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First Blu-ray Disc Reviews Posted Online
An anonymous reader writes "With the first Blu-ray player and discs officially making their market debuts tomorrow, High-Def DVD Digest has posted the first reviews of three of the first Blu-ray discs -- The Fifth Element, 50 First Dates, and xXx. So what's the verdict? So far, in terms of video quality, the results seem to be mixed: standard DVD fave 'Fifth Element' underwhelmed ('just
not the best HD I've seen'); likewise, 'xXx,' was a disappointment ('up close just looks like a messed-up bunch of dots'). Somewhat surprisingly, it's '50 First Dates' that ranked highest of the three in video quality ('holds
its own with the best high-definition transfers out there')."
The problems are almost always in the source material.
...well...a mom).
Hell, TNTHD upconvertes and stretches (!) normal SD content for most of the day and calls it "HD".
I've noticed that the most important part of HDTV is the source, and this is evident just through simple channel surfing. Shows that I assume can afford better cameras because they need less of them, and less mobile ones, such as Jay Leno/David Letterman, SNL, etc, have absolutely amazing quality. Watching it on a 1080p 50 inch Sony SXRD is phenomenal, with no artifacts, or lack of detail. The colors, contrast, and image quality is so good that it appears your looking through a window.
Anyone who has seen this TV displaying true HD content at my apartment is immediately excited. And almost everyone says "oh oh! put in a DVD so we can see how that looks", unaware that DVDs are of a much lower resolution.
So I put one in, usually something fun like The Matrix or what have you, with a warning that it's going to look much worse then what they just saw. I have a pretty good upconverting DVD playing that puts out 1080i/60 over HDMI. Looks better than a normal DVD player but considerably worse than the HD content. Everyone so far has been disappointed with DVD quality (except my mom, but she's
Point is, there *IS* a difference, a huge difference, and those of us with good TVs are begging for a way to watch our movies in the same detail we watch our TV...other than HBOHD.
Fifth Element, hello? How could you miss Milla's nipples?
Most people don't know this but the quality of current Blu-ray titles does not match the quality offered by HD-DVD's for a very simple reason. The couple of Blu-ray titles that have been released so far are all encoded using MPEG-2, while HD-DVD titles are using the more advanced MPEG-4 based VC1 codec.
What is even more frustrating is that Blu-ray titles could have been VC1 encoded. The Blu-ray and HD-DVD standards both support the same set of video codecs. But for some reason the Blu-ray camp decided to encode the first titles using MPEG-2. I don't follow closely enough the format war to know why such a decision has been taken, but I know this is a stupid decision because most non-technical people will have a bad first impression of Blu-ray. It is even more frustrating knowing that Blu-ray titles have the technical potential to look at least as good as HD-DVD titles.
As I recall, weren't there multiple "standards" for audio CDs way back when? I seem to remember seeing CDs that were either tagged DDD, DAD, ADD, or AAD - depending on how "digital" the disc really was. I believe DDD meant it was digitally recorded, digitially mixed and digitially transfered, which was the highest quality you could get. That was popular on classical music CDs. But most popular music CDs were of the much lower AAD quality, because they were just reusing the original analog masters.
Another reivew, from a Mr. Sony McSonyson, informed me that Blu-Ray provides not only a superior picture quality, but also interfaces directly with my brain to extract my personal preferences. For example, in Star Wars, regardless of which version, Han would always shoot first. In every scene. Also, "Into the Blue" would focus on Jessica Alba not in the ocean, but a kiddie pool filled with baby oil. Also, it was revealed that HD-DVD would kill my dog, leave me sterile, and emit cancer-inducing radiation if viewed for more than 0.18 seconds at a time.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
My experience and subjective opinion is that what is being delivered is being delivered with unacceptable compromise, whether it be to rush to market, or just shoddy quality, it doesn't matter. I've seen compression artifacts, I've seen jittery playback. I'm not "getting" it.
The title of this reply, for those who may have skipped over it, is "Why Digital Isn't Better Than Analog".
Usually that starts into a discussion about how much better analog is at reproduction and why vinyl rocks. That's not where I'm going with this; personally I'll take a CD any day.
The problem is that with digital, you can compress the signal lossfully. This theoretically is an advantage, allowing you to fit, say, 3 TV high-quality TV channels in the bandwidth of 1 old-style SD analog channel.
However, given the choice, everybody seems to prefer to fit in 8 low-quality TV channels instead. Satellite radio, rather than have 50 high-quality stations at 128 or 192 Kbps, would rather have 150 barely-tolerable stations at 64 Kbps.
The reason they think they can do this is that most people can not articulate the difference between the old analog signal and the new, way-over-compressed digital signal. If you ask them with just a couple of minutes exposure, they'll say they are the same. Only people who are very familiar with the technology can say "It's overcompressed".
