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Blu-ray Hits Key Milestone Faster than Standard-Def
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."
...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.
Right now I can do a lot with standard def DVDs fairly easily. I'll need that functionality before I buy into any HD format. To me that functionality is worth a lot more than the extra resolution.
I see shipped. I'd like to know how many were sold. On an interesting sidenote, how many of those sold were to be played on PS3s?
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
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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Technology adoption has grown dramatically since that time. This is similar to the Vista outselling XP story. The truth is, since XP came out the PC market grew by a huge percentage, thus making the Vista sales claim bunk.
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Could it just be that Casino Royale is a better film that Air Force One?
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This reminds me of all the whiners saying that in the 2000 US presidential election that Al Gore got more votes "than any president in history except Ronald Reagan".
My response was that Ralph Nader got more votes than Abraham Lincoln.
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Actually probably not, if you haven't heard PS3's aren't selling
You mean more people bought Casino Royale, a widely acclaimed addition to the ever-popular James Bond pantheon than bought Air Force One, an implausible ho-hum action movie made with a cookie cutter? I am shocked!
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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.
I read the internet for the articles.
If by key you mean some random arbitrary metric of the success of the format, then I suppose the title is accurate. If you mean a milestone with actual meaning, then I think the title is a little misleading.
Yeah, I'll bet that all those shipped Blu-ray discs are sitting at hundreds of Best Buy stores, right next to the towers of Playstation 3 systems.
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Try using the PS2 DVD player on a progressive scan TV. The quality is abysmal, deinterlacing artifacts everywhere. Every software player I've used on my computer has done a far better job. The PS2 DVD player is alright if all you've got is a cheap TV without component/progressive scan, but stick it on a good TV and it looks awful. I got a progressive scan Divx-enabled DVD player at Wal-mart for $37, and it beats the PS2 by leaps and bounds.
... with each PS3 sold.
All this says is that a number of PS3 owners have registered online for their 'free' disk.
It's like Nintendo claiming to have won the console wars because of the 1-1 sales of Wii Sports..
And Vista has beat XP's numbers for the first month. What's the significance? Not much.
Given that some disappointingly high percentage of people don't even know what the hell Blu-Ray or HD-DVD are, much less the difference or that they don't work in normal DVD players, how many of these orders were actually intended to be SD-DVD purchases?
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Imagine when everyone out there who knows he needs to back stuff up backs stuff up to a single Blu-Ray disc (all 50gb) and then the disc stops functioning.
Even if disc and burner prices come down pretty dramatically, I think we're to the point with hard disks that they're cheaper and more usable/recoverable after long-term storage and/or damage.
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..until they get the Blu-Ray v. HD DVD settled. Or I can buy a player that supports both formats for about $200.
Wake me up when that happens.
I currently use a PS3 strictly for a BD player and it works quite well. I have the BD remote control that Sony sells and it functions like a normal play would. It even boots up faster than the standalone players. However, the true videophile would say that because the source of the movie is 24fps and the PS3 outputs 60fps that you're not getting the best picture available. I'm not so sure if I'm able to tell the difference myself. Here's an article from that explains a little bit more.
This article states that Sony was GIVING AWAY 500,000 copies of Casino Royale on Blueray to the first 500,000 people to register their PS3 after the European launch of the PS3, which was on March 23rd.
So how many people actually "bought" the movie?
How long before they begin to offer new movies ONLY on the new discs thus forcing us old timers to "upgrade or die"?
I have no use for this new hi-def stuff. My old legacy dvd players and TV's work fine, thank you very much and I don't and won't shell out for new equipment, period. People throw away old CRT TV's all the time, I just pick them up from the curb, repair them and "watch on".. It will be many years before I run out of old style legacy CRT's. I get them for free and it costs me just about as much to repair them.
Why should I go spend money on new stuff when what I have works fine?
Besides, most of the new movies suck anyway. Too much CG and "shaky-cam" and not enough real acting.
