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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.
How much of this customer preference is just the name? "Blu-Ray" is easy to remember, and does not sound like much anything else. "HD-DVD" sounds like just more tech alphabet soup, or part of a features list string for a Dell desktop ad.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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...
As we all know from the VHS-beta wars, which format wins out depends not on what consumers want, but what the pornography industry prefers.
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?
That's the one where the Pepsi rep makes sure that he pees in the Coke bottles before each and every "Taste Challenge".
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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 discs hold more data. Anyone hearing a run down comparison is going to go with blu ray. Personally, I'm still a bit scared about potentially loosing data because the layer of protection is so small. Of course, I'm sure the comparison didn't say "the protection layer is almost non-existant in blu ray discs".
It might be an unfounded fear, but I won't know that for at least a year after I get blu ray stuff.
Blu Ray has a sexier name. HD-DVD sounds like somethign for an IBM PC.
The study's editor insightfully removed the "death-ray" option from the final results, despite an 82% preference rate among the 12-32 demographic.
On the software side, they encompass the same codecs. It'd be nice if the BBC or some consortium of similar institutions could get the proprietary codec off the Blu-Ray spec and put an open standard on there instead. Dirac or Theora could do for video what the web (HTML+HTTP) did for the net.
Last I heard, the audio codec was not selected. That would be a prime use for Vorbis.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Hey, 2 out of three are accurate. So just wait until they're three and hope that two of them agree.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
Sounds like the Blu-Ray people have the clearly superior product. I guess I'll be stopping by Frys on my way home from work to pick one up.
On second thought, they'll probably all be gone if I wait that long. I'd better swing by during lunch.
It's the land of the brave, and the home of the free
Where the less you know, the better off you'll be.
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.
Sigh... not again...
...the early adopters who back the wrong horse will be punished and will learn a life lesson that will make them reluctant to embrace new technology...
...the general public will sit back waiting for the dust to settle...
...it will take five years before you can walk into a video store and see which format is the "normal" one, and see a choice of models at low prices stacked up in the local K-Mart or Costco...
...and just as I buy one, they announce the next pair of competing, incompatible (or compatible-in-"many"-but-not-mine) standards.
As Theotocopulos says in the H. G. Wells movie Things to Come: "Stop this 'progress!' Stop it, I say!"
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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?
And now Sony will dust off that damn pan-faced robot from "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" for commercials: "BD BD BD BD BD BD".
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Maybe people who voted actually wanted these rays: http://www.crystalinks.com/bluecrystals.html
FYI: Google gives a ration 1:3 for "blue-ray" vs "blu-ray".
So what...
VHS didnt win because it had a better picture, VHS won because it was less costly.
HD-DVD has better backwards compatibility(hd-DVD players play older DVDs more easily)
The capacity of HD-DVD is not enough to hold movies and extras at 1080i.
So it seems to me if studios favor HD-DVD its because they want to sell us all the movies on HD-DVD, and sell us the movies again on HD-DVD mkII which will have more capacity.
From my narrow perspective, Blu-Ray would make a good medium for backup now that 300-500G hard drives are increasingly common.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
"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.
Remember the C3D company? They invented a CD which could hold a nearly infinite number of layers because each of them is completely transparent, but if the laser is focused on a layer and shining on it, the layer is self-illuminating.h ronicle/archive/1999/11/29/BU19966.DTL
C3D presented this technology back in 1999 or even earlier, they even had working prototypes.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c
These discs could hold as much as 140 gigabytes of data!
Compared to this, blu-ray looks kind of outdated.
But the company went banckrupt (I think), and now in 2005 we are presented a technology IMHO less advanced than C3D.
The biggest reason why VHS won was the fact that JVC (the developer of the Video Home System format) and its majority shareholder Matsushita Electric offered extremely low licensing terms for other companies to manufacture VHS recorders--far lower than that of what Sony wanted for the Betamax format.
Besides, VHS had another huge advantage, notably longer recording times at all recording speeds, something highly desirable for recording complete TV seasons, miniseries or sporting events. And VHS easily matched Beta improvements in sound and picture quality with VHS Hi-Fi audio and Super VHS higher-resolution recording.
Lest face it, this time next year there will be a few thousand HD-DVD players sold to early adopters and a few million Blu-Ray players sold disguised as PS3's.
There will also be hell of a lot more people who won't what to upgrade from the DVD players they brought last year.
Over here in the UK we might have actually have PS3's by then and possible be in four figures for the number of people watching HDTV.
Also of interest is the H.264 article on Wikipedia, specifically the Applications section--
All things being equal again, that leaves capacity as the only thing seperating the two formats as far as I can tell.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
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!
It's noticeably better quality, it's more expensive, it's backed by Sony...
...yep. It's doomed.
Chris Mattern
People with diabetes have a higher glucose content in the blood. When they test diabetes in the blood or urine, that is what they are testing for. The more diabetes the sweeter the urine will be I guess. But I somewhat doubt it will cancel out the taste of salt.
