So, I assume that everyone here claiming there's no difference between 1080p and 720p is happily reading Slashdot on a monitor of 1280x720 pixels or less resolution. After all, it doesn't matter. And you DVD fans... still using your PC in original VGA mode, right?
Ok, those who are left... you have proven you can see differences in resolution, or just like wasting money on those expensive HD monitors. If you can't see any difference on Blu-ray, either (a) you're just saying that to justify your low-resolution DVDs, or (b) you're sitting too far from your TV. And that's not just a resolution issue, it's a viewing quality issue. If you follow either the THX or the SMPTE recommendations for seat to screen, which are based on angle of view, you'll get perfectly complete HD at 1080p, and it will look better... just like your PC does.
It might get a little trickier with 4K screens....
66% of US households already have that HDTV. An even higher percentage of PC users do, for those who watch video on computer screens. So no, most people don't need a television upgrade to adopt Blu-ray.
Maybe for Blu-ray in the second room. But Blu-ray players still support older output modes. So as the price falls, that second Blu-ray player may well wind up just for compatibility purposes on the kids' TVs. I know I'd buy another PS3 in a heartbeat if it was $100 or so, just to get my teenage son off my 71" TV.
HD-DVD dual format was only an option -- most did not support it. And since there's usually a DVD tucked into every BD release, it's becoming a rather moot point. There's also an even better technology for BD and DVD on the same disc.... much easier than HD-DVD since Blu-ray uses shallower data layers (HD-DVD had them at the same depth as DVD). I image that standard DVD and BD mastering is so cheap, there's just no point in developing a combo format.
It was barely a year and a half from the general availability of HD-DVD players in mid-2006 to the win by Blu-ray in January of 2008. Those were hardcore early adopter times anyway... it's hard to sell that many $400-$500 players, format war or no format war. Things took off quite well afterwards... Blu-ray has been ahead of DVD in adoption rates ever since then.
People just forget how long VHS hung on. In a year or two, every DVD player will also be a Blu-ray player, and people will still be claiming the format is dead... until all of a sudden, Hollywood's secure enough in DVD to start phasing it out, just as they did with VHS.
Probably not... particularly in a theater with digital projectors. Most cinematic projectors are 2K -- nominally 2000x1000 pixels, essentially the same as Blu-ray and HDTV. A few support 4K resolution, and if you see a 3D film in IMAX, you're probably looking at two separate 2K projects synched together. Of course, if it's on film, you have a half-frame 35mm image there -- probably close to 20Mpixel worth in ideal circumstance. Naturally, no one's printing digital to film at 20Mpixels, but the film (other than generational loss for making prints) isn't the gating factor.
As of December 2009, 50% of US households had at least one HDTV. As of early this year, it was over 66% of US households (Market Force Information). But only 15% of households currently own at least one Blu-ray player. Though that 15% accounts for as much as 25% of consumer media sales.
DVD was fantastically better than VHS. Not just the effective 4x increase in resolution, but the real improvement in color and sound.
Not everyone appreciates the quality differences. As a videographer, photographer, and computer developer working in both analog and digital video in the 80s and 90s, I absolutely appreciated the gains in quality, for both VHS->DVD and DVD->Blu-ray. VHS was so heinous I never bought a film on VHS for myself, just my kids. SVHS was more acceptable in the day, but of course, only useful for finished videos I made myself, there was no commercial pre-recorded content.
DVD changed everything. It wasn't simply a vast improvement over VHS and SVHS, it was random access, digital, and optical. Now, as well as using DVD for a delivery medium, I bought films on DVD. Just stuff I know I'd like to watch again... some folks think they need to buy everything on disc, but really, if there's no repeat watching, you might as well rent or see it in the theater (then again, with a Blu-ray new release generally cheaper than a night for two at the theater, my home screen growing, cinemaplex screens shrinking, and features increasingly being shown in 2K digital -- essentially the same quality as Blu-ray -- there's less reason to travel to a theater).
And I've been making and buying Blu-ray discs, pretty much since Sony won the format wars. With all my video great HD for the last 6+ years, it's silly to consider SD on DVD as the only physical delivery medium. And you take such a hit in quality delivering it online.
I re-bought only a handful of films... largely because Warner Bros. offered a $5-$7 upgrade. And it was something I would appreciate in HD, and watch multiple times.