I'm perfectly happy watching Turner Classic Movies on my 36" CRT which looks most excellent!
for one.. the article and sony announcement do not say "in the US", just shipped. As another person pointed out Sony is giving away 500,000 copies for registering your PS3 in europe. http://www.siliconera.com/index.php/2007/02/12/eur opean-ps3-owners-get-casino-royale-for-free/
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This is even less impressive than Microsoft's claim that Vista is selling faster than XP did.
And it suffers from the same oversight...
That is, it fails to take into account the increases in market volume and buying power which would make it a useful comparison and instead uses the same raw number to compare two very different markets in two different eras. That raw number of 100,000 doesn't mean the same thing at the dawn of the DVD player as it does now at the dawn of the "BluRay player."
A useful comparison would consist of a ratio or percentage adjusted to take those differences into account. But it's obvious that an honest comparison isn't going to impress anyone.
After 12 years (I'm making an educated guess here), all they can say is that they beat the same raw number of purchases by 2 months?!?!
There's an old saying... "you can't polish a turd."
there are no blueray hddvd usenet gr... (user is duct taped to chair and muzzled by greybeards)#*&^$)No Carrier.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Yeah I'd say it's FUD because you don't own a PS3 and therefore can't have a valid opinion on the Blu-Ray functionality.
I do own one and the BR support is second to none. Furthermore since it's online, any time Sony finds a bug, they can sneak the fix in with the next firmware update. The PS3 will remain the best BR player despite what anyone else builds. Not only that but tons of magazines have already had showdowns with BR players and the PS3 wins every single time. Speed, ergonomics, correctness, etc. it wins in every category.
Now there are a very small handful of 'video purists' that criticize the lack of 1080p/24fps support which is true film and prevents 4:3 pulldown, but Sony can add support at any time via firmware. Not only that but I have yet to see *any* player support 1080p/24.
Every "professional" review I've seen comparing the PS3 to a standalone player all said that the PS3 was just as good, if not better, than the first-gen standalones. Keyword here is first-gen. The big plus for the PS3 was faster loading times than the standalone. Of course, the PS3 will always be the same with each new generation of standalone. The real question is how much HD is enough? Alreayd it's very difficult to tell the difference between 1080i and 1080p.
Those discs you mentioned also all supported DVD playback, so there's no way to infer much from the sales figures of those discs. I actually think people that just bought HD-TVs are buying some of those expecting them to look better because they are "HD-DVD", illustrating the hideous mistake made in choosing such a similar name for a new format.
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I don't believe my newer slim-style PS2 is affected nearly as much as you say. I run progressive scan on it at 61", and for the most part it looks good with only a few de-interlacing artifacts. While I do plan on replacing it with a real standalone player (I'd love to hear what player you bought) I don't think the progressive upscaling is nearly as bad on the newest PS2s.
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I can't even begin to count how many worthless posts I've read like this on slashdot since I started reading this site in 2000. Mod this post down! The same can be said of every technological advancement since the wheel. Who gives a fuck what people think who don't see the need for a technological advancement? No one with a brain, that's for sure.
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'Furthermore since it's online, any time Sony finds a bug, they can sneak the fix in with the next firmware update.'
So what you are saying is that the moment someone finds out how to get around the anti-customer protections that prevent you from using the player to play backups Sony can slip in a 'fix' without your permission?
Thanks but no thanks. I have a rather extensive movie collection and I take care of them. Discs are just too fragile, especially children's movies. I have a backup of each of my hundreds of discs and I have needed those backups numerous times. I also have a number of movies that I digitized from VHS and encoded to DVD. I'll pass on any player that I can't safely hack on without having to worry about repercussions from an anti-consumer vendor. Especially one like Sony that doesn't merely cater to the vile music and movie industries but is actually a part of both.
UMD's shipped a ton too. How'd they sell? Oh right, so many people bought them that retailers pulled them from store shelves to reclaim shelf space.