The number of "average" consumers that have a clue when it comes to is pretty damn low. They were given a bullet point list and keeping in line with the usual tendencies they chose the one with the most bullet points and do you want to bet that Blu-Ray had the most bullet points? Back in the early days of word processors I had a conversation with a software distributor as to why Word was starting to outsell Wordperfect and he said Word had a bigger feature list on the back of the box. From that day forward I always paid attention to that aspect of marketing and he was right. People always assume more is better.
Reports show that majority of the customers prefer macdonalds. The same reports show that majority of the customers prefer not to be fat as well as not to excersize. Another reports show that clock is still blinking on most VCRs. The bottom line is that majority of the customers ether does not know what they want or want something for completely the wrong reason.
The World Famous Dr. Eisenburg finishing his lecture on the importance of careful observation one day.
He immediately moved on to a new subject, and he explained to his class that as a doctor, one can learn a great deal about what disease the patient has by tasting their urine. He then lowers his hand into a beaker of urine and sticks his index finger in his mouth.
His class cringes. "Now class, I want you all to do the same. When this beaker has finished its way around the class, we will further our discussion."
One by one each student gingerly places their hand into the beaker and then into their mouths.
Finally the beaker finishes its way around, and the Dr. Eisenburg picks it up. "Now class, if you had paid attention to our earlier conversation, you would have noticed my middle finger was placed in the urine, and my index finger went into my mouth."
Deja Vu
n. 1. The sensation that you've read this very article before.
The market for those that have equipment that can show the resolution difference of HD content is pretty small. DVD offered something for everyone, HD offers something for a tiny percentage.
Infintesimally small percentage when you factor in the ultra DRM on these machines that require DRM connections everywhere in the chain or drops back to standard DVD resolution by downsampling.
I would be a prime candidate for next generation disk, I have been completely turned off by DRM overkill. So while at first I was drooling over the possability of HD LOTR goodness, I have completely given up caring as I won't be buying in for the DRM from hell setup.
And you can bet the vast majority of people like my Mom and Grandmother who only have DVD because I bought them one will NEVER swith.
I think it is toast just like the DRMd Super Audio CDs...
It's more expensive, more restrictive, more complicated, but hey you get better quality if you have all the right gear and the planets align.
Folks,
.dmg file of it. The only player I've tested this with is DVD Studio Pro 4.6 on a Mac G5, but I think there is a beta Moonlight player that could do this as well. I'd be curious to hear about anyone not on a G5 Mac that can get this to play.
m g.torrent?1C6B407CD6671B2BB03F55C49D67CEB584A74D90
I also posted this as a reply, but I figured some non-nested browsers might want to see this as well.
If I could break with Slashdot tradition and post an actual example instead of half-understood innuendo, here's an actual HD-DVD for your edification
I made a HD-DVD a few weeks ago with Apple's DVD Studio Pro 4. Here's a torrent to a
It's nothing fancy, but I say a big advantage of HD DVD is that I CAN ALREADY MAKE THEM!
http://216.99.212.233:6969/torrents/HD_DVD_TEST.d
My video compression blog
Ok. Not making shit up. The 24-bit/PCM comment was meant to reference to DVD-Audio. Sorry for the confusion. SACD actually encodes 1-bit audio at 2.8 MHz.
You're right, a lot of artists do record in analog and then copy to digital, but there is still a loss in the conversion. In fact, every conversion creates some loss. Not making that up, either.
You're right 16-bit/44.1 kHz records do sound quite a bit like 24-bit/192 kHz records. This is due to the physical limitations of the human ear. Most people can only hear sounds between roughly 20 Hz and 20 kHz. CDs have a theoretical frequency response up to 22 kHz, while DVD-As have a theoretial value up to 96 kHz. Since the human ear can only distinguish sounds up to 20kHz, DVD-A isn't providing much more for our ears to hear, but it does give a more precise reproduction of the sound wave.
I do have some issues about 5.1 sound. I like the theory, but I can't say I've ever been to a concert with theatrical 5.1 surround sound.
And "unbroken DRM"... I'm sorry, but all DRM is broken, by definition. Heh.
Deja Vu
n. 1. The sensation that you've read this very article before.
45GB for HD-DVD vs. 50GB for Blu-ray isn't that big a difference...
No, 5GB isn't that big of a difference. The problem is that in order to do 45GB, HD-DVD's need to use 3 layers, while they were only intended to ever do 2 layers. Yes, they did recently hit 3 layers, but they will probably never get to 4 layers and they will only be sold as 2 layers when they first come out.
Blue Ray was intended, right out of box to get to 8 layers. Right now with 2 layers they're at 50GB. They've already done 4 layers (100 GB) and wholey expect to get to the 8 layers in the future. This is a format with room to grow. HD-DVD just BARELY squeezed in 3 layers and still doesn't reach the capacity of a 2 layer Blu-Ray disk.
It's no contest.
200GB > 100GB > 50GB > 45GB > 30GB. (The two at the bottom are 3 and 2 layer HD-DVD respectively)
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