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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.
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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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.
... 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..
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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..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?
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.
'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.