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Sony Thinks Blu-ray Will Sell Like DVDs by Year End
An anonymous reader writes "Sony CEO Ryoji Chubachi knows something we don't. At a press conference, he announced Sony's plan to increase Blu-ray market share to 50% of all movie discs by the end of the year. 'DVD and BD currently account for about 80% and 20%, respectively, of global demand for movie discs, Chubachi indicated. The new BD devices to be offered by Sony include models integrating an HD LCD TV with BD recording functionality, Chubachi pointed out. Sony has relied mainly on the PlayStation 3 (PS3) to promote BD, and sales of the game console will increase along with the offering by top Hollywood studios of new BD movies, Chubachi noted. However, Sony will extend its BD promotion from the current focus on the PS3 and BD players/recorders to IT devices, Chubachi pointed out.'"
especially when you are talking about older movies that sure as heck were not recorded in HD.
They were recorded on 35mm or 70mm film. The grain size is finer than a High definition CCD's pixel.
You forgot one detail,
Buy Blue ray player now, and buy it again next year when the 2.0 profile becomes mandatory for the published disks. Only the sony PS3 promises it can be updated. All "cheap" BR players do not say such details, and probably you can forget about that.
Even then, an Upconverting DVD player looks almost as good as BluRay. It's not exactly as good, it gets you quite a bit closer, with spending quite a bit less. The last upgrade from VHS to DVD offered a ton of new features. BluRay, apart from quality advances, doesn't really offer anything.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
To make people spend more money then they have. That way, they foreclose on their mortgage. I buy their house for a steep discount from the bank while they move into the apartment building I own. I get the equity they should have put into their house do to the discount from the bank and they build my equity in my apartment complex with the money they pay in rent. People smart enough not to buy luxury items on a credit card get to keep their homes until I persuade a local councilman to declare imminent domain for the road that will serve the giant strip mall complex I partner with VISA to build in 10 years. They currency of choice at said strip mall? Credit cards.
So, credit cards serve the purpose of bankrupting you and making me rich.
Also players typically offer a higher quality of up conversion since they're designed to work specifically with the kind of content found on DVDs while TV upconverters are designed to be more generic (jack of all trades, master of none... or some such).
Really it comes down to which device has the better scaling equipment. No matter what you should set it up to only scale the image once. ie: having your player scale from 480i to 720p then your TV from 720p to 1080p is a no-no.
What you should be doing is setting your player to scale to the native resolution of your display, and see how that looks, then set your player to output at the native resolution of the original content, thus letting your display do all the scaling, and see how that looks.
The problem is most people have their player set to upscale something stupid like 1080i (because it's the "biggest") when their display has a native resolution like 1366x768 and the results generally look like garbage in comparison to what they COULD look like.
As for myself, personally I have a projector with a native resolution of 1280x768, and I have an Oppo upscaling DVD player set to scale the dvds to 720p (1280x720), my projector is set to just center the signal and leave some black bars on the top and bottom (often called "just scan" mode) thus completely bypassing the scaler in the projector. Both the player and projector have identical scaler chips (Faroudja DCDi) so the player is the better place to scale since it's done before converting the signal for travel over the cable. The scaling is only done once and the picture looks fantastic.
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To put it simply: HDMI. A non-upconverting DVD player isn't likely to have an HDMI out, and if I'm trying to minimize the cables that have to go to my tv (or for that matter my receiver), I'd rather use a single HDMI cable instead of a three-cable component video and a single digital audio cable.
Does the upconverting really make any difference? I've never seen the output of an upconverting player, but I don't understand how upconverting in the player can look much better than upconverting in the TV.
... well, you can imagine that's not going to look its best, no matter how good your TV's upscaler is. Its only got half the information to work with. It was more than good enough on the old 25" TV that only took RCAs, but on the 46" HDTV its just not up to the job.
The upscaler in a new DVD player may be better than the upscaler in the TV, but that's only half the issue. For a LOT of people, the benefit to upgrading DVD players isn't so much about the scaler as it is about getting a progressive scan player with composite/dvi/hdmi output.