But I think that even if most people can't articulate why the digital experience is worse than the analog experience, they do have a different experience with this over-compressed content that results in lower immersion, lower enjoyment, and in the long run, less inclination to pay for the experience. In the end they see no reason to jump or even want to go back to analog.
I've done the latter. I took the digital TV deal from Comcast a while back that gave me the basic digital package for just over their analog rates. But a combination of leisurely channel changing (since it has to re-sync with the rarely-sent I frames), visible artefacts even on my bog-standard low-def 28 inch TV, and incredibly sluggish set-top box made go back to analog, and I'm exactly the kind of person who "should" be drooling for digital. I hear they've since fixed the last problem, though I have no evidence of this.
I'd love a good digital experiece. I'd love a digital radio that's actually an improvement over analog radio instead of (to my ears) a slight downgrade since they only use 96Kbps. I'd love good digital TV, but they always jam too many channels down the line. I'd love satellite radio, but again, to my ears they are quite obviously right on the edge of unlistenability. And to those non-techies I've asked, when they wonder what I mean by "isn't this TV/radio just sort of missing some life?", I always get nodding heads, not arguments.
Until the digital entertainment purveyers are willing to actually live up to their quality claims, where digital becomes a consistently superior experience, instead of something that is inferior to analog in inexpressable-but-important ways, digital stuff just isn't going to take off. Digital ought to be better than analog. The potential is there. But it's not being realized.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
(probably when Netflix chooses a technology)
Actually, Netflix is already offering HD-DVD disks. All you have to do is set it up in your account settings.
Therefore, there can not be any quality difference inherent to the formats
Well, maybe not in the formats, but there is a quality difference in the current players. The first Bluray players are supposed to be able to output the disc's native 1080p at 24fps (film is natively 24fps), while the HD-DVD players released so will show a picture converted to 1080i at 30fps. If you had a reallly good TV, you could theoretically get a better result with BluRay, at least until HD-DVD starts releasing 1080p players.
Those aren't exactly "standards". It was just a notation system used by record companies to ostensibly indicate quality. It was long ago abandoned as not being informative at all.
Ummm, did you read the reviews ?
There's no doubting the discs, if using the same codec, were encoded from the same source, and used the same equipment for encoding, would then look the same regardless of the disk. However, in this case they don't.
- The HD-DVD disks reviewed use VC-1. The Blueray disks use Mpeg-2. The reviewer theorises that perhaps the disks are single layer blu-ray disks - who knows, but it says _many_ times in the different reviews that the reviewers wish they could compare the _same_ film on both disks (and probably we'd see no difference)
- When talking about picture quality, especially on older films, transfer from the original source is all important. And this is on the individual studios, who back the different formats, to do well. From these early disks it appears the HD-DVD backers are doing better on this than the Blu-ray backers, but who knows if this will stay the same.
- The Blu-Ray backers seem to have got ahead of the game on sound, which is available in uncompressed PCM which the reviews universally say is better than anything from HD-DVD. So maybe the additional space is being used for something good after all.
Don't sound off about 'picture quality' assuming it's just the raw bits and bytes or codec of a particular format that make the difference. The quality of the film source, and the transfer to the disk _do_ make a difference (although whether it'll ever be great enough to encourage the masses to change is another matter).
As I recall, weren't there multiple "standards" for audio CDs way back when? I seem to remember seeing CDs that were either tagged DDD, DAD, ADD, or AAD - depending on how "digital" the disc really was. I believe DDD meant it was digitally recorded, digitially mixed and digitially transfered, which was the highest quality you could get. That was popular on classical music CDs. But most popular music CDs were of the much lower AAD quality, because they were just reusing the original analog masters.
t m
Wrong.
Just because a disk is DDD does not mean its good. Just because a disk is AAD does not mean its bad.
Some of my best sounding disks are AAD. Today, most all disks are DDD, but they still can sound like shit. Many DDD disks from around 1995 to 1999 sound horrible, this is mostly due to the "lets compress the hell out of this to make it sound LOUDER!". Thankfully, audio engineers learned from the mistakes of the era. Take a look at this URL:
http://www.cdmasteringservices.com/dynamicdeath.h
Also, there were not different "standards". Before the DRM days, CDs were all "Red Book" standard.
Keep in mind that music is analog. Digital encoding of analog material is limited by the ADC (analog to digital converter) and to a lesser extent the DAC (digital to analog converter). There are a number of issues with digital recordings. The biggest issue is the harsh sound that digital encoding frequently brings. Today, most mixing in the digital domain is done at much greater than "CD quality". The best thing going for them are that digital sources can be transfered losslessly. You do not get the loss with each analog generation like you used to. But a lossless copy of junk still sounds exactly like the original junk.
The lossless copying of media has scared the media cartels for years. That is why we have DRM and other fun stuff like SCMS.
Yes. I'm an audiophile.