Slashdot Mirror
New Study Finds Low Interest In Blu-ray
PHPNerd writes "A new consumer survey recently released chronicles the woes of the winner of the hi-definition format war: nobody wants it. While consumers were very happy to embrace the DVD standard when it came about because it brought a huge jump in quality over VHS, the pros of switching to Blu-ray are not as obvious. From the article: 'In contrast, while half of the respondents to our survey rated Blu-ray's quality as 'much better' than standard DVD, another 40% termed it only 'somewhat better,' and most are very satisfied with the performance of their current DVD players." Another reason cited was that a Blu-ray investment also dictates an HDTV purchase, something consumers are reluctant to do.'" Maybe it's also that line-doubling DVD players can be had for less than a hundred dollars.
Q: What exactly is a line-doubling DVD player?
A: Progressive scan from an interlaced source.
Hardly something that should be mentioned... you know, we've had progressive for quite a long time now, and from experience most DVDs are interlaced.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
People might have been calling the Blu-ray vs. HD DVD the next VHS vs. Betamax, but I didn't see it that way.
Laserdisc has been around almost as long as consumer VHS. But, unlike when Disney and others dropped the cost of VHS movies to $20, Laserdisc stayed expensive, often $50 or more per title. Laserdisc remained a premium format, VHS became the common format, and VHS outsold LD in droves.
Fast-forward to 2000 or so, and DVD is the next hot thing. Laserdisc is still being made, but it's almost done. DVD companies use their brains, and realise that if they want to make DVDs replace VHS and not just replace LD that they need to make them cheap. Thus, the price was common originally around $30, then $20, then $16.99, with some titles as low as $5.00 new, on sale. Great! Those who never saw LD and only saw VHS see a significant quality improvement as they get to use most of their 525 scan lines, instead of about half of them, and with the prices being competitive they see no reason to keep buying those old tapes.
Jump to now. DVD is reasonably well established. DVD has replaced VHS like CD replaced cassettes. People know it, they like it. They see how nice it is, and how much it basically looks like regular broadcast TV, or Cable, or Satellite on their analog TVs, and how it looks pretty good on their digital TVs. Many people have amassed large collections of DVDs and the money spent in those purchases is fresh in the minds. Now, Sony wants everyone to buy an expensive player, expensive titles (twice or more the cost of DVDs), and all that they can really claim is that it's better looking. Trouble is, most of us still need analog converter boxes for HDTV, most of us still use composite cable or coax, and even those of us who are videophiles with huge collections don't necessarily see enough benefit to bother with the added expense. We have our consumer format in DVD and by all reaoning it's a great format with good quality. Why should we buy the elite format in Blu-ray when we've got something that already conveys the eye candy, and already has all of the special features, languages, multiple versions, and the like?
Yes, I actually do collect Laserdiscs. I collect DVDs. I don't see how my older projector will make any use of the new format, and as projectors are expensive, HDMI-capable receivers are expensive, HDMI cables in 50' lengths are expensive, and what I have works wonderfully, I don't see any need to upgrade to anything new until something that I already have breaks, and I mean something more than my DVD player chunking out. Even then, I might buy a Blu-ray player if my DVD player breaks, but that would only be for the ability to possibly play blu-ray discs, and as the standards for Blu-ray aren't finalized, I still don't see any advantage to buying a player that might be obsolete by the time I get around to buying titles in its format.
Blu-ray is the next Laserdisc, and the sooner that Sony realises this and markets it accordingly, the better it'll be for them and for the consumer.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
LG GGC-H20L + AnyDVD HD + Blockbuster is your friend. ;-)
Blame Hollyweird's obsession with DRM protection on their movies for that. The Blu-ray players have to do a shitload of self-authentication against internal keys, check for signs of tampering, and load the goddamn stupid JVM before you can view your movie.
*curses whoever thought a JVM was a good idea for an embedded consumer device*
The delay from pressing the 'on' button to getting something on the screen was a big issue when I was working with a certain consumer electronics company on the firmware, but it was very difficult to reduce it further because of all the required DRM/anti-tampering crap. The actual embedded kernel boots very quickly.
---dragoness
Yes and no.
The 480i to 480p conversion wasn't a conversion of source material (ie DVDs didn't suddenly come out that were 480p60.) It was more a case of eliminating flicker on CRTs, and eliminating striping on LCDs and Plasmas. The source content on DVDs, for movies at least, has always been 480p24, munged using a system called "pulldown" that turned it into an interlaced i60 signal.
