I know anyone with a 19inch NTSC resolution. How many people do you know running at 640x480? Most people at the very least run 1024x768 (which IS HD) on a 19 inch monitor and a good deal run at leat 1280x960.
How many times will people repeat that Blu-Ray has more drm just so they can hate sony more? I've studied the specs and looked at wikipedia's articles of both techs. HD-DVD comes with every bit of DRM that blu-ray does including the image constraint flag which would allow studios to force 520p on non-hdmi connections.
HD-DVD has the Image Constraint flag that would cause it to downgrade it to 520p on analog connections. However that will likely be a nonissue as movie studios will "seemingly" hold off on activating it on their discs till 2010-2012 or forever.
Wikipedia has an article on it. There is no bit of drm that blu-ray has over hd-dvd. Just rumors and people spewing nonsense.
Before this upcoming generation sony has been the least control freakish with drm on their consoles. Sony released their primary console on cd's while Nintendo has been using their own proprietary cartridges and charging out of the ass for licensing fee's along with the high cost of cart manufacture.
This continued with the proprietary format of the gamecube versus' the ps2's dvd drive. All you needed to do was mod your ps2/psx to play your games. Media was never an issue. This little bit of DRM is in all consoles.
Hell, I remember back when the psx was popular that some attributed PSX's success due to ease of modding and burning games for it. Saying Sony's history in consoles is that of above industry lvls of drm and proprietary formats is a joke.
Thats just spewing hatred. Blu-ray is clearly superior on many levels. It's scratch resistent coating has been seen by independent techs and they all love it. The most important however, is capacity per layer. It's ten gigs more per layer then hd-dvd. What else does it need to be for superiority?
It's been shown that HD-DVD will have teh same drm blu-ray will and the implementation of dvd backwards compatibility isn't all that different. They still need another laser to read dvds.
In relative computing power 2-2.5x more powerful is NOTHING in the realm of consoles. The console cycle is 5-7 years. Usually performance increases are anywhere from 10-20x that of the previous generation. The ps1 had 1MB of vram and to get to ps2 graphics it had 16mb of vram and 32x the system ram. It also pushed about 16-20x the polygons. I don't remember off the top of my head but it went from several hundred thousand to a figure over 10 million.
It was around $1k when i saw it for sale and each game was $200ish. Add inflation and it's a hell of a lot more.
3DO once again with inflation would be more expensive.
Third their is very little that the "crippled" ps3 cannot do. It has as much hd space as a premium xbox and hdmi isn't necessary to get full hd resolutions.
I wouldn't be surprised if the $499 ps3 moves a ton of boxes.
I don't give a crap about sony's consoles, remember that rootkit the music division released three decades ago? I haven't touched a sony product ever since.
Once I got a sony blu-ray player for free, i went home and freaken pee'd on it.
Even before Videogames, TV's, and Radios, kids didn't spend all of their leisure time reading books for fun. Why would they start if we took away consoles?
The only console that had anywhere near 4 year cycle was the failed xbox one. They tried to rush out the next console since they were going nowhere with the original. Sony is releasing the ps3 earlier then their older longterm plans (I remember 3 years ago they were talking about a 2007 release) as a result but it's still being released at the 5-6 year mark.
This is probably part of the reason for the delay this year and lack of readyness by Sony. They are not only having huge technical issues to work out due to going for bleeding edge in every way possible but their releasing it earlier then they planned a few years ago.
U.S. Robotics makes routers and wifi equipment. When you lost interest in Zip drives did you also lose interest in all media formats? Did you chuck away that cd/dvd drive?
I still see you comparing apple's with oranges. It's nice to have better broadcast--satellite and cable are an extension to broadcast imo-- but people have always loved owning tangible movies/music/goods. I don't see that changing in the near future.
Upconversion is nice but your not getting any more detail then 480p video. And 480 is far from HD. BTW, what's the resolution of your plasma tv, and model?
Before you say you don't want HD res video why not actually view it? Would people have shelled out the big bucks for DVD's before they saw the differnce. Grante the change from DVD to HD media isn't neary as drastic but lets wait and actually see how it turns out before we knock it, eh?
I personally welcome any new tech that may make movies even that much more immersive.
