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DVD Players - Buy Now or Wait for the Violet Laser Models?
PateraSilk asks: "I've been resisting the DVD pull for a while but VHS is becoming more and more obselete. So, I'm thinking about joining the hordes, but I have two problems with the DVD format: compression artifacts and low-level pixel dithering, which annoy me no end. Maybe I've just seen crappy DVDs, but this leads me to my question: should I go ahead and purchase a DVD player regardless of my qualms or wait for a violet/blue laser standard to emerge? My hope is that a larger storage capacity would lead to a less lossy compression format, but, then again, I could be waiting in vain. Plus, I don't want to embrace a technology only to have it be replaced within a couple of years." Remember, Sony's violet-laser player has already hit the market, so hopefully it won't be long before other manufacturers follow suit. How long will it be before competition in this market drives down prices to reasonable levels?
Just like vinyl sounds better to an audiophile's ears than a CD, videotape just looks better to a videophiles eyes than a DVD.
Speaking as a videophile, I have to disagree.
The analog encoding on VHS loses high-frequency information way too fast. (See this comparison for the sillyscope pics. It's comparing SVHS to VHS, but you can see how they all lose HF info.) Signal bleed and stretch kick in a week after you buy the tape. Moire (colors appearing in a black and white pattern) and susceptibility to poor combing (losing edges around 3.5 MHz) is inescapable, because the chroma signal is still overlaid on the intensity signal. (This last sentence applies if you hook up the DVD player with a composite cable, but I'm concentrating on VHS format problems, not connection follies.)
I know people who prefer laserdisc, which is an analog format, to DVD. It suffers from some of the problems as VHS (such as moire), but it does have a much higher bandwidth than VHS, meaning better resolution-- a sharper picture and clearer detail.
These laserdisc holdouts are a dwindling breed, though. The DVD revolution has taken hold.
So videophiles don't prefer VHS. What's PateraSilk's deal? I'm guessing he saw bad examples: poor transfers, possibly, or a bad (or misconfigured) player adding stairsteps when it downconverted a 16:9 tape. (See my other post in this article.) But I can't imagine anybody prefering VHS to DVD in general.