Thing is, you can't really buy a standard def TV anymore... maybe those $50 5-7" Chinese digital televisions technically qualify. And LCD TV prices have been plummeting, largely due to far more advanced panel making technology. The idea that "you can't tell the difference on my TV" is a rapidly fading possibility. Those analog televisions will fail, and won't be repaired. They'll be replaced by HD units.
HD-DVD wasn't "cheaper all around"... it was artificially cheaper, only. Toshiba (partnered with Microsoft) was treating HD-DVD as their own gaming console. Everyone knows that game consoles are subsidized when they're new... the manufacturers have a lock on the market, they make money on software, so they can toss it out below cost. Toshiba tried the same thing with HD-DVD; they could sell at a loss, because they would make it up on software sales. Sony had the PS3 in this market, of course, but it was roughly the same price as early BD players. They didn't sell BD players below cost, and as a result, they developed a conventional hardware market: dozens of manufacturers make BD players. Only Toshiba made HD-DVD players (unless you count the couple of BD players from Samsung that could also handle a subset of the HD-DVD features).
The big problem this set up is that, had Toshiba been successful with HD-DVD, they would have been dependent on their extra HD-DVD income for some time to come... this was the cash needed to offset the loss on the hardware. So HD-DVD media prices would have remained artificially high. Same reason you don't have $10 video games (other than cheap downloads).
Blu-ray is not all that expensive. Blank discs are already well past the point of "no one cares", same thing that happened with DVD. Maybe I pay $0.25 for a DVD5-R in volume and $1.25 for a BD25-R in the same volume (in fact, I do)... the price difference is not enough for me to care, if I want Blu-ray, I use Blu-ray. The incremental difference in price between a new DVD release and a new BD release is also fairly minor. True, you can't find a discount bin of back catalog BDs at Wal-Mart, $5.00 each, as you can with DVDs. But you can certainly find a virtual bin of under $10 BDs at Amazon... really, not that big of a deal.
Blockbuster was already dying on the day Netflix went live with their first streaming video. They had already put a serious hurting on the traditional rental model. Red Box came in finished them off. Together, they account for over 75% of the rental model in the USA. And while streaming is a factor, it's still low quality and very small compared to physical rentals. It's not the physical rental that's the problem, it's making that special trip to the rental store and paying $5-$6 for a rental.
There were all kinds of compatibility issues in the early days of DVD, too. Only, players were generally no upgradeable. Some were widespread, like the lack of compatibility between many players and DVD-R/RW (at least one class of error was due to a bug in the Philips reference code, which was used by many early manufacturers -- if you had a first-gen Pioneer player, these discs played fine. Pioneer developed their own code).
No, not as many issues as BD, simply because the specs were simpler for DVD. But an update is usually available for a BD player (I know Samsung didn't support upgrades for a few early players, but most companies do, and most of the players in the field support online updates). As a video enthusiast and videographer, I lived though the early days of DVD, which were not pretty in this respect. That's why I bought a PS3 as my first BD player -- it was obvious that Sony was using the PS3 as a Blu-ray test bed, since it could do things in software that would have to be supported in HW on a dedicated player. Thus, they would be fast and furious with upgrades... which they have been.
People have been claiming Blu-ray as a failure even before it was out. And as you state, it's matching or besting the rollout of DVD. People forget just how long DVD took to knock VHS down.
The lack of Blu-ray support from Apple is entirely an Apple thing. They want people to support iTunes, not Blu-ray. The tiny bit of money they would have made on video professional who want Blu-ray support (which they can actually get, after-market, on the Mac... Adobe tools support it) pales in comparison to the cash they're pulling in on iOS devices and products. In fact, just the iPad itself brought in as much revenue as the Mac last year... and it wasn't even launched until April.
Sony won specifically because Blu-ray wasn't proprietary. Toshiba and Microsoft ran HD-DVD like a gaming console -- Toshiba sold every player at a loss, which they could, because they got a per-disc royalty. Blu-ray was rapidly licensed... other than the PS3, Sony wasn't even out with a BD player early on (they had to devote their supply of lasers to the PS3).
Blu-ray in PCs wasn't a critical thing, just as DVD in PCs wasn't when DVD was new. PCs only adopt the new consumer formats once the drives hit a comfortable price point. Which is about where Blu-ray drives are these days.
