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Blu-ray Adoption Soft, More Still Own HD DVD
MojoKid writes "A new study by Harris Interactive notes that currently,
one in ten Americans (10%) own an HD DVD player, while just 7% own a Blu-ray player. Crazy, right?
More Americans own HD DVD right now than the 'winning' format, Blu-ray. If you think about it, that statistic isn't that shocking. When HD DVD was around, it was far and away the 'budget' format for high-def. The players were cheaper, the films were cheaper. In other words, it was a format more ready to thrive in a down economy. Blu-ray was always viewed as a niche format for those absorbed in A/V, not the common man's format. The survey also found that on average, consumers purchased approximately six standard format DVDs in the last six months, compared with one in HD DVD format."
So they're counting the PS3 and the Blu-Ray players as separate items in their study. If you add the two together, Blu-Ray adoption is higher. Of course, the question is if they count Xbox HD-DVD drives, but those numbers are probably low.
As a way to make some extra dough I work at a video rental chain (the largest here in the US) and just from what I have seen no one really wants to rent Blu-Ray. We got 90% of the new releases on Blu-Ray and yet they prefer dvd even at the same price point. Who wants to buy a blu-ray player at over $200 right now when I can keep buying dvds at a cheaper price. Blu-Ray is beautiful yes but for most pictures I don't need or want to pay an extra 10-20 dollars for it.
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If you read the article, you'd see that no. The PS3 is counted seperatly, which makes absolutely no sense if you want to compare blu-ray adoption.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
I own 3 computers with DVD players and a Wii (which uses DVDs).
Wii doesn't come with DVD-Video player software. Its game discs aren't even DVD-ROM; like GameCube discs, Wii discs have a different file system (not UDF), a physical sector format with slightly different anti-direct-current scrambling, and six pinholes punched in their lead-in. There is homebrew software to play DVD-Video on a Wii, but it probably infringes the MPEG-2 and Dolby Digital patents and the major movie studios' anti-circumvention rights (under the U.S. DMCA and foreign counterparts). More importantly, the Wii disc drive is designed for random access, not streaming a two-hour cut scene.
If you combine the 360 addon owners with the regular pool, 14% of those surveyed own an HD-DVD player.
So, if you combine the PS3 owners with the regular Blu-Ray owners, 16% of those surveyed owned a Blu-Ray player.
Here is the logical response you probably have now: "But, every HD-DVD owner (including addon) bought it to watch Blu-Rays, while many PS3 owners probably bought it just to play games."
That's taken care of by the survey too. Out of all, PS3 owners 25% buy all their movies in Blu-Ray and another. 32% buy "most" of their movies in Blu-Ray. So 57% are regular Blu-Ray buyers now, and many PS3 owners are waiting for prices to come down.
HD-DVD owners? Stores gave the players away. They were cheaper than other upscaling players at some point. The addon for the 360 was $20 at my local stores with 5 free movies. Many HD-DVD owners probably bought closeout gear at low prices.
So while the percentages may technically be right, with the fire sale that followed HD-DVDs failure, it's not terribly suprising. And the 7% is it at least 12% for Blu-Ray buyers, since over half of all PS3 owners buy movies.
This isn't true, from here:
"The primary advantage of this format is a low manufacturing cost. Since HD-DVD media is so technically similar to standard DVD media (it uses the same layer thicknesses as DVD, made of similar materials), the discs can be produced with only a slight modification to existing manufacturing lines. "
"This technology comes with a significant price. Manufacturing Blu-Ray discs requires significant costs in updating DVD fabrication equipment, and would be a sharp manufacturer cost increase over HD-DVD."
Toshiba also got the jump on sony and released it's first players months earlier allowing it to get production ramped up. It's true that when HD-DVD started to lose they chopped at the price, but it was already significantly lower than Bluray.
Blueray has piracy, at least in South East Asia, where there are malls full of shops selling Bluerays with the best covers a 10 year old color photocopier can provide, for the same price as 3 DVDs that aren't even out in the cinema yet (ie about $8).
I gotta say, as bad as the fiasco was, it was one of the few things Best Buy did right - I bought a HD DVD player that Christmas, and when the format was discontinued, Best Buy actually sent me a $50 gift card 'for my disappointment in the situation', unsolicited.
No they do not actually. Netflix to your TV (via xbox) is standard def and slightly below standard def. Comcast HD is not 1080p. They push out a degraded 1080i so it will typically look like a 780p. It's good enough but falls far short of blu ray, hd dvd, and even upconverted dvd. Blu Ray is 1080p
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Enjoy your 480p content then. Doesn't matter what resolution your monitor can handle, you need to pair it with a suitable source. DVD looks pretty bad on a monitor, unless you're 10' away from it. And what's the point of that? And did your roomate have his TV calibrated properly? Too much sharpness and edge enhancement will add halos, it's possible that you were seeing that. 300 had a strange look & feel, could be that as well. Go check out A Bug's Life, hell even the older Bond films on BD and you should be very impressed.
My couch is about 9' away from my new 52" LCD and everything I've watched on BD looks amazing. Definitely better than up-scaling regular DVDs.
I have no opinion on HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray, but your analogy with Apple is ridiculous. The PS3 is a full-featured Blu-Ray player. Thus, it should be counted as one. The iPhone does not run OS X. Thus, Apple should not count iPhone sales in its OS X market share stats. There's really no logical basis for your analogy.
It's amazing. Sony are so bad at format wars that, even when they win, they lose.
This quote from the article doesn't tell the whole story, though:
"A new study by Harris Interactive notes that currently, one in ten Americans (10%) own an HD DVD player, while just 7% own a Blu-ray player. Crazy, right?"
