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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.
If this is true, why is Wal-Mart pushing the Blu-Ray discs to the front of the electronics section? Because they're all going to push it on us anyway.
... that HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray wasn't the next Beta vs VHS, but rather, the next Laserdisc vs CED.
Given the huge price difference between an upsizing DVD/VHS player and a Blu-Ray player, and the higher cost of the movies on Blu-Ray...I am not surprised. My movies on DVD look just fine to me (upsized to my HDTV, no less). My surround sound didn't stop working with the invention of Blu-Ray, so they all sound just as great as 2 years ago.
I will wait for the $50 players to arrive.
Bearded Dragon
With players at $400 and discs at $30 a pop, Blu-ray is a lot less appealing, even for those with an HDTV. Plus, standard-def DVDs look remarkably good with upconverting players.
For me, the big selling point for upgrading to DVD was the ability to skip around to different scenes quickly, no rewinding and features like playing commentary from the director and cast. Blu-ray adds better sound and picture, but unless you also upgrade your entire A/V setup these benefits just aren't there.
DVD appeared to be pushed on us as well. But ... at least it had some merit to it!
A lot of the problem comes from the fact that Blu-ray quality quite often sucks. This has nothing to do with the format, and everything to do with the mastering process. I have seen countless Blu-rays that hardly have enough detail to justify a DVD release, let alone anything in HD; some examples include Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, the latter of which was done as a film transfer... and had dirt all over the film and jittered throughout the entire movie, along with the film grain, which seemed completely out of place for an animated feature.
Its difficult to market a new format with better quality when in reality a large number of the discs are produced so badly that there's no reason to get them in place of a DVD.
Maybe it's the fact that they want 25-30 fucking dollars for a movie that I can get for $12 on regular DVD?
I should be their target audience - I have plenty of disposable income, a 52" 1080p LCD, and a PS3, but I still don't buy much on blu-ray, cause it costs too damn much.
Make it a 20% premium, and I'll buy it, but 100% is absurd.
Check out DRM-free movies at http://www.bside.com
I'm not a big fan of blu-ray. Just so long as my TV-and-Movie rips from TPB and the green demon keep coming in HD, I'll never bother getting a real Blu-ray drive. Why bother paying for a physical product, when you can pay (or not) for an electronic one? Especially when it is easier to find HD downloads than Blu-ray discs.
For most consumers, BluRay is just another kind of DVD that is more expensive, more confusing, and requires a new DVD player, when their own one works just fine, thank you. DVD was much better than VHS not because of quality, but because they lasted better and you didn't have to rewind and fast-forward them. The menu options are what caused the jump to DVD, not the quality. Mind you, this isn't my opinion, but it is the majority of consumers.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
You know I don't mind that people exaggerate thing online a bit but saying "many.. 90+ seconds.." is just a lie.
I can't name a single BD that I own that takes more than 30 secs from "cold boot" (As in turn on PS3, insert BD) to actually viewing the movie and that usually includes selecting subtitles if the system doesn't pick them automatically (which it usually does).
I wonder how many people got burned last time by a format "leap" that really wasn't that awesome. I get the impression that people are holding off until Blu-Ray is the only game in town. For now if it doesn't offer a huge increase in quality why invest the money?
In two years there could very well be another dominant format (online digital downloads) which would mean all the Blu-Ray crap I buy now is part of an intermediary step in the digital evolution.
The quality of the program is largely irrelevant to me and many of my friends. Yes, it may be better quality, but I've been living off my home media server for several years now. I will never, ever, ever, ever go back to keeping physical media around. I can't stand it. I want all of my media available at any TV in my home and ready when I want it.
If I have to have a disc to keep track of, you can forget it. I don't want the technology. I want my media available whenever, wherever and HOWEVER I want to play it. Blu-Ray offers NONE of the those things (and to be fair, neither did HD-DVD) and THAT is why I won't ever be adopting Blu-Ray. The players can drop to $10 and I still wouldn't buy one, simply because I do not care. I realize that I'm not in the majority currently... but as time goes on, more and more people are going to get sick of carrying around physical media.