And this is the same evolution as other devices. The pundits do expect Blu-ray player sales to exceed DVD this year, for the simple reason that the CE industry has counted on new DVD features of some kind every year to drive new player sales. Particularly today, your best chance at a new sale is to someone who's already a DVD users. The premium player market was long ago established at around US$100. When 480p players hit the market, they were more expensive, but settled into the $100 niche. Then upscaling players took over that $100 slot. Now it's Blu-ray players... they are, after all, still fully functional DVD players. By Christmas, BD players will hit the $50 mark on sales, then pretty regularly into 2012 -- just as BD players first hit the $100 mark last Christmas, and now are readily available at around $100.
Media sales are another thing... many discs are sold to people with multiple players. You may have that BD player in the livingroom, but DVD players in the car, the kids room, the portable player or PC for vacation use. This has many new BDs bundled with a DVD as well... they'll spend the extra $0.05 to make the BD sales. Disc sales were around 20% last year, depending on the film (films with geek appeal do a significantly higher share of BD sales than, say, chick flicks or kiddie films). This is expected to increase this year.
That's not the whole story, though, because it's also keyed by retailer. Wal-Mart sells the most DVDs in the country, and they're still highly DVD oriented. Best Buy, on the other hand, went over 50% Blu-ray last year, and they continue to grow. DVD sales are skewing toward highly discounted older releases already, and probably keep moving that way. That's one big reason the studios are all about the Blu-ray, even though it hasn't dominated yet. Don't forget, it took quite some time for DVD to replace VHS, and that was without the backward compatibility.
Another related factor: just try to find a standard definition television or camcorder any more. They essentially don't exist. Consumers are moving rapidly toward HD in all things, which starts to make DVD unacceptable, at least for certain films. Same reason I could imagine watching a small cast drama in SD, but wouldn't even bother to watch any pro sport in SD... just doesn't work anymore.
This is what happens when stupid people get elected to Congress. Elections do have consequences. I mean really, did Mr. Jackson just wake up in 2011, after sleeping since 1994? Even then, print media was already being in a large part replaced by visual media, starting with television in the 1950s, and what was left is increasingly in competition with the internet and other digital media sources. Apple's only been doing this for a year... how about the Kindle? The nook? Plain old PCs?
There is no divine right to any market. There was once a vibrant market for horse-drawn buggies in this country. Some of that still exists in Lancaster, PA in support of the Amish, and perhaps a few other places supporting a few other Luddite cultures, but some things need to die. Companies that don't innovate should fail; supporting a dead business model via politics just blocks the way for new tech happening here. It's going to happen anyway, whether digital books or stem cell research. All political interference does is ensure the new industries start up in another country.
That's not a problem for companies who figure out the business they're actually in. If you know you're a Newspaper company, and are determined to ride that sinking ship to its bitter end, you deserve that end. People are moving to other media the same reason they move to other new technology: they find it a better solution. I never drove a horse and buggy. My kids may never use a film camera. I never subscribed to dead-tree newspapers - I just didn't find enough value in all that waste. And yet, I read and watch news media quite a bit, on satellite and online. If the NY Times or Philly Inquirer were pushed to my Android tablet (Notion Ink Adam) every time, I'm at least a potential reader, and the electronic deliver is an advantage over random website visits -- that part of the newspaper/magazine model is a good one, I think. I get more of my professional magazines electronically, and probably won't renew a paper subscription ever again.
That takes these guys realizing that they're actually a media content companies, not newspaper companies. If newprint is just of many forms of a company's media, its inevitable decline if not outright extinction isn't necessarily the end of the company.
There used to be an ad running in EE Times, showing a bunch of gains, with the caption "the larger ones are pepper" -- an add for someone's 0201 passive components, I think. These are 0.6 mm × 0.3 mm, and you can definitely see them, though forget it if you drop one on the floor. Still, much better under a microscope. I once hand soldered an 01005 part (0.4mm x 0.2mm) under a microscope... not easy. And yeah, you can see it without the scope, but not well enough to really recognize it as anything but a spec.
Probably greyscale. They didn't say how large the imager is, but it can't be larger than 1mm x 1mm, probably a bit less, which means even at 250x250 pixels you're dealing with 2um or smaller sensors. From the look of the tiny pinhole of a lens, they're probably already diffraction limited on resolution. To get color using the typical Bayer pattern, you'd need to go to 1um or smaller sensor sites. Ouch!