(Interestingly, the same sort of thing is being applied to HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs, albeit with some smarter logic. Some high-end TVs are being produced that do a 1080p120 thing, where they'll upconvert the incoming p24/i60/p60 signal into a p120. It's still 1080p24 input.)
But, yeah, the thing to realize about the 480p to 1080p move is that while it's a noticeable improvement in quality for some of us, DVD is already at a remarkably high quality on LCD and Plasma displays, and while virtually everyone can see both side by side and tell the difference, it's not actually obvious to many people what they're missing unless they're actually seeing the two.
Case in point: When I got my HD player at Christmas, I also got a variety of HD discs and regular DVDs. Everyone in the household ooh'd and aah'd over Blade Runner and 2001, and with good reason, the HD transfers looked fantastic.
Then everyone watched Live Free or Die Hard. Nobody said anything for the entire duration of the film. It looked superb. At the end, I commented "Yeah, it's a shame it isn't currently available on HD DVD" at which point my wife and my mother both turned to me and said "Wait, that wasn't HD?"
To me, I could see it wasn't. But I also appreciated why they thought it was. It looked great.
The situation is such that I seriously doubt there's any point in ever going better than 1080p. I don't think the vast majority of people will ever see a difference, not without TVs so large and close they're practically eye-bleeding.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The problem is price. Not of the Blu-Ray players (which are relatively reasonable), and not of HD televisions (which more people are buying anyway), but of the media.
Simply put, a Blu-Ray title typically costs 50% to 100% more than it's DVD predecessor. With high gas prices and reduced wages and many families struggling to make ends meet, does it make sense to spend $30 a pop for a movie?
High-definition disks, you see, were the industries the secret strategy behind rationalizing higher DVD prices. Consumers have historically resisted every attempt by the industry to raise prices, and competition has in fact lowered them. As such, we pay much less for a DVD today that we did a decade ago, despite that fact that inflation should have boosted the price of a disc along with most everything else.
A new format kills two birds with one stone: It provides a rationale for higher prices for a higher quality product and --not insignificantly-- lets us pay for our favorite movies yet again in yet another format.
Unfortunately for the industry, however, we're not taking the bait. Plus we now have other options, like HD cable VOD, or AppleTV/iTunes HD downloads. They're not quite as good as Blu-Ray, true... but they're also only five or six bucks apiece.
If the Blu-Ray folk want to sell players and discs, they need to drop media prices so that the HD version is only a slight premium over the SD DVD. Say two bucks, max.
As is, they're wanting to screw the consumer and, as always, make him pay for the privilege.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Serious question: Has anyone here ever seen a TV die? I mean, not from being dropped during a move, but actually just stopping to work. I might be mistaken, but I have the impression these things just don't break.
They actually die a variety of slow deaths. They get blurry, they lose color fidelity (tint), they get dark, or lose contrast (look washed out), they can suffer 'burn in', make high pitched buzzing noises...
A lot of this stuff is repairable... but its not usually worth repairing.
I can't use HDMI anyway. At least with my hardware, closed captioning does not work through HDMI. And we need closed captioning in our household. When I first bought my HDMI-capable 46" LCD TV, I bought HDMI cables. I took them back the next day when I realized closed captioning didn't work.
So I use normal DVD, normal cable box, and standard analog cables to the 46" LCD TV. Looks fine to us.
HDMI doesn't support closed captions (in the Line-21 sense), because on HDMI, there is no "Line 21" or overscan signalling for closed captioning at all. HDMI is just a lightly modified version of DVI (slightly more robust signalling, but otherwise identical save the connector and digital audio).
The only captioning available via HDMI is that produced by the source - e.g. high-def TiVos generate captioning over the video source before outputting it over HDMI, and DVDs/Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) offer standard subtitling support. The annoyance comes from the fact that MPEG-2 has an actual transport for line-21 captions, but the studio masters don't make DVD subtitle overlays with the same content. (New DVDs tend to have it as overlays - you'll see it as "English SDH" under subtitles, rather than as part of line-21 MPEG captions, but old DVDs don't, and it's annoying). Alas, most players don't have caption generators to overlay the caption text prior to output via HDMI.
Also, there's only one Blu-Ray player on the market that's worth getting (the Playstation 3), partly due to HD-DVD having forced Blu-Ray's hand in releasing players before technology had matured enough to make HD-DVD features affordable in Blu-Ray players. And unfortunately, the PS3 doesn't integrate nicely into a home theatre (lack of consumer IR being the big issue, so you can't use your fancy universal remote).