The popularity of MP3 players is a prime example... instead of toting around hundreds of CDs, why not just carry around one MP3 player. The same thing is happening with video, and the trend will only accelerate. The disc as a medium for entertainment is dying, if it's not dead already and only still twitching.
The whole idea of rotational, optical media is outmoded. I should be able to take a flash drive (any flash drive) to Blockbuster and load on my drive a movie where I can play it anywhere. And the only reason to do that, is because we don't have a lot of bandwidth for real-time streaming of perfect quality.
Plastic media is prone to scratching, and carries with it some value based on on its manufacture, but the bits put on it. It is not reusable either.
High Def Video-on-Demand is also working to obsolete rotational disk, however the limitation is that movie inventories are limited. Given that inventories will increase, this will fix itself.
The only remaining space of rotational media is for portability, but flash drives can fit several movies. In addition flash drives are more rugged and portable than temperature and scratch-vulnerable rational media.
Blu-Ray won the war that never needed to be fought.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
...such as "consumers were very happy to embrace the DVD standard when it came about because it brought a huge jump in quality over VHS."
I'm not so sure that's the reason for consumer adoption - DVDs are more compact, less fragile, and you don't have to rewind them. I think it's all about convenience, not quality. Quality is just a bonus.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Landfill items like DVDs are dead, and broadband will kill them. Nobody should care about the next landfill item. I just recently bought a terabyte of storage for abotu $250. It connects via Ethernet--a stable standard that isn't going to change in any radical way. Same deal with USB, which is just as ubiquitous, and almost as stable.
Why should I build a big collection of toxic plastic platters when I can order what I want and put it on my little SAN?
Plainly, there are a lot of things that need to be worked out before everybody takes this path. The DRM people need to go away. Really. Just give it up already. We need broadband to become much more widespread.
OK, I know there is that desire to have the "physical item" for some people, and nicely printed liner notes and things like that. Fine. Send us that, maybe even include your latest landfill format disk as an option, but as far as getting excited about the little plastic platter is concerned... no. It's not exciting. It's just data, and everybody knows that.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Let me fix this for you "female factor" should be replaced with "people who have a life". I don't understand how this gets attributed to females given that females are just as likely to blow large sums of money on trivial things, and ultimatly that is all this is.
I have a TV capable of doing higher than 480, I have an upconverting DVD player. I don't have a desire to spend $50 on a cable where a $5 cable will do just to get a better picture. I mean...you can make the picture and sound the most amazing quality, even better than the human ear/eye can distinguish. But so long as the content quite consistenlty sucks in the first place what is the point? I like shows with good acting, good story, good concepts, and quite frankly the quality of the picture/sound above reasonably clear has precious little effect. The only dramatic effect this has is on movies that tend to lack in every department other than visual and audio effects. The same way gameplay keeps turning out to be horrible in so many games while they have the latest super rendering mega fast pretty factor engine. I don't care how good it looks if the game sucks, and if it is a good game then stellar graphics are hardly my concern.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
The average moron doesn't think there's a difference between "widescreen" and "HD". One step above that - the informed consumer - might realize there's a difference but has a hard time telling the difference in quality between an anamorphic-widescreen NTSC SD picture and a true 1080i one. Above that, there is an even more technically inclined bunch of folks who couldn't tell 1080i from 1080p if their lives depended on it. At the very top you have the uper-videophiles who know what they're doing and what they're seeing, and can tell the difference. This elite group is like "the gamer" in the PC market. They know what they want and will pay to get it. Everyone else is happy with Intel's onboard graphics.
Add in the compression that some distributors put their signal through, and the difference between anamorphic widescreen and "real HD" becomes hard to distinguish even if you are able to discriminate between them.
I like what the survey results reveal. It tells me BR players and recorders will be coming down in price a lot faster than the manufacturers had hoped.
Maybe it's because the players start at ~$280 and the new release movies are ~$35?
With a subprime crisis going, and from what I read recently the downturn in the economy now threatening to make it into a prime crisis as well, people aren't interested in expensive players and discs that require a home with room for a large TV? I have a HDTV and play HD content on it and think it looks great - but it's an expensive luxury. And it doesn't turn a soggy movie into a great one either. I think the change will still happen because it's easier for the whole supply chain to have one format, they can easily push DVDs to a "legacy" option if only they cut back on the margins.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Sort of like why does anyone want a 4 GHz Pentium processor for Microsoft Office, is that really useful?
