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Majority Of Customers Prefer Blu-Ray
bonch writes "A poll shows Blu-ray as the preferred choice, as conducted by Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates. Customers were given a side-by-side comparison of HD-DVD and Blu-ray. The results were that 58 percent of the 1,200 polled chose Blu-ray, and 26 percent were undecided. Generally speaking, HD-DVD is preferred by those seeking to reduce manufacturing costs while Blu-ray is preferred by those more interested in features and data storage." Sony's PS3 is to use the Blu-Ray format.
And what percentage were convinced by the cool name and blueness, rather than the fact that one is slightly different?
Note to mods: I'm probably being sarcastic.
This isn't like one of those setup Pepsi challenges where they would shake up a bottle of Coke making it flat so the people would choose Pepsi is it?
Now why is it I think that all side-by-side comparisons can be equated to the Pepsi challenge? Well with a rhetorical question I'll be the one that answers it for you. If you're seeking a certain result you will find it; thus, whatever side-by-side comparison done always seems like a Pepsi challenge whereby the results are skewed by either a deliberate or unconscious malicious act in some way.
If history of technology has shown us anything, in a two horse race the cheapest normally wins unless their is a VERY good reason for it not to.
This might be one of those cases; HD-DVD seems perfectly capable as a higher capacity DVD; why would people want to pay a premium for a few more features about 10% higher quality?
A poll conducted by the group backing the Blu-ray next-generation DVD standard shows that the technology is supported by a majority of consumers, putting rival HD DVD on the defensive.
Shock horror, the Blu-ray guys have come up with a poll that says their product is better. Next story please...
But that doesn't mean anything, since I'm a classic/vintage computer user (PDP-11)
Seriously, though...how do surveys this early in the technology curve for the next-DVD-replacement mean anything?
Yes, and right now its just the name of the hardware.
I bet whichever format gets more of the "cool stuff" to begin with will more than likely be the format that wins, regardless of the actual technology.
East Coast Brewers
On DVD's we wouldn't have to sit thru FBI warnings or have region restrictions, or not allowed to fast forward thru scenes.
That survey is good to make people think they're being listened to. They're not.
Blu Ray has a sexier name. HD-DVD sounds like somethign for an IBM PC.
Kind of reminds of when you had to decide whether you were going to get DVD+R or DVD-R discs.
Now you can get a dual format drive for less than $50 and not have to worry about it.
I'm guessing after a little while we'll see the same thing happen with the new formats and nobody will care which one you're using.
Seriously, if you're running your own biased survey, you've loaded the dice in your favour, and you still only get 58% of the vote for something most people can't tell apart anyway, something is wrong.
What isn't said there, is that all 1200 of these consumers work for Sony.
Seeing how most consumers don't own televisions that support hi-def content, the only people who will care about Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD are the geeks, folks who are likely to understand the difference and who will extract benefit from one format over the other. Joe Sixpack is perfectly happy watching his full frame flicks that he rents from Blockbuster on his 27" set.
This may be one format war where the best product actually wins.
"Blu-Ray" is easy to remember, and does not sound like much anything else.
D +RD -DVD-R
Unfortunately, the plan is to call it a "BD-ROM" or "BD-RAM", depending on rewritability. I can see it now:
CD-ROM
CD-R
CD-RW
DVD-ROM
DVD-R
DVD-RW
DV
DVD+RW
BD-ROM
BD-R
BD-RW
BD+RW
HD-DVD
H
HD-DVD-RW
HD-DVD+RW
I think the plan is to get the consumer to actually pass out when shopping for media. Then, the store clerks will just steal their wallets.
More
Sounds like they missed the price tag out of the feature list. If you compared the feature list of Fords and Ferraris, you'd expect people to want the Ferrari more - but what do people buy? Getting slowly annoyed with these skewed PR surveys. Surely press hacks must be getting bored of filling space with meaningless copy?
Stop the fuck modding this shit "Insightful". I guess I've read this sentence almost verbatim at least 100 times here on slashdot (and I tend to browse at +4 or +5).
Some reasons:
1) Unlike VHS/beta these media is not only used for movies. Far from it. I guess most BR discs for PS3 would be games. And I guess at least half of my discs at home are not video (and most of the others are filled with *.avi but I digress).
2) VHS was more practical. Really.
3) Sony are nuts about their proprietary formats.
4) Most of the people do _not_ purchase porno. If you're past-teen single loser that does not mean you are typical. In fact we are minority (and even then _I_ do not purchase porno).