These little processors use significantly less power than the screen, or even the radio link on a smartphone. Adding cores and shrinking the SOC is still an overall power win... witness the dual-core tablets that are getting the same battery life from the usual 24-25Ah battery that powered last year's tablets. But unless they deal with the screen, and perhaps the growning demand for GPU power, even a zero power CPU is not going give you a 24hr battery life.
The camera's a bit different. You're already diffraction limited on a 5Mpixel sensor at 1/4", particularly given the f2.8 or higher fixed lens on most camera phones. Going to 8Mpixel needs a larger chip, smaller aperture number, or both to make any difference in actual resolution. Other things, like noise, these get better with each generation of sensor anyway, so don't be surprised when 8Mpixel 1/4" chips get reviewed as looking better then the previous ones.
CPUs are getting better, still, and at the same time, lower in power. Most of the power use in a smartphone these days is screen backlight and radio transmit power anyway... if you really want to save on battery, stay away from 4G phones for awhile (at least until they get the LTE chips themselves well behaved... LTE's radio protocols actually will lead to less power on the phone, once they get past that currently expensive bit of DSP work needed to deliver that.
When you take the clock away from a static CMOS device, you pretty much remove all significant power consumption. A well designed multi-core CPU for mobile devices will be able to do exactly this. Now, sure, some of the hotrodded Cortex A8 cores (anything Intrinsity got their hands on) may have NMOS or transistors or dynamic latches, but nothing from ARM directly does -- they're all static.
When I have four cores that only need 500MHz to get the work done, that can be a substantial savings over two going at 1GHz... that allows additional voltage cuts. And stuffing four cores in there, you're definitely dropping to 32nm or 28nm design rules, which means even lower voltage operation in the core. Doing the same work as today's single core chips, these will save power.
Sure, you're going to be able to clobber the battery running the thing balls to the wall.. same as any phone, laptop, or tablet today -- they're all using power management to extend battery life. And that ever faster GPU is doing the same thing, when you use it.
These are not for "phones", they're for the pocket computers we carry around that, by virtue of one out of a dozen peripherals (the cellular modem) and hundreds of applications are still dubbed "smartphones". Face it, they're just as much phones as my 6 core desktop PC with dual 24" monitors and 11.5TB of storage is a computer terminal. Both absolutely are those things, but being able to do that function is not descriptive of the device anymore. Hasn't been, in a long long time. The point of increasing power in the pocket device is that such devices will soon be the primary or only computing device for at least a subset of users.
Look uo Sony Acid... thst is the program Apple copied from, poorly, whrn they created GarageBand. There are demos of paid versions, and a free basic version on acidplanet.com.
And I know what you mean. I have developed code under Linux, and its great place for that. But sometimes I want to record music, edit video, design electronics, etc. and just have it work.. me and the app, with the OS as invisible as possible. I have never had enough patience to get past all the issues, lack of features, incompatibilities, and basic unfinishedness of these non-software-dev type apps on Linux to get to the point of productivity.
That's actually a good example of why Linux in the wild is often confusing and uncoordinated. Rather than one good solution for any given need being pounded into perfection through the FOSS process, there are often several redundant things, none ideal, pulling in different directions, even motivated by politics.
It's only whenyou have a captive Linux, such as Android, that things have pulled enough in the same direction to drive general consumer acceptance. And like it or not, applications of commercial quality, running the gamut of needed areas for general use, only arise when there is a vibrant consumer market. The telling case isn't that Linux hasn't displaced Windows as the leading consumer desktop OS, but that it hasn't displaced distant #2, MacOS.
And there were a couple methodologies developed on the Amiga to deal with the lack of the MMU. Most developers by the later 80s had machines with MMUs, so folks at Commodore developed tools like "Enforcer", which used the MMU to trap memory violations. Other similar tools went after memory leaks, string overruns, etc.
Better still, these tools were released to the general community. Before long, software reviewers always checked for "enforcer hits"... a few of these amounted to a bad review. So the quality of the code being released was generally better than you found on machines with MMUs (in fact, several programs I ported from UNIX to AmigaOS were full of these kinds of bugs -- not necessarily fatal, particularly on a protected system, but bugs still).
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So, I assume that everyone here claiming there's no difference between 1080p and 720p is happily reading Slashdot on a monitor of 1280x720 pixels or less resolution. After all, it doesn't matter. And you DVD fans... still using your PC in original VGA mode, right?