It might come in handy for that idiot who keeps sending you doc files with 2 gigs of embedded pictures.
The problem is not that 1080p is too small of an improvement, it is actually a vast improvement. The problem is that standard DVD has had more resolution than most people could see on their old sets. Specifically, when viewing a DVD that is "Enhanced for 16:9 Televisions" on a standard TV, the DVD player is discarding 25% of the resolution. It is surprising how much of a difference that makes. So what happens is that when people get their new HDTV set, the first thing they do is watch one of their existing DVDs and they see how much better it looks, and they are satisfied with that. That is enough of an improvement to wow them for the time being, especially since a Blu-Ray investment would cost them way more than the HDTV set did, considering that the player would be $400 and replacing a 20 movie library would be another $600. Blu-Ray players will have to get down to $100 and disks $15 before it will be a mainstream success.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
The biggest problem with Blu-Ray is they're not releasing compelling products. They're releasing a 2 hour movie that loads slower with very marginally better video (because they used the same masters for the DVD) and exactly identical audio (very few BDs have a true 7.1 mix) that costs more. Why the fuck would people want that?
The solution is to take advantage of the 50GB capacity and give people stuff they want. Like an entire TV season on a single disc. Collections of playable Java games. A search function in the menus (possible with BD!) for searchable clip segments. ex. type "little friend" into the menu of the Scarface DVD and you jump directly to the "Say hello to my little friend". Look at porn BDs to see what the studios should be doing.
With Blu-Ray on the scene, I can buy regular DVD movies at Sam Goody (often used) at greatly reduced prices. And it's going to be a *long* time before Blu-Ray has the market penetration to replace DVD's entirely (if ever). For 95% of the movies I watch, I don't care whether it's in HD or not, the content transcends the resolution. For the regular standard-definition DVD consumer, Blu-Ray is the best thing that could have happened. You don't have to own a Blu-Ray player to love what it's done for the cost of owning movies!
PS - Have you seen how nice regular DVDs look when upscaled on a PS3? I'll look forward to that, if I ever choose to get myself one...
Most of us don't even have hidef TVs. Without a high definition television, BluRay is worthless.
My TV is forty two inches, flat screen, only five years old. I paid a thousand bucks for it, and I'm not planning on replacing it any time soon. By the time I need a new TV, BluRay will be obsolete.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Blue-ray has plenty of honest, actual merit; it is capable of about six times the visual detail, higher frame rates (so considerably better motion depiction) and a larger color space as compared to a DVD; in fact, it is so good that just as compact disks did for audio, a Blue-ray version of a film often reveals limitations of the original recording.
The summary has it at least partially right: The problem isn't that Blue-ray isn't better, the problem is that without good source material, a large hi-def TV and a viewing arrangement where you can actually make out the additional detail, it is difficult or even impossible for a viewer to appreciate the extra capability. With the economy tanking, I rather doubt the first thing on everyone's list is to go out and get an HDTV.
For those of us who do have them, though, and where the viewing arrangement is large enough to see all the detail, Blue-ray is not just "better", but far, far better and definitely the format of choice. I went extreme with my setup, and I don't regret it even a little bit. People who see movies and HD games on my system never leave thinking HD is a marketing scam.
I am almost certain that HD and Blue-ray will do just fine; it's just that there's a ton of legacy hardware that people already like, and it'll have to get old and crufty in their sight before they upgrade, and the economy has slowed down what wouldn't have been all that quick a process anyway.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The other day when I was standing in line at Blockbuster, they had a blu-ray demo playing on a fairly large sized HDTV. The demo was going over the virtues of blu-ray, with side-by-side comparisons. The problem is, I couldn't tell which side of the screen was blu-ray, and which was regular dvd resolution (at least from where I was in line, about 10 ft away). The only thing that HDTV makes clearer is the disclaimer text at the bottom of most commercials, and maybe sports such as football. Other than that, for most movies I get plenty enough enjoyment out of them with regular DVDs.
People thought the same at the beginning of DVD, or worse.