Well - really - I was a bit young to remember when beta had a chance and may not know all the details but claiming that new universal media format would be decided by _porno_industry_ is a bit silly, no?
Right, like how the name FIREWIRE blew the jumble of letters USB2 right out of the water, even if it was technically superior
"I don't think Sony is about to repeat their Beta experience."
They certainly haven't learned from their ATRAC experience.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Honestly, the two technologies are close enough in features that I would much rather just avoid a format war than have to deal with the bullcrap I put up with to write to a DVD.
You are comparing apples and oranges. These are two entirely DIFFERENT interfaces.
More relevant is how the "better name" Firewire really eclipsed Sony's name for the same thing (something like IEEE-1394, I think).
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Most of the people do _not_ purchase porno. If you're past-teen single loser
Psst: Porno is sometimes purchaces by married people, including women. Shhhh! Don't tell anyone, though. It's important that we pretend the entire multi-million-dollar industry is driven by skeevy 40-something single pervs in yellow trenchcoats, so we can all continue to be morally outraged about it.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
No, VHS won because Sony wouldn't license porn. But, with the porn UMDs out there that Sony seemed happy to license, it looks like they have learned from their mistake on that one.
Unfortunately, Apple restricted the use of the "Firewire" brand name in the early days, so most PC implementations were forced to use the unsexy "IEEE1394" moniker.
However, the real reason USB2 was victorious is because it is free technology while Firewire still requires some sort of licensing fee. Hopefully now that Apple and Intel are in bed, they can come to some sort of agreement and 1394 will become a standard PC chipset feature.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Generally speaking, HD-DVD is preferred by those seeking to reduce manufacturing costs while Blu-ray is preferred by those more interested in features and data storage.
Personally, I'm the most interested in a format that can be at least as reliable (preferrably even more) than the DVD-R format. Now that would be something for data archival -- a common format that's reliable as hell. Especially as the storage size keeps increasing, I keep finding this to be an important factor. But for some reason you rarely hear about it in the Blu-ray/HD-DVD debate, but rather just what's more costly. If Blu-ray is more expensive but also clearly more reliable in addition to a greater storage, I'll happily pay at least 50% more for one of those than a HD-DVD.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
sadly enough vhs vs betamax was before i had any technical knowledge, but from what i hear betamax had superior quality, but vhs was probably cheaper.
i can imagine when people get polled before release they want the best things, but when they're actually in the store, they look at their wallet and choose the cheapest solution...
Saying "your fingers can handle a lot more latency than 250 Mbps" is nonsensical- 250Mbps is a measure of bandwidth, not latency. I couldn't find any statistics on a latency difference between USB and Firewire interfaces, and any latency either has is going to be something in milliseconds that will never be apparent to humans no matter what the application. External drives that have dual Firewire/USB interfaces don't even bother to quote different latency specs for the different interfaces, it's so close to identical.
As I said, Firewire had greater bandwidth, so if you needed to move a lot of data in real time, then that was an advantage. Firewire became the standard for video instead of USB because USB 1.1 didn't have enough bandwidth to handle a DV stream, and it probably helped stop USB2 from taking over later that Firewire was designed specifically to handle a DV video stream and has great protocols for doing so. USB2 could probably do as good of a job- the latency's effectively the same as Firewire, and the bandwidth is competitive. You can find many pages online testing, measuring, and debating the merits of Firewire and USB2 for various real-time uses, like MIDI. Note, this article on MIDI latency doesn't even mention the latency of USB and Firewire, only the read/write speeds- the bandwidth, because the latency of the interfaces is irrelevant. USB2 actually wins the realtime data transfer test in their comparison because it achieves faster write speed. If you look around, there are a lot of other real-world tests online showing USB2 and Firewire to have similar bandwidth, and the latency of the interfaces isn't even an issue.
Again, your division of tasks with non-realtime using USB and realtime using Firewire is a coincidence of the two things you pointed out. Plenty of realtime applications are done through USB, and plenty of tasks that aren't time sensitive are done through Firewire. I could as easily switch your sentence around to say "Which is why non-real time tasks like tape backup drives use Firewire, while real-time webcam video uses USB." You can get webcams, printers, hard drives, and all sorts of things with either interface or both. Firewire rules video transfer for the reasons I've mentioned, and USB rules keyboards and mice because USB chips were much, much cheaper than Firewire chips a few years ago. Neither ever had anything to do with latency, and neither has anything to do with current bandwidth differences between Firewire and USB2.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?