still insisting on using MPEG-2. There have been only a handful of releases that I would consider decent films(unless you think Ultraviolet and The Benchwarmers are a mark of cinematic excellence). And the Samsung player has a bug affecting video quality that still hasn't been corrected via firmware upgrade.

HD-DVD meanwhile has plenty of momentum of its own. Universal just officially announced King Kong for mid-November. WB should have several big name titles out by the end of the year, including Batman Begins and Superman Returns. When a disc doesn't have a great transfer, it's the exception to the rule. Dolby TrueHD is being offered on several upcoming titles. Classic films are being released in addition to newer ones. And Toshiba continues to offer firmware upgrades to work out the early kinks in their player.

Oh, and yes the HD-A1 is half the price of the Samsung player. That doesn't make us early HD-DVD adopters cheapskates. It just means we're able to get HD quality video and audio for as little as 363 bucks. No offense, but what kind of idiot would spend 3 times that amount on a faulty player for a format that so far seems like a marginal improvement over upconverted SD-DVD?

The only ones that I know of are the 360 addon drive and the toshiba euro models. But, I think Amir hinted that we might see 2nd gen this winter in the US. Not sure though.

Guess what...the Panasonic has been pushed back.

Was supposed to come out this month. Now it's coming out in November.

The Pioneer is still nowhere in sight.

Its definitely superior to anything Blu-ray has offered.

I'd say it's pretty much a definite.

Also, CEDIA is next week so we'll know more about everything after that.

The Pioneer dual-drive just had the kabash put on it. More Sony muscle at work.

FWIW, I think Burnt was just trying to be an ass by asking the question, as usual.

you misspelled HD DVD!

These things are only funny when they're true.

To him, it is. Something about blu-colored glasses.

I dunno.

I'm burnt out on him and his posts, to be honest.

I don't think it's fair to categorize them as cheap, since HD-DVD had the advantage in earlier release, higher quality, and currently still higher capacity, in addition to price. Also, $500 is not what I'd categorize as "cheap."

The price advantage looks like it will exist for a while still. PS3 has an aption with the same SRP as the A1, but the A1 has had discounts on its price, which the PS3 will not.

To be fair, 1080p has been deemed unnecessary by a lot of reviewers, since 1080i of a 1080p source has no noticable interlacing artifacts. Also, the $499 barrier may be because a $499 HD-DVD player already exists, and has all the features and quality most people need.

Still, I agree that a lot of HD-DVD owners seem overly defensive of the format at times, and overly dismissive of Blu-Ray as a competitor. Bias can exist on both sides, especially if you've already picked one as worthy of owning.

Now it's old...

Your perception of reality is once again flawed.

It's not about price it is about value. BD has no value at all because there is better quality for far less price. We wouldn't be talking about price if we hadn't seen better quality for half cash.

I'm sitting on tens of thousands of dollars of AV equipment so it isn't about price. There are hundreds/thousands of others who are in the same boat. It isn't about price-- it IS about value.

The best BD can hope to do is match HD DVD. I noticed that you got all excited about the TotS BD review because it looks like it might match HD DVD.

BD has really fucked up big time. It was supposed to be "beyond high definition", but it has turned out to be more like, "we can almost do it, too".

I own quite a few DVDs and I'm looking forward to upgrading them to HD. But I don't care how much BD costs. At this point it isn't worth buying at any price. If they win and keep their current quality I'll stick with DVD. And I mean it.

Exactly. I agree. I wish they had rep points in this site.

If BD does win and puts out quality releases, then I have no problems adopting BD.

Again, it comes down to wanting quality HD content on disc. HD-DVD or BD. I dont care.

Right now, HD-DVD is giving us the best quality and it just so happens that the price of the hardware is lower.

At the risk of venturing off the topic of the big fight...
Please let me be clear, HD DVD is noticeably better than upconverted SD DVD. I didn't intend my comments to be used as support for the notion that HD DVD isn't worth it.

But I did an A/B comparison with Serenity, focusing on the title sequence because the credits are so pretty on HD DVD, and I was suprised at how good my SD DVD looked. Softer, yes, but pretty good. By contrast, I was watching an A&E mystery on 4:3 DVD on Sunday and the PQ was pretty crappy, to put it kindly. They can't get that sort of thing on HD DVD fast enough for me! (I am hoping that they were all filmed, as opposed to being recorded on video.)

We here make up a tiny minority of the market for HDTVs, DVD players, and the like. I was trying to view the upgrade to HD DVD (or BD) from the POV of an average TV watcher making the step up from SDTV to DVDs upscaled on an HDTV monitor. That's a mighty big jump in PQ, in my experience.

It isn't the early adopters who will make or break the HD DVD or BD formats. It is the average consumer, who doesn't know word one about calibrating displays and thinks that buying an HDTV automatically equates to his/her DVDs being HD ('cause the salesman said so), who will make the difference. And that gives me pause.

Will HD DVD/BD sales outpace DVD sales in three years? I don't think so. As I said before, I'd like to be wrong!

^ I think the upconversion on the A1 is highly underreated. Its an EXCELLENT upconverting player. In many instances, the sd dvd looks almost hd quality. Ive owned MANY upconverting dvd players and this one is the best (at least on my Sammy DLP set).

You can really see the difference though in fast action movement between hd and sd upconverted. Also, the bigger the picture, the more evident of a change. My DLP is 61in and 720p rez.

At BB, I watched Serenity on a Mits 1080p set and it looked brilliant. Better than on my set.

For 720p sets, the picture probably does look more similar. After all, the difference between that and 1080p is that 1080p has twice as many pixels (assuming full 1920x1080). With 720p being "half" resolution of full HD, the similarities to SD would be more apparent.

just to clarify--was this on SDVD from an SDVD player, or being upconverted?

I certainly wouldn't expect an upconverted SDVD to look as good as HD cable or HDDVD, but I would hope it looks noticeably better than SDVD, even to the 'untrained' eye [ie, people who don't read this forum]. I have a 60" 1080i RPTV, and some SDVDs don't look very good on it.

SHOCKING NEWS!

MGM's releases will be......MPEG2......WITH NO EXTRAS.....AND....$40 retail!!!



http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/sh...ray_Titles/216

That's just insane.

I guess if BD owners pretend they're "import titles"....then paying $30-40 MSRP really isn't that bad.