The difference is that DVD has a lot of benefits besides improved picture quality; no rewinding, you can choose scenes and go there instantly, "pause" doesn't leave ugly artifacts (nor do FF and Rewind), Multilingual subtitles (with the dynamics they use in movies these days where the music is ear splitting and the voices are muted, it's necessary) etc.
The only benefit to BluRay is the picture quality, and it is offset by some decidedly backward steps (one commenter earlier mentioned 90+ second to watch a movie, wtf???)
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
How many of you have walked up to that "bad-ass" HD/player display demo to watch a few minutes of the loud action movie being demoed, only to find the really fast action scenes STILL end up pixeling and distorting in front of your eyes?
I'm sorry, but I've yet to find an HDTV that has eliminated this completely. THIS is what has turned me off from dumping $2000+ into a new HD environment, so I'm not so certain the player/format is to blame here.
Contrast this to the gaming world, if you saw image degradation in fast FPS sequences, you'd find yourself shopping for a new video card, which generally fixes the issue. What the hell "upgrade" choice do I have with my new $2000 HDTV? other than the "new and improved" $3000 model?
Sure, that's why you haven't touched a CD or a DVD in your lifetime either, right?
I buy blu-ray regulary, and I see many on the Playstation 3 and HIFI forums who does the same. Why should I buy a movie on DVD anymore, when I can get it on blu-ray, and to the same price even (but that demands that you browse several sites to find the good offers). But I agree that blu-ray (at least at the moment) is in the category as laserdisc, unless there will be cheaper and faster players in the near future.
(yes this can be compared with sex)
This discs are expensive, the players are play-only and expensive, the players force use of a DRM'd display...
Wake me up when I can stick a raw drive in my computer (running any display on the computer or anything it streams to around the house) for $100 or less, it can also burn discs (data only discs it won't play is fine), and the blank media is $1 a disc or less.
I also expect playback with the OS/software of my choosing. If VLC won't work with it, it isn't what I'd hope for.
Knowing how the industry is with DRM, I doubt I'll get what I want. I'll probably eventually settle for a read/write drive that takes affordable media and can be used for tv shows I've recorded or whatever else comes along. Looks like it'll be years before I get even that...
I've noted that support for large HD displays is poor, life isn't that great, they're expensive and the money will only make the trade imbalance worse. So for the shorter term, a medium (24"?) display on the computer will be fine. I've heard that retailers like Best Buy have reported low than expected sales of HDTVs. Close to 20 minutes of ads an hour on over-the-air tv, and few shows that appeal to me. I wonder how many of the people struggling with debt have stopped to figure out what the total cost of a large screen HDTV with paid programs is over say a 5 year life?
For 8 hours a day use, figure close to $10 a month just for electricity to start with....
I have a HD player, Toshiba's AH3. Yeah, that means HD-DVD. Got it for $99 with eleven free movies. Got a bunch more when HD-DVD got shut down for less than $100. Still work. Better yet, compared to my friend's PS3 I don't have a single HD-DVD that forces me to watch anything other than the movie. His movies, well its pot-luck but many play ads for up coming movies that don't allow skip.
Still I have a 61 HD tv (Samsung LED DLP fwiw) and with a good upscaling player I can still tell a difference between DVD and HD-DVD. Dune and Blade Runner are good examples of being able to pick out details on. Especially in clothing and other textured items that just seem to blur on vhs and even base DVD. HD OTA looks better than some dvds! Yet with even a great TV, good sound, and the ability to get HD satellite, I can't see getting a new player
The real issue is two parts. The players are obnoxiously priced and the movies aren't far behind. With the ability to rent them I could see getting a service like Netflix but honestly I am not going to fork out nearly four hundred dollars for a media player. Get the price of the player down and do it quickly or simply write it off. Sony may have bought off the studios and if the rumors are true even Toshiba but they bought nothing if they cannot price the players and the movies into a realm where people don't even have to think about it. I have no qualms buying movies at CD prices... but at twenty four and higher its not worth it. Maybe Disney films for the kids as they will watch them for years, but regular movies? Get real. Its just a movie.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
When will people learn to not let big companies like Sony shove expensive proprietary formats down our throats?
Oh, wait.