Thats a change in media delivery. That is not something hardware companies can help you with. This is more so related to your isp(s) and media companies then anything.
Tieing everythign to such a network is nice but what about downtime. You'll lose your tv watching capability, the lack of physical media will mean your cutoff from your media connection too. Your hard drive(s) in whatever devices you have is decent for standard resolution video and music but theres only so much hd video you can affordably store.
A new video format that only allows for greater picture quality (with the max resolution of the best res HDTV 1080p) and movie length on a single disc. Thats no reason to upgrade from DVD's 480P, for life yo! What more do you want a new format to do? A dual layer blu-ray disc holds 50gigs and they've already gotten 8 layers working on the lab. Plus blu-ray has this new highly scratch resistant coating that appears to work really well.
I don't know about everyone else but I've been holding out on HDTV's simply because there wasn't much I could do with one. HD gaming and cinema changes all of that. Half the reason most HDTV's don't look so good in stores is that a good portion are playing on dvd's with 480 lines of resolution. About 40% of the HDTV's in sam's are getting an actual hdtv feed.
In summary a blu-ray drive will give you the following:
1) Longer Movie Runtime 2) Maxed out HDTV Resolution 3) Scratch resistant coating that will alleviate one of the biggest longevity issues with dvd's.
I'm not sure what more I could want with a new format.
Slight improvements or in this case putting two of the same gpu's in one pcb is still in the same generation. Their number scheme actually makes sense once your used to it at least. The naming scheme, GEFORCE ULTRA XTX ZERO or whatever the hell each individual pcb manufacturer decides to come up with is a different story.
We don't know if the wii will wipe the floor with anything. It's new and it's radical and NO one on slashdot has one. The concept is interesting and cool but we simply don't know if people will like and adopt the new controller in the long term more so then traditional controllers.
We also dont' know how the lack of hd will affect people's perception ofthe console. So claiming that it will wipe the floor with the 360 is arrogance itself.
It just doesn't send the signal digitally with HDMI. Games will be outputted in HD for sure although whether game developers decide on 720p or 1080p is a different matter (both are greater then wii's standard resolution of 480p).
Now if this article is correct and no movie makers will release image constrainted discs till 2010 then your movies will also display at full resolution. So you lose nothing at all except the very minor signal distortions that come from not using a digital signal (how many people really notice much of a difference between using a d-pin and dvi for monitors).
By 2010 blu-ray players will cost very little anyway so that doesn't matter.
DLP, tends to blur pixels and lower res plasma's have sharper images. It's just something I've noticed from all the models available in our store over time (Sam's Club). Most video enthusiasts seem to agree.
If I'm going to get hd i'd rather use a technology which will not only take advantage of the extra pixels but use them in the clearest manner possible.
I just pray that one day LCD's will affordably break the 40 inch barrier.
I've always upgraded those three things together. If not at best your getting a 30% improvement in processing speed.
Even if amd used socket a for a long time they migrated from pc100-133 ram to pc 2100-2700 (drr 266 & 333) and bus speeds changed. That required new motherboards. It's quite pointless to upgrade your machine to a new cpu if your bus speed and memory speed remains unchanged in almost all cases. The speed difference is so minor.
DVD's come with copy protection, any such converter would break it, so even if Sony (doubtful but hypothetically) were to want to do this they couldn't.
It's quite valid to say taht most ps2's are probably connected to some smaller tv's now that it's been a budget console for several years. But how about at launch? Did those enthusiasts who spent a phenominal $300 dollars also put them on the smallest tv's in the house to experience their awesome new graphics and surround sound?
I still have my ps2 plugged into my bigscreen (36inch old sd tuber mind you) and a dolby digital sound system. It just makes gaming a hell of a lot better.
While i'm not putting down the wii as a console but even the average Joe should be able to find a difference in graphics between a Wii vs. 360/PS3. The wii is unfortunately quite a bit weaker technically then ms/sony's consoles. It may be less noticeable if you lack hdtv though as all wii games will be programmed to run in standard resolution.
Slashdot Mirror
I know anyone with a 19inch NTSC resolution. How many people do you know running at 640x480? Most people at the very least run 1024x768 (which IS HD) on a 19 inch monitor and a good deal run at leat 1280x960.