Ok, those who are left... you have proven you can see differences in resolution, or just like wasting money on those expensive HD monitors. If you can't see any difference on Blu-ray, either (a) you're just saying that to justify your low-resolution DVDs, or (b) you're sitting too far from your TV. And that's not just a resolution issue, it's a viewing quality issue. If you follow either the THX or the SMPTE recommendations for seat to screen, which are based on angle of view, you'll get perfectly complete HD at 1080p, and it will look better... just like your PC does.
It might get a little trickier with 4K screens....
66% of US households already have that HDTV. An even higher percentage of PC users do, for those who watch video on computer screens. So no, most people don't need a television upgrade to adopt Blu-ray.
Maybe for Blu-ray in the second room. But Blu-ray players still support older output modes. So as the price falls, that second Blu-ray player may well wind up just for compatibility purposes on the kids' TVs. I know I'd buy another PS3 in a heartbeat if it was $100 or so, just to get my teenage son off my 71" TV.
HD-DVD dual format was only an option -- most did not support it. And since there's usually a DVD tucked into every BD release, it's becoming a rather moot point. There's also an even better technology for BD and DVD on the same disc.... much easier than HD-DVD since Blu-ray uses shallower data layers (HD-DVD had them at the same depth as DVD). I image that standard DVD and BD mastering is so cheap, there's just no point in developing a combo format.
HD-DVD didn't ship until 2006... so of course, the answer was "DVD" in 2003.
It was barely a year and a half from the general availability of HD-DVD players in mid-2006 to the win by Blu-ray in January of 2008. Those were hardcore early adopter times anyway... it's hard to sell that many $400-$500 players, format war or no format war. Things took off quite well afterwards... Blu-ray has been ahead of DVD in adoption rates ever since then.
People just forget how long VHS hung on. In a year or two, every DVD player will also be a Blu-ray player, and people will still be claiming the format is dead... until all of a sudden, Hollywood's secure enough in DVD to start phasing it out, just as they did with VHS.
Captain 80's sez:
Plain and simple. Most people aren't looking to play in great definition on Ferd's 200 inch TV.
And for screens 30" and smaller, digital, while noticeable just isn't enough of an improvement to merit the switchover.
That and the huge install base of VHS players and drives out there is just an 800 lb gorilla that DVD has to struggle to overcome.
Probably not... particularly in a theater with digital projectors. Most cinematic projectors are 2K -- nominally 2000x1000 pixels, essentially the same as Blu-ray and HDTV. A few support 4K resolution, and if you see a 3D film in IMAX, you're probably looking at two separate 2K projects synched together. Of course, if it's on film, you have a half-frame 35mm image there -- probably close to 20Mpixel worth in ideal circumstance. Naturally, no one's printing digital to film at 20Mpixels, but the film (other than generational loss for making prints) isn't the gating factor.
Most people are not limited to SD screens.
As of December 2009, 50% of US households had at least one HDTV. As of early this year, it was over 66% of US households (Market Force Information). But only 15% of households currently own at least one Blu-ray player. Though that 15% accounts for as much as 25% of consumer media sales.
DVD was fantastically better than VHS. Not just the effective 4x increase in resolution, but the real improvement in color and sound.
Not everyone appreciates the quality differences. As a videographer, photographer, and computer developer working in both analog and digital video in the 80s and 90s, I absolutely appreciated the gains in quality, for both VHS->DVD and DVD->Blu-ray. VHS was so heinous I never bought a film on VHS for myself, just my kids. SVHS was more acceptable in the day, but of course, only useful for finished videos I made myself, there was no commercial pre-recorded content.
DVD changed everything. It wasn't simply a vast improvement over VHS and SVHS, it was random access, digital, and optical. Now, as well as using DVD for a delivery medium, I bought films on DVD. Just stuff I know I'd like to watch again... some folks think they need to buy everything on disc, but really, if there's no repeat watching, you might as well rent or see it in the theater (then again, with a Blu-ray new release generally cheaper than a night for two at the theater, my home screen growing, cinemaplex screens shrinking, and features increasingly being shown in 2K digital -- essentially the same quality as Blu-ray -- there's less reason to travel to a theater).
And I've been making and buying Blu-ray discs, pretty much since Sony won the format wars. With all my video great HD for the last 6+ years, it's silly to consider SD on DVD as the only physical delivery medium. And you take such a hit in quality delivering it online.