-- Boycott Shell
People listen to MP3 files that sound like crap compared to CD-quality. But they do the job and other considerations, such as portability, are more important to consumers.
So why is anybody surprised that the same consumers will accept less than the best for their viewing when it comes at a fraction of the cost, and with a far larger selection? There's even a market for bootleg garbage made with hand-held cameras in theatres, and DVD quality isn't too terribly bad, even compared to Blu-Ray.
As long as one guy in the crowd has state-of-the-art equipment, the "usual gang of idiots" will wind up meeting in his basement now and again for a real kick-ass movie night with beer and everything else. For normal viewing, who needs it?
And it will be a pretty safe bet that the guy with the small fortune in equipment is single and probably has no kids. Oh...and everybody's wives and girlfriends hate his guts.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
If quality was the key point in selling a format than why didn't LaserDisc take off?
I once posted that most of this "format war"s outcome didn't matter because the format would die a fast death anyway and this article only strengthens my belief in this. BluRay is the new LaserDisc. It's nice to have if you have the system to take advantage of the new format with and if you have the money to buy movies at a premium price but aside from that why bother.
The only good thing that BluRays has over LaserDisc in their respective timeframes is that you can still play DVDs on a BluRay player where as I couldn't play a VCR tape on my LD player. But that's it.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Gas prices are up. Economy is in the stinker. I can't remember the last vacation I took. Saving every penny to make those payments. Yea, I'm gonna buy a new dvd player & a new tv just so I can perceive better quality slightly.
How about fixing the roof? Or saving for my kids' college funds? That's why we Americans are pressured put everything on credit! So we can buy the latest n' greatest!
Yea, right. I have no need for this currently. All it will do is enhance how I waste my time. I can do that with weed or a beer instead of being able to count the blemishes on some football player's neck.
The reality is that there's still a need for physical media here. On-line distribution is improving, but getting high quality video over the Internet is still not quite there yet. Furthermore, getting a disc in a box and putting it into a player is simple and familiar to most people.
Having said that, the drive for Blu-ray isn't going to ever be like it was for DVD. I recentl advised some folks doing an HD upgrade to skip getting a blu-ray player because they are too pricey still and they wouldn't get enough out of the difference. If something is made for HD from the get go, it does look nicer on blu-ray, but it's a marginal difference in most cases. The HD version of Blade Runner is absolutely gorgeous, but if I'd never seen it, the original is still a great film.
My expectation is that this will probably be the last generation of dedicated video formats. It's up to playing high definition content and there's no new higher definition standard on the way (nor can I see any reason to go there). So blu-ray will probably be it. It will likely always have a market because people like to collect movies, etc, but it will eventually just become like DVD is today where it's dirt cheap and common.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I was so pissed about unskippable commercials and FBI warnings on my DVDs that I stopped buying them new. I now wait, buy them used, rip them to my PC, remove that shit, and burn new disks to play. Now I can put the disk in and start watching my movie. No lectures from the government about copying the disk I fucking paid for. No worries about my ownly copy getting scratched and having to buy a new copy.
When I can burn full-capacity BlueRay movies to my own media, and I can get BlueRay movies used, I will consider switching.
Until then? Fuck those guys.
Blar.
My only DVD player is a linux box.
As soon as Blu-Ray works just as well on Linux as DVD does now, I'll upgrade the drive to a Blu-Ray drive. Until then, no thanks.
(Of course, this means that the DRM will need to be thoroughly hacked to pieces first... Oh well.)
*curses whoever thought a JVM was a good idea for an embedded consumer device*
You mean, a huge chunk of cell phone manufacturers?
Whoever thought a JVM was a good idea for an embedded consumer device
Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Alcatel and many more mobile phone manufacturers
MOD THE CHILD UP!
Here's a reason that many on /. will understand.
I watch all my TV shows and movies on a Linux computer hooked up to a 28 inch LCD monitor. Usually, the show is in a window while I do something else (like right now).
Now, at least the DRM on a DVD is pretty much a joke and easy to bypass, but Blue Ray is a different story. I refuse to buy Vista (along with a Blue Ray drive, if any such exists for less than a king's ransom) just for the privilege of watching a movie in the same tiny window I use right now with the equipment and software I already own.