How many times will people repeat that Blu-Ray has more drm just so they can hate sony more? I've studied the specs and looked at wikipedia's articles of both techs. HD-DVD comes with every bit of DRM that blu-ray does including the image constraint flag which would allow studios to force 520p on non-hdmi connections.
HD-DVD has the Image Constraint flag that would cause it to downgrade it to 520p on analog connections. However that will likely be a nonissue as movie studios will "seemingly" hold off on activating it on their discs till 2010-2012 or forever.
Wikipedia has an article on it. There is no bit of drm that blu-ray has over hd-dvd. Just rumors and people spewing nonsense.
Before this upcoming generation sony has been the least control freakish with drm on their consoles. Sony released their primary console on cd's while Nintendo has been using their own proprietary cartridges and charging out of the ass for licensing fee's along with the high cost of cart manufacture.
This continued with the proprietary format of the gamecube versus' the ps2's dvd drive. All you needed to do was mod your ps2/psx to play your games. Media was never an issue. This little bit of DRM is in all consoles.
Hell, I remember back when the psx was popular that some attributed PSX's success due to ease of modding and burning games for it. Saying Sony's history in consoles is that of above industry lvls of drm and proprietary formats is a joke.
Thats just spewing hatred. Blu-ray is clearly superior on many levels. It's scratch resistent coating has been seen by independent techs and they all love it. The most important however, is capacity per layer. It's ten gigs more per layer then hd-dvd. What else does it need to be for superiority?
It's been shown that HD-DVD will have teh same drm blu-ray will and the implementation of dvd backwards compatibility isn't all that different. They still need another laser to read dvds.
HOw is it any more proprietary then Toshiba's HD-DVD (or whomever the designing company is)? This isn't a rhetorical question, I just don't know how.
Both techs seem to be upgrades with associated licensing fees for the tech. Do DVD's lack any licensing fee's to whomever originally designed it?
In relative computing power 2-2.5x more powerful is NOTHING in the realm of consoles. The console cycle is 5-7 years. Usually performance increases are anywhere from 10-20x that of the previous generation. The ps1 had 1MB of vram and to get to ps2 graphics it had 16mb of vram and 32x the system ram. It also pushed about 16-20x the polygons. I don't remember off the top of my head but it went from several hundred thousand to a figure over 10 million.
The ps3 is a similar jump.
It was around $1k when i saw it for sale and each game was $200ish. Add inflation and it's a hell of a lot more.
3DO once again with inflation would be more expensive.
Third their is very little that the "crippled" ps3 cannot do. It has as much hd space as a premium xbox and hdmi isn't necessary to get full hd resolutions.
I wouldn't be surprised if the $499 ps3 moves a ton of boxes.
So what do you think abou the PS9?
I don't give a crap about sony's consoles, remember that rootkit the music division released three decades ago? I haven't touched a sony product ever since.
Once I got a sony blu-ray player for free, i went home and freaken pee'd on it.
Even before Videogames, TV's, and Radios, kids didn't spend all of their leisure time reading books for fun. Why would they start if we took away consoles?
They really expect to pay a large premium for products they believe are high quality. Thats why games can cost up to twice as much in japan.
The only console that had anywhere near 4 year cycle was the failed xbox one. They tried to rush out the next console since they were going nowhere with the original. Sony is releasing the ps3 earlier then their older longterm plans (I remember 3 years ago they were talking about a 2007 release) as a result but it's still being released at the 5-6 year mark.
This is probably part of the reason for the delay this year and lack of readyness by Sony. They are not only having huge technical issues to work out due to going for bleeding edge in every way possible but their releasing it earlier then they planned a few years ago.
U.S. Robotics makes routers and wifi equipment. When you lost interest in Zip drives did you also lose interest in all media formats? Did you chuck away that cd/dvd drive?
I still see you comparing apple's with oranges. It's nice to have better broadcast--satellite and cable are an extension to broadcast imo-- but people have always loved owning tangible movies/music/goods. I don't see that changing in the near future.
Upconversion is nice but your not getting any more detail then 480p video. And 480 is far from HD. BTW, what's the resolution of your plasma tv, and model?
Before you say you don't want HD res video why not actually view it? Would people have shelled out the big bucks for DVD's before they saw the differnce. Grante the change from DVD to HD media isn't neary as drastic but lets wait and actually see how it turns out before we knock it, eh?
