HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Disappointing So Far

Dster76 writes "Reuters is reporting that the new format wars are showing signs of underwhelming performance, both technically and financially. In fact, according to the article, the new formats are just not selling. Reuters chalks it up to a current lack of interest. They indicate that as more movies and players become available this autumn, sales should improve. Just the same, the current picture is quite sour." From the article: "'Neither format is selling well or at the level I had expected. I had expected early adopters to step up and other retailers have had the same experience,' said Bjorn Dybdahl, president of San Antonio, Texas-based specialty store Bjorn's. 'High expectations were set. At every meeting with Sony, every demonstration was spectacular,' Dybdahl said. 'Then along comes the first Blu-ray player from Samsung and that's when my expectations were hurt. When we put the disc in, all the sales people looked around and said it doesn't look much better than a standard DVD,' he said."

Comments

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[popeye44]

When he speaks of convenience I can't but help think he means broken kicked in the ass and left in the gutter encryption that is on dvd's. No one reasonably geek would have a device that it takes 3 seconds for their 2 year old to kill the only disk they have and be forced to buy another. I backup dvd's religously as I have a 5 and an 8 year old. While they do not fubar my movies much they fubar theirs like mad. "imagine if you will your 5 year old walking into the room with the dvd held correctly in the center by his finger.. and the underside of the dvd having peanut butter and jelly on it.."

I have no desire or intention to pay for anything more than once. Taxes are bad enough at doing that why should I buy a player that only makes it harder for me to escape that idiocy? Better quality? Well I have a 42in plasma.. and yes it looks great with hdmi connections and Hi Def... but there's not enough hi-def content for me to appreciate it fully yet. Dvd's look good and i'm happy with them so far. I still don't have a compelling reason to buy anything incrementally better. I'm not paying for a screwing regardless if your a hooker in Mexicali or Sony in Japan.

What do you expect?

[sdo1]

What exactly do you expect when a huge percentage of people who have HDTVs either aren't using them with high-def sources and/or they aren't but they THINK they are? Yea, HD is great. I have a 50" first-generation DLP (720p). The picture is really good and regular DVDs can look great. But I have no desire to drop a grand (or even half that) on an HD video player right now, especially when I'd be buying movies for a second time (some a third time when I upgraded from VHS). Furthermore, the discs are locked down with DRM that isn't yet breakable. I'm not going to buy a new movie on an HD format if I can't down-convert it and burn it to DVD so I can watch on DVD players elsewhere in the house. Sorry. Those are my rules. If the content isn't portable, I'm not buying. Period.

-S

EVD standard

[alucinor]

I personally think China's EVD standard will become dominant -- not because consumer's will flock to it, though, but manufacturers. There is no copyright or other licensing to use it, and it's a freely published standard for high-def. No royalities, and it's codecs can even be implemented in Linux without legal issues.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[RsG]

Actually, what I was getting at was more that the sound chip was like a VHS tape, and the sound card like a DVD. The general idea being that once you have a mature version of a technology, there is little to be gained from upgrading yet again.

So, I fully agree that these new formats aren't sufficiently better than DVDs to justify their cost and drawbacks. That was my point :-)

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[amuro98]

I think "peak" is the wrong word here. I think of it as "delta", as in the difference in performance between the old version and the new version.

When comparing VHS to DVD, the delta in picture quality and sound was VERY large. Just about everyone could appreciate DVD as the superior medium, and the market migrated accordingly.

However, the delta between DVD and these new formats isn't quite as pronounced. Yeah, I'm sure many here could see the difference, but believe me, not everyone can. Plus throw in the fact you need to own a HDTV, and it's just not going to matter to the majority of the market at this time.

To go back to the soundcard comparison, everyone will agree that a sound card will give you better sound than the PC's onboard speaker. But does that mean that everyone here can appreciate the difference between, say, the SB-AWE32 and AWE64? Or, how about the differences between the first and second generations of the Audigy? Would you bother upgrading your Audigy to the Audigy2 (or whatever it's called)? Probably not. The delta between the two isn't worth the extra money.

Video cards still make pretty large strides each generation. Most probably don't upgrade every day a new card comes out, but can agree jumping every 2 or 3 generations is a good idea if you're serious about cutting edge games.

The only way you're going to get people to upgrade is to convince them that the delta is worth the cash. Otherwise, if they won't buy because their current equipment is "good enough."

Of course, issues like: format war, uncertain DRM, expensive players, sub-standard movies, etc. doesn't help things any. After all, it's usually the early adopters who convince their non-early-adopter friends to go buy the thing after seeing it in action at the early adopter's house :-)

"HD vs SD quality? Who cares!", says the wife

[jchenx]

In the end HD and all its accoutrements won't be rapidly adopted because they don't offer any increase in convenience. If people cared about quality, we'd still have big movie theatres playing 75mm films, but people preferred more choices and more show times.

I have to grudgingly agree with you. When I got the new HDTV and programming, I was stoked. For a long time, all I would watch were shows in HDTV, because of the amazing clarity. I bragged about it to all my co-workers and friends, and it was always the guys that were in envy.

Of course, my wife barely even notices the difference between HD and SD. It basically looks the same to her. And that's quite amazing, because SDTV on an HDTV looks even crappier than normal. Our old SDTV upstairs still gets a lot of use, because it's more than good enough for her.

Now, try getting her to notice the difference between regular DVD and a high-def DVD (Blu-ray or HD-DVD)? Might as well give up now. Or she may notice a small difference and just not care.

However, what she DOES love is the DVR functionality we got a few years ago. That's definately a sign that convenience > quality for many folks.