Obligatory Star Wars reference: "This is not the customer you're looking for. Move along."
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Actually from what I have seen is that females will do it spread out across more purchases. Guys will typically blow large sums of money on single purchases where gals tend to nickel and dime you to death buying 1000 things they don't need simply because "it was on sale".
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
If the $50 dollar cable you are referring to is an HDMI cable then you haven't gont to Amazon.com where they have them for 1.73 +shipping to bring it up to around 5 dollars. PROTIP: don't shop for electronics at Best Buy.
I've got the TV for it, but I still don't have Blu-ray. Why? Because it's too expensive. $400+ for a decent player, when DVD players are $30? Re-buying movies I already own if I want them in the better format? $30 a movie when I can buy DVDs for $10? No thanks. If they want me to make the jump to Blu-ray, the players need to around $100 or so. And I'm still not re-buying movies I already own unless there's a trade-in credit.
Conspiracy-happy, are we? Seems like it to me, anyway.
It seems to me like you are saying that we should reject all advances in technology. If that were true we'd be looking at televisions with five-inch (round, even, sometimes) screens with terrible black-and-white picture with lousy sound that required cabinets the size of a dresser and had a long warm-up period before you could see anything. Or that we should still be using horses to get around. Or that we should still be using basic Wright-style propeller-driven airplanes.
Technology moves on. But innovation has a cost. That's the way things are. If you see conspiracy in something as basic as technical innovation, then you must see conspiracy in every facet of life.
I am not insulting you personally, please don't take it as such, but I just can't figure out that attitude.
i am a soviet space shuttle
I have around 300 DVDs. I have less than a dozen VHS tapes that I'd like to replace with DVDs at some point if I can find them cheap enough. If I could find a bargain bin of $5 blu-ray discs then I might consider upgrading my favorite DVDs. But even at $5 each that would be $1500 to replace them all. It's just never going to happen.
I can't justify spending more than $15 for a DVD unless it's an outstanding movie which is rare. Blu-Ray discs havn't even hit that price point.
As for HD, my motivation for upgrading the TV is safety. I don't like the idea of a big bulky CRT tv being within reach of a grabby little 2 year old's hands. So I'm planning to buy a larger HD LCD TV and mount it on the wall out of reach. It'll free up floor space and be safter.
The other hurdle is portable players. I can buy a DVD and watch it at home or in the car on a portable player. People aren't going to want to have to buy a movie twice just so their kids can watch it in the car. A home DVD player plus a portable DVD player is still much cheaper than a single Blu Ray player.
So I don't see any compelling reason to switch to Blu-Ray. They need cheaper players and bargain bin movies. Until then, it's going to be only for those people who like to spend their money on that sort of thing. Not the mass market.
Work Safe Porn
That just means it's used, not that it's a good choice.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I won't comment on your complete answer, but this really caught my eye :
picture/sound quality - dvd isn't that big of an improvement over VHS really, Especially at the time. Dolby Digital is nice (DTS not even available yet), but back then the equipment was very expensive so the only ones who saw an improvement in audio quality were those with lots of money to buy an expensive stereo. Early DVD encoding wasn't great, picture quality was better than VHS but really not by much. (I think the jump to hi-def is a much bigger improvement than even the best dvd over vhs)
Picture and sound quality was absolutely brilliant compared to VHS. I don't know what you were smoking back then, but VHS always had horrid quality, with bleeding colours and an awfull resolution. ... and even then it's not sure it's really worth the money.
The only reason it survived for 9 years after DVDs came out is that home DVD "recorders" were expensive.
The big difference between VHS vs DVD and DVD vs Bluray is that you could see the great improvement DVDs brought on your standard TV set, whereas the improvement from DVD to BluRay is not apparent, unless you change your whole setup
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
As a video professional, I'm really happy with Sony. They brought us U-matic, which never seems to die... seriously... I've played back tapes from the early 70s without much fuss. There are also the various Betacam formats that still dominate broadcast SD to this day. Also, DVCAM is pretty awesome for ENG. HDCAM is now the de facto professional HD standard. Just about the only pro formats that are widely used that they didn't originate are 1" and DVCPRO.