Hooking up a 7 year old $20 walmart DVD player that does 480i over RCA
By the way, every retail store I've gone to has had expensive BluRay movies. Yet, on Amazon I have found tons of BluRay moves (new and used) for $15 or less, which sure beats the $35 they want to charge in many stores.
I don't know if they're still doing it, but when I bought my PS3 I mailed in the proof of purchase, and got 5 free BluRay movies. Check online and they may still be doing that.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
New Up Convert Pioneer DVD Player with HDMI Output: 25% additional increase.
Its a little more complicated than that.
Component vs HDMI cables carrying the same resolution signal should be barely distinguishable in normal circumstances. And even when you can see a difference, it should come down to blind luck to be able guess which is HDMI and which is component.
You didn't state what resolution the component was on the Sony. (Was it 480i as well?)
And more importantly, you didn't try component on the Pioneer at all!
If your TV is doing the scaling (ie you compare 480p over component and hdmi on an HDTV (720p or 1080i), then HDMI has an ever so slight advantage, because processing (scaling) the original digital image before conversion to analog is slightly better.
But if your player is doing the scaling, then all the processing is still done before the analog conversion, and sending the upscaled image at 720p or 1080i over component vs hdmi... there's almost no chance you could tell them apart. (granted if you have a digital display -- plasma/lcd/dlp/etc... theres an analog-digital conversion but a straight da-ad conversion without no other processing is pretty clean.)
I suspect the difference your seeing is that the Sony component was still only 480i, while the Pioneer HDMI is 720p/1080i. I further suspect if you tried the Pioneer on component at the same resultion as your HDMI you won't be able to tell the difference.
Provided your equipment is up to that of course. Unfortunately that test may not be possible, many DVD players only do 720p/1080i on the DVI/HDMI outputs. And similarly, many TVs only take 480p/480i into their component inputs but not 720p/1080i. My own HDTV has two component inputs for example, but only one will take 480i/480p/720p/1080i, the other only takes 480i/480p. (presumably this was done to cut costs; fortunately I use component 2 with my Wii, which only does 480p so it works out just fine for me...)
But yeah, in cases like that, yes, moving to hdmi will make a significant difference over component... but its not that component isn't as good, its just that some equipment doesn't support component at those resolutions to shave a few bucks off the product. The vendor assumes that if you've got a big HDTV you'll use the digital connector, and the component being locked at 480p isn't going to be an issue because its only going to be used with old 32" SDTV CRTs anyway...
So...you can count on HDMI to be a safe choice for 'top' picture quality. But don't underestimate component it can look equal to HDMI provided your equipment supports the same signal types on its component connectors.
The final wrinkle is 1080p (and the future), which will probably only really be supported on DVI/HDMI (with HDCP). Its not that component can't do 1080p, but it won't do HDCP (hi-def content protection), and AACS limits "MPAA" content to 1080i over component becase of this. I doubt the movie industry is going to authorize anyone to output their content in 1080p unprotected... so other than your own 1080p home movies... there's going to be practically no content that will be usable.
Bottom line... if your buying new stuff get hdmi and don't worry about it. But if you've got a system running component at the same native resolution as your TV don't assume 'upgrading' to hdmi is going to make any difference, because it probably won't.
This means that you have two options 1. Knowingly scale your image twice, once with the source device to get CLOSE to your native resolution, and then again when your TV converts actual 720p or 1080i/p to 1366x768... or 2. don't do any conversion in the player and let your TV do all of the scaling.
IMO this is a bad situation to be in since you're always at the mercy of your TV's scaler, and the reason I personally avoid, and encourage others to avoid purchasing an HDTV with a non-standard native-resolution.
The best thing to do here is to simply try all of the output resolutions at your disposal and see which one looks best to you. Theoretically setting your DVD player to output 480i or 480p over HDMI would produce the best quality image, but it really comes down to how well your TV's scaler handles it since there is no good way to bypass it.
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