I personally welcome any new tech that may make movies even that much more immersive.
Thats a change in media delivery. That is not something hardware companies can help you with. This is more so related to your isp(s) and media companies then anything.
Tieing everythign to such a network is nice but what about downtime. You'll lose your tv watching capability, the lack of physical media will mean your cutoff from your media connection too. Your hard drive(s) in whatever devices you have is decent for standard resolution video and music but theres only so much hd video you can affordably store.
A new video format that only allows for greater picture quality (with the max resolution of the best res HDTV 1080p) and movie length on a single disc. Thats no reason to upgrade from DVD's 480P, for life yo! What more do you want a new format to do? A dual layer blu-ray disc holds 50gigs and they've already gotten 8 layers working on the lab. Plus blu-ray has this new highly scratch resistant coating that appears to work really well.
I don't know about everyone else but I've been holding out on HDTV's simply because there wasn't much I could do with one. HD gaming and cinema changes all of that. Half the reason most HDTV's don't look so good in stores is that a good portion are playing on dvd's with 480 lines of resolution. About 40% of the HDTV's in sam's are getting an actual hdtv feed.
In summary a blu-ray drive will give you the following:
1) Longer Movie Runtime
2) Maxed out HDTV Resolution
3) Scratch resistant coating that will alleviate one of the biggest longevity issues with dvd's.
I'm not sure what more I could want with a new format.
Their's tons of budget pci-x 16 slots that use smaller coolers and use tons less power.
Slight improvements or in this case putting two of the same gpu's in one pcb is still in the same generation. Their number scheme actually makes sense once your used to it at least. The naming scheme, GEFORCE ULTRA XTX ZERO or whatever the hell each individual pcb manufacturer decides to come up with is a different story.
We don't know if the wii will wipe the floor with anything. It's new and it's radical and NO one on slashdot has one. The concept is interesting and cool but we simply don't know if people will like and adopt the new controller in the long term more so then traditional controllers.
We also dont' know how the lack of hd will affect people's perception ofthe console. So claiming that it will wipe the floor with the 360 is arrogance itself.
It just doesn't send the signal digitally with HDMI. Games will be outputted in HD for sure although whether game developers decide on 720p or 1080p is a different matter (both are greater then wii's standard resolution of 480p).
Now if this article is correct and no movie makers will release image constrainted discs till 2010 then your movies will also display at full resolution. So you lose nothing at all except the very minor signal distortions that come from not using a digital signal (how many people really notice much of a difference between using a d-pin and dvi for monitors).
By 2010 blu-ray players will cost very little anyway so that doesn't matter.
DLP, tends to blur pixels and lower res plasma's have sharper images. It's just something I've noticed from all the models available in our store over time (Sam's Club). Most video enthusiasts seem to agree.
If I'm going to get hd i'd rather use a technology which will not only take advantage of the extra pixels but use them in the clearest manner possible.
I just pray that one day LCD's will affordably break the 40 inch barrier.
I've always upgraded those three things together. If not at best your getting a 30% improvement in processing speed.
Even if amd used socket a for a long time they migrated from pc100-133 ram to pc 2100-2700 (drr 266 & 333) and bus speeds changed. That required new motherboards. It's quite pointless to upgrade your machine to a new cpu if your bus speed and memory speed remains unchanged in almost all cases. The speed difference is so minor.
DVD's come with copy protection, any such converter would break it, so even if Sony (doubtful but hypothetically) were to want to do this they couldn't.
It's quite valid to say taht most ps2's are probably connected to some smaller tv's now that it's been a budget console for several years. But how about at launch? Did those enthusiasts who spent a phenominal $300 dollars also put them on the smallest tv's in the house to experience their awesome new graphics and surround sound?
I still have my ps2 plugged into my bigscreen (36inch old sd tuber mind you) and a dolby digital sound system. It just makes gaming a hell of a lot better.
While i'm not putting down the wii as a console but even the average Joe should be able to find a difference in graphics between a Wii vs. 360/PS3. The wii is unfortunately quite a bit weaker technically then ms/sony's consoles. It may be less noticeable if you lack hdtv though as all wii games will be programmed to run in standard resolution.