I re-bought only a handful of films... largely because Warner Bros. offered a $5-$7 upgrade. And it was something I would appreciate in HD, and watch multiple times.
Thing is, you can't really buy a standard def TV anymore... maybe those $50 5-7" Chinese digital televisions technically qualify. And LCD TV prices have been plummeting, largely due to far more advanced panel making technology. The idea that "you can't tell the difference on my TV" is a rapidly fading possibility. Those analog televisions will fail, and won't be repaired. They'll be replaced by HD units.
HD-DVD wasn't "cheaper all around"... it was artificially cheaper, only. Toshiba (partnered with Microsoft) was treating HD-DVD as their own gaming console. Everyone knows that game consoles are subsidized when they're new ... the manufacturers have a lock on the market, they make money on software, so they can toss it out below cost. Toshiba tried the same thing with HD-DVD; they could sell at a loss, because they would make it up on software sales. Sony had the PS3 in this market, of course, but it was roughly the same price as early BD players. They didn't sell BD players below cost, and as a result, they developed a conventional hardware market: dozens of manufacturers make BD players. Only Toshiba made HD-DVD players (unless you count the couple of BD players from Samsung that could also handle a subset of the HD-DVD features).
The big problem this set up is that, had Toshiba been successful with HD-DVD, they would have been dependent on their extra HD-DVD income for some time to come... this was the cash needed to offset the loss on the hardware. So HD-DVD media prices would have remained artificially high. Same reason you don't have $10 video games (other than cheap downloads).
Blu-ray is not all that expensive. Blank discs are already well past the point of "no one cares", same thing that happened with DVD. Maybe I pay $0.25 for a DVD5-R in volume and $1.25 for a BD25-R in the same volume (in fact, I do)... the price difference is not enough for me to care, if I want Blu-ray, I use Blu-ray. The incremental difference in price between a new DVD release and a new BD release is also fairly minor. True, you can't find a discount bin of back catalog BDs at Wal-Mart, $5.00 each, as you can with DVDs. But you can certainly find a virtual bin of under $10 BDs at Amazon... really, not that big of a deal.
Blockbuster was already dying on the day Netflix went live with their first streaming video. They had already put a serious hurting on the traditional rental model. Red Box came in finished them off. Together, they account for over 75% of the rental model in the USA. And while streaming is a factor, it's still low quality and very small compared to physical rentals. It's not the physical rental that's the problem, it's making that special trip to the rental store and paying $5-$6 for a rental.
There were all kinds of compatibility issues in the early days of DVD, too. Only, players were generally no upgradeable. Some were widespread, like the lack of compatibility between many players and DVD-R/RW (at least one class of error was due to a bug in the Philips reference code, which was used by many early manufacturers -- if you had a first-gen Pioneer player, these discs played fine. Pioneer developed their own code).
No, not as many issues as BD, simply because the specs were simpler for DVD. But an update is usually available for a BD player (I know Samsung didn't support upgrades for a few early players, but most companies do, and most of the players in the field support online updates). As a video enthusiast and videographer, I lived though the early days of DVD, which were not pretty in this respect. That's why I bought a PS3 as my first BD player -- it was obvious that Sony was using the PS3 as a Blu-ray test bed, since it could do things in software that would have to be supported in HW on a dedicated player. Thus, they would be fast and furious with upgrades... which they have been.
People have been claiming Blu-ray as a failure even before it was out. And as you state, it's matching or besting the rollout of DVD. People forget just how long DVD took to knock VHS down.
The lack of Blu-ray support from Apple is entirely an Apple thing. They want people to support iTunes, not Blu-ray. The tiny bit of money they would have made on video professional who want Blu-ray support (which they can actually get, after-market, on the Mac ... Adobe tools support it) pales in comparison to the cash they're pulling in on iOS devices and products. In fact, just the iPad itself brought in as much revenue as the Mac last year... and it wasn't even launched until April.
Sony won specifically because Blu-ray wasn't proprietary. Toshiba and Microsoft ran HD-DVD like a gaming console -- Toshiba sold every player at a loss, which they could, because they got a per-disc royalty. Blu-ray was rapidly licensed... other than the PS3, Sony wasn't even out with a BD player early on (they had to devote their supply of lasers to the PS3).
