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Blu-ray Hits Key Milestone Faster than Standard-Def

Posted by Zonk on from the bond-blu-bond dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Slashdot has already reported on the go-go sales for the 'Casino Royale' Blu-ray on Amazon, but now comes news that the same Blu-ray disc is the first high-def disc to ship 100,000 units within the United States. It took standard-def DVD eleven months to reach that retail milestone (in 1998 with 'Air Force One'), but with 'Royale,' the nine-month old Blu-ray format now has done it two months faster."

6 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. Faster? by Intron · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The US population in 1998 was 270M, but 298M today, so one would expect a new format to hit some arbitrary number 10% faster, other things being equal.

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    Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
    1. Re:Faster? by Lumpy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Funny part is the number of homes with a HiDef set is remarkably low compared to their supposed adoption rate. MOST people that have a hidef set only have a 720P set which makes standard DVD's look utterly fantastic compared to the crap on your Cable TV and only slightly better when running a blu-ray movie through it. People that own 42" and smaller will not even notice a difference between a blu ray and standard HDDVD with a line doubler running.

      Until people can get 1080 native sets for reasonable prices or they atart buying the 50+ inch size sets there really is not going to be the adoption rate they think they are getting. Almost none of the customers at the company I work for want HDDVD or Blu Ray after we go an demo it in their theater. We demo on their gear and a 1080 projector. when they see the higher end projector they are all over it until a price is quoted, then they say "we will wait a couple of years, our current setup is fine." They do not like having to throw away a $10K-$20K 720p projector and buying a similarly price 1080 projector plus all their content, plus player, etc....

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  2. No surprise by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Could it just be that Casino Royale is a better film that Air Force One?

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    Evil people are out to get you.
    1. Re:No surprise by Coco+Lopez · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Rottentomatoes.com has Air Force One at 77% fresh, vs. Casino Royale at 94% fresh.

      Casino Royale is a 17% better movie, which directly explains the roughly 17% faster selling rate.

      What it doesn't explain is why Slashdot has been running so many stories direct from the Sony marketing department lately...

  3. Re:Great.... by karmatic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'll get a blu-ray player when I can easily rip the movies and do what I want with them including making standard def dvd backups, or transcode it for my video iPod.


    Well, it's a good thing you don't have to wait. Every disk released so far is cracked. They are going to take a stab at improving the protection, but companies have been doing that since DeCSS came out.

    And yes, I went out and bought a bunch of blu-ray disks after the cracks happened, for much the same reason.
  4. Re:PS3 owners? by jandrese · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't know about the PS3, but the PS2 was in a similar situation with its DVD drive. Ultimately, the DVD drive in the PS2 wasn't the best. It worked ok on simple movies, but it tended to get edge cases wrong on more complex discs. You'd see this as messed up subtitles on foreign films, "camera angle" changes that were handled incorrectly, menu choices that don't get translated correctly in the film and so on. Granted, a lot of these were bugs on the disc itself, but better players managed to work around the bugs and work correctly regardless.

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