If you look at the chart, they've separated out the PS3 owners from the Blu-Ray player owners. Combine the 7% Blu-Ray owners with the 9% PS3 owners, and that's 16%. I'm sure that most PS3 owners didn't feel the need to buy a separate Blu-Ray player.
So you're judging your opinions of HD on one of the few movies that was done almost entirely in front of blue/green screens, the exception being the scene involving the Persian horseback messenger coming across the hills. Mind you 300 was about 90% blue screen and 10% green screen. I'd venture to say that unless you were seeing this effect the entire movie, then your complaint isn't nearly as problematic as you make it out to be.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
The definition was so good that I could see the seperations around the actors and knew exactly when they were in front of a green screen and no on set. Totally ruined the visuals
Movie theaters nowadays use a 1080p or bigger format with an even higher bitrate than Blu-ray Disc. Had you seen the film in a movie theater, might you have noticed the same compositing failures?
Not just movies today - movies on film are analog, so they get scratches and such, but they have a much higher effective resolution than 1920x1080.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Chances are your friend doesn't have the TV calibrated properly. Turning up the sharpness too high on many Hi-Def sets will cause this effect by adding in a lot of edge enhancement (ringing) to the image. Getting a good calibration disc like AVIA or Digital Video Essentials will make a huge difference in the appearance of HD sources.
To be fair I think that sounds like a one off, and a bit of an knee jerk response on your part. I've personally not noticed that issue with any HD films I've seen (though I've not seen 300 in HD, the film sucked enough in SD). Blade Runner, for instance, looks absolutely stunning, as does Planet Earth, and the Pixar films look gorgeous too.
I'd give it another go before I make my decision on one, very poor, film.
Additionally, I'd get your mate to check he hasn't turned the sharpness of the image on the tv way up as this can cause JPEG-esque blocky artifacts to appear.
I bought a PS3 for the main purpose of watching movies and for my kids to play a few games on here and there. I use it for watching BluRay and DVD and find the interface as easy as any DVD player I've ever owned. I own the remote control also, but even when the kids have lost it and I have to use the controller it's pretty much just one button click to get the movie going. I never owned a PS2 so I don't know how it compares. I did use an original XBOX as a DVD player for a little while and found it so pitiful (even with the remote) that I bought a separate DVD player instead, however my XBOX remote was flaky and I don't know which one caused the other.
It was reported that Criterion uses the Playstation3 as their reference Blu-ray player. So I'd say it's up there in terms of quality.
You can and should very much count the ps3 as a bluray player. The most obvious reason is that it is, indeed, a bluray player. Your friends have 2 bluray movies for their PS3s? Gee, wonder what they watch them on... Maybe... the PS3?
The next obvious reason is that a lot of people bought ps3s because they wanted a (wait for it) bluray player. The PS3 was targeted as a high-end movie/game player and that's why it was so expensive. Yet, it was still cheaper than the majority of the players at the time and allowed people to play video games. It's pretty clear it's a bluray player and people are obviously buying movies to play on the ps3.
If you buy the Blu-ray Disc Remote for an extra $20 - $25... not bad. If you try to do it with the Dualshock 3 (or sixaxis) its more or less as clunky as the PS2's DVD player.
Not everyone who buys a PS3 does so because they want to play Blu Ray discs (In fact, one would assume that a minority do).
While I don't disagree with your statements, I'm curious why you would assume only a minority of PS3 owners are Blu-ray watchers. The PS3 was touted by review sites as the best Blu-ray player on the market for the money for quite a long time. This year old EngadgetHD article says that 87% of PS3 owners watch blu-ray. I can't read the source of that info at work, 87% seems a tad high to me, but saying it's a minority sounds a little off.
Blue Ray players are very difficult to find in East Asia, while those "Blue Ray" bootlegs are *everywhere*...
Of course, those in the know are just downloading off emule or youku.com anyway, why waste $.75?
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So, what is the quality of a typical movie theater you ask (or at least you should). According to an international study named "Image Resolution of 35mm Film in Theatrical Presentation" a typical theater has a 750 scan lines resolution.
IIRC, that study when published mentioned that film could contain enough detail for 750 pairs of alternating black/white lines, which means it actually has an effective resolution of about 1500 lines. Of course, everyone reporting on the story latched onto that 750 number and presented it as 750 lines of resolution, not double that, which is what the results of the study actually were.
Getting a good calibration disc like AVIA or Digital Video Essentials will make a huge difference in the appearance of HD sources.
Absolutely. I've used my Avia disk to set the basic video settings on five TVs so far including my own RP CRT plus new LCDs and Plasmas recently bought by friends and family members.
It's really easy to do and everyone I've done it for has been stunned by the difference. Some of the factory settings on TVs are unspeakable too. My Hitachi RP CRT had the contrast set to 100, when the optimal value based on the Avia test pattern (which looked spectacular) was around 20. As a matter of fact, in that example, the factory settings would almost surely ruin the TV.
Speaking of calibration...I just don't get why all TVs have like five or more preset video settings when, generally speaking, there really is only one set of correct values. Then again, with 99% of the general public skewing all their 4:3 content to 16:9 and not seeing anything wrong with it (don't even get me started on that) I guess they feel people expect it and don't know any better.
70mm? Are you sure it's not 35mm film? To the best of my knowledge, there are only a very few movies on 70mm film because there aren't too many theatres with a 70mm projector.
(I own a movie theatre.)
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Multimedia/Games.
Settings that make movies or broadcast TV look good aren't that good for games, and vice versa. Or at least they didn't used to be. I have the "User" contrast and brightness down to about half on this screen I have this PS3 connected to, but It's calibrated for Linux (where I want the black in my terminal to be black) and not as much as for games and movies.