Blu-ray in PCs wasn't a critical thing, just as DVD in PCs wasn't when DVD was new. PCs only adopt the new consumer formats once the drives hit a comfortable price point. Which is about where Blu-ray drives are these days.
And this is the same evolution as other devices. The pundits do expect Blu-ray player sales to exceed DVD this year, for the simple reason that the CE industry has counted on new DVD features of some kind every year to drive new player sales. Particularly today, your best chance at a new sale is to someone who's already a DVD users. The premium player market was long ago established at around US$100. When 480p players hit the market, they were more expensive, but settled into the $100 niche. Then upscaling players took over that $100 slot. Now it's Blu-ray players... they are, after all, still fully functional DVD players. By Christmas, BD players will hit the $50 mark on sales, then pretty regularly into 2012 -- just as BD players first hit the $100 mark last Christmas, and now are readily available at around $100.
Media sales are another thing... many discs are sold to people with multiple players. You may have that BD player in the livingroom, but DVD players in the car, the kids room, the portable player or PC for vacation use. This has many new BDs bundled with a DVD as well... they'll spend the extra $0.05 to make the BD sales. Disc sales were around 20% last year, depending on the film (films with geek appeal do a significantly higher share of BD sales than, say, chick flicks or kiddie films). This is expected to increase this year.
That's not the whole story, though, because it's also keyed by retailer. Wal-Mart sells the most DVDs in the country, and they're still highly DVD oriented. Best Buy, on the other hand, went over 50% Blu-ray last year, and they continue to grow. DVD sales are skewing toward highly discounted older releases already, and probably keep moving that way. That's one big reason the studios are all about the Blu-ray, even though it hasn't dominated yet. Don't forget, it took quite some time for DVD to replace VHS, and that was without the backward compatibility.
Another related factor: just try to find a standard definition television or camcorder any more. They essentially don't exist. Consumers are moving rapidly toward HD in all things, which starts to make DVD unacceptable, at least for certain films. Same reason I could imagine watching a small cast drama in SD, but wouldn't even bother to watch any pro sport in SD... just doesn't work anymore.
This is what happens when stupid people get elected to Congress. Elections do have consequences. I mean really, did Mr. Jackson just wake up in 2011, after sleeping since 1994? Even then, print media was already being in a large part replaced by visual media, starting with television in the 1950s, and what was left is increasingly in competition with the internet and other digital media sources. Apple's only been doing this for a year... how about the Kindle? The nook? Plain old PCs?
There is no divine right to any market. There was once a vibrant market for horse-drawn buggies in this country. Some of that still exists in Lancaster, PA in support of the Amish, and perhaps a few other places supporting a few other Luddite cultures, but some things need to die. Companies that don't innovate should fail; supporting a dead business model via politics just blocks the way for new tech happening here. It's going to happen anyway, whether digital books or stem cell research. All political interference does is ensure the new industries start up in another country.
That's not a problem for companies who figure out the business they're actually in. If you know you're a Newspaper company, and are determined to ride that sinking ship to its bitter end, you deserve that end. People are moving to other media the same reason they move to other new technology: they find it a better solution. I never drove a horse and buggy. My kids may never use a film camera. I never subscribed to dead-tree newspapers - I just didn't find enough value in all that waste. And yet, I read and watch news media quite a bit, on satellite and online. If the NY Times or Philly Inquirer were pushed to my Android tablet (Notion Ink Adam) every time, I'm at least a potential reader, and the electronic deliver is an advantage over random website visits -- that part of the newspaper/magazine model is a good one, I think. I get more of my professional magazines electronically, and probably won't renew a paper subscription ever again.
That takes these guys realizing that they're actually a media content companies, not newspaper companies. If newprint is just of many forms of a company's media, its inevitable decline if not outright extinction isn't necessarily the end of the company.
There used to be an ad running in EE Times, showing a bunch of gains, with the caption "the larger ones are pepper" -- an add for someone's 0201 passive components, I think. These are 0.6 mm × 0.3 mm, and you can definitely see them, though forget it if you drop one on the floor. Still, much better under a microscope. I once hand soldered an 01005 part (0.4mm x 0.2mm) under a microscope... not easy. And yeah, you can see it without the scope, but not well enough to really recognize it as anything but a spec.
Probably greyscale. They didn't say how large the imager is, but it can't be larger than 1mm x 1mm, probably a bit less, which means even at 250x250 pixels you're dealing with 2um or smaller sensors. From the look of the tiny pinhole of a lens, they're probably already diffraction limited on resolution. To get color using the typical Bayer pattern, you'd need to go to 1um or smaller sensor sites. Ouch!
These little processors use significantly less power than the screen, or even the radio link on a smartphone. Adding cores and shrinking the SOC is still an overall power win... witness the dual-core tablets that are getting the same battery life from the usual 24-25Ah battery that powered last year's tablets. But unless they deal with the screen, and perhaps the growning demand for GPU power, even a zero power CPU is not going give you a 24hr battery life.
The camera's a bit different. You're already diffraction limited on a 5Mpixel sensor at 1/4", particularly given the f2.8 or higher fixed lens on most camera phones. Going to 8Mpixel needs a larger chip, smaller aperture number, or both to make any difference in actual resolution. Other things, like noise, these get better with each generation of sensor anyway, so don't be surprised when 8Mpixel 1/4" chips get reviewed as looking better then the previous ones.
CPUs are getting better, still, and at the same time, lower in power. Most of the power use in a smartphone these days is screen backlight and radio transmit power anyway... if you really want to save on battery, stay away from 4G phones for awhile (at least until they get the LTE chips themselves well behaved... LTE's radio protocols actually will lead to less power on the phone, once they get past that currently expensive bit of DSP work needed to deliver that.
When you take the clock away from a static CMOS device, you pretty much remove all significant power consumption. A well designed multi-core CPU for mobile devices will be able to do exactly this. Now, sure, some of the hotrodded Cortex A8 cores (anything Intrinsity got their hands on) may have NMOS or transistors or dynamic latches, but nothing from ARM directly does -- they're all static.
When I have four cores that only need 500MHz to get the work done, that can be a substantial savings over two going at 1GHz... that allows additional voltage cuts. And stuffing four cores in there, you're definitely dropping to 32nm or 28nm design rules, which means even lower voltage operation in the core. Doing the same work as today's single core chips, these will save power.
Sure, you're going to be able to clobber the battery running the thing balls to the wall.. same as any phone, laptop, or tablet today -- they're all using power management to extend battery life. And that ever faster GPU is doing the same thing, when you use it.
These are not for "phones", they're for the pocket computers we carry around that, by virtue of one out of a dozen peripherals (the cellular modem) and hundreds of applications are still dubbed "smartphones". Face it, they're just as much phones as my 6 core desktop PC with dual 24" monitors and 11.5TB of storage is a computer terminal. Both absolutely are those things, but being able to do that function is not descriptive of the device anymore. Hasn't been, in a long long time. The point of increasing power in the pocket device is that such devices will soon be the primary or only computing device for at least a subset of users.
Look uo Sony Acid... thst is the program Apple copied from, poorly, whrn they created GarageBand. There are demos of paid versions, and a free basic version on acidplanet.com.
And I know what you mean. I have developed code under Linux, and its great place for that. But sometimes I want to record music, edit video, design electronics, etc. and just have it work.. me and the app, with the OS as invisible as possible. I have never had enough patience to get past all the issues, lack of features, incompatibilities, and basic unfinishedness of these non-software-dev type apps on Linux to get to the point of productivity.
That's actually a good example of why Linux in the wild is often confusing and uncoordinated. Rather than one good solution for any given need being pounded into perfection through the FOSS process, there are often several redundant things, none ideal, pulling in different directions, even motivated by politics.
It's only whenyou have a captive Linux, such as Android, that things have pulled enough in the same direction to drive general consumer acceptance. And like it or not, applications of commercial quality, running the gamut of needed areas for general use, only arise when there is a vibrant consumer market. The telling case isn't that Linux hasn't displaced Windows as the leading consumer desktop OS, but that it hasn't displaced distant #2, MacOS.
And there were a couple methodologies developed on the Amiga to deal with the lack of the MMU. Most developers by the later 80s had machines with MMUs, so folks at Commodore developed tools like "Enforcer", which used the MMU to trap memory violations. Other similar tools went after memory leaks, string overruns, etc.
Better still, these tools were released to the general community. Before long, software reviewers always checked for "enforcer hits"... a few of these amounted to a bad review. So the quality of the code being released was generally better than you found on machines with MMUs (in fact, several programs I ported from UNIX to AmigaOS were full of these kinds of bugs -- not necessarily fatal, particularly on a protected system, but bugs still).