Actually, HD-DVD was weird, and you have to look at it as what it was... Toshiba's proprietary format. They subsudized the cost of the players, directly, like Sony does for the PS3 or Microsoft for the X-Box 360. The goal, of course, was to make it up on licensing fees... Toshiba collected most of those, so they could do this. That, however, prevented anyone else (well, aside from Samsung's dual-mode players, which cost more than one of each) from competing in the HD-DVD player market.
Sony was brilliant here. They could subsudize the PS3 as any old gaming platform, keep it as the cheapest Blu-Ray player for a few years, and yet let the hardware market for dedicated units follows its natural course. Thus, every CE company except Toshiba joined the Blu-Ray alliance, and they all made players, and you got the same kind of dynamic that the DVD market had, rather than something controlled only by Toshiba.
The other side is the disc market... Toshiba claimed a price advantage, and they had it for a short time. Today, that's long gone.. the cost of a BD vs. an HD-DVD vs. a plain old DVD is negligable in Hollywood quantities. Hell, I can put a DVD in a case with pro-looking labels and all for under $5.00, quantity one. But the ugly side of Toshiba's strategy is that they could never really give you a lower media cost, because they counted on extra licensing fees per disc... they had to, since they lost money selling you the cheap players in an effort to defeat Sony.
The other thing up Sony's sleeve was that Blu-Ray really had been out for three years already... they had already become pretty good at making the discs, at least the readers and the BD-Rs... I guess BD-ROMs had a few early glitches in 2007 (they didn't get dual layer until early 2008). The disc technology was the basis of their XDCAM format, released in 2003.
So Toshiba's two big advantages were ultimately not advantages. And we should all be glad Sony won.
Well, yeah. So how about this... Toshiba made a grand total of 300,000 HD-DVD drives for the X-Box 360, world wide. Last quarter, 400,000 stand-alone Blu-Ray players were sold in the USA alone. That should answer why no one really cares about how many HD-DVD drives were sold for X-Boxen.
If you buy a cakebox of 25 BD25-Rs, you can get 'em for just under $3.00 each, or just over $25 each for printable surfaces. This makes them more expensive than DVD-Rs per bit, a bit more expensive than internal HDDs, and just about the same per bit as large external HDDs.
But in six months, they'll be much cheaper per bit than those same HDDs.
The player/recorder for the Japanese market sold in 2003 was using essentially the same Blu-Ray media, but in cartridges.. they hadn't figured out the hard-coating yet, and had to protect the discs. Plus, it was very different firmware -- no Java, no AVC, no VC-1... MPEG-2 only. They sold these recorder/players for time-shifting satellite HDTV.. that's all they did.
I could also mentioned Sony's XDCAM video format, which also uses Blu-Ray-like discs (called "Professional Discs"), and also came out in 2003. But that's also MPEG-2 IMX only, and at that, totally different than the consumer BD format.
If they're identical HDTVs, you're probably not crippling DVD much. All digital TVs do internal up/down scaling anyway, most also do inverse telecine on 24p material that was pulled down to send over at 60i. Digital displays don't directly support interlaced video, you need good 2D rescaling to avoid pixelization of SD material, most run at 60Hz if not 120Hz refresh these days. A digital link from your DVD player helps, and sure, there are upscalers of different quality out there, but it's actually kind of hard to not upscale a DVD on a modern TV today. The upscaler in the DVD player was largely a way to sell new DVD players to people who already had them.
I think there are a bunch of different ideas on what's optimal; some are simply used by salescritters trying to upsell you a larger TV. Others have history.
I would favor the use of either SMPTE standard EG-18-1994 or the THX certification standard. Both of these are concerned with the viewing angle, both really created for theatre setups, but applicable to the TV. THX requires a 26 degree viewing angle, and recommends a 37 degree viewing angle. SMPTE recommends a 30 degree viewing angle.
As for visual acuity, a nomally sighted person (20/20 vision) can detect or resolve details as small as 1/60th of a degree of arc... yeah, one arc-minute.
So, you put these together and, magically, produce numbers for ideal viewing distance based on the size of the screen. And from that, you can use the resolving power of the human eye to suggest the limits on your vision. Now, of course, this is based on one's vision... a poorly sighted person will have to sit much closer to fully resolve the picture (possibly too close... there are also numbers for maximum viewing angle), and Superman can watch from the other side of a football field and still get the full 1080p effect.
I tend to agree... if I have want to own the disc, I buy the Blu-Ray. That means there's a really good shot at me wanting to watch it over and over... I don't buy all that many, just the best stuff. I also got Blu-Ray because, after three years of shooting HD video, I could finally author projects to the specs of the final HD consumer deliver format. No more hand hacking WMV/HD javascript and HTML code!
I would love to rent Blu-Ray in-store. Unfortunately, the local creatins who watch only DVD apparently all went to Netflix, so our local "largest major national video chain" store closed down, and given that they managed to put all the local guys out of business, I have to drive 15 minutes to rent, rather than five. That's annoying enough, I don't do it much.
Next... I'll just wait for it to be on HD satellite. True, it's downrezzed a bit, but at least in general, Dish Network isn't crapifying their HD to the extent of folks like Comcast. It's still good, and their PVR is nice enough to let me dump stuff off to a spare 750GB HDD, for viewing later. They have HD PPV, too, and even 1080/24p "rentals" that play from the PVR itself (not quite BD quality, but really close, other than the fact it's still plain old 5.1 AC-3 audio)... but they charge enough for PPV, it would tempt me back to the BD.
Formats live or die on profits, not unit sales. DVD profits have been down for awhile, given that the majority of DVDs sell at heavy discount these days. Wal-Mart, for example, sells 40% of the DVDs in the USA... quite a few, I'm sure, in those $5.00 and $10.00 bins.
Some companies, like Best Buy, are already making more profits on Blu-Ray than on DVD. It's actually possible... no guarantees, but possible, that the industry will make more profit on Blu-Ray than DVD in 2009. And it's a virtual certainty in 2010.
Yeah, this has quite a bit to do with DVDs selling cheaper than ever, while Blu-Ray discs are in the $25-$35 retail niche that DVD was in a few years ago. These two facts are not just a coincidence... consumers willing to spend $25+ on a video buy Blu-Ray, those who won't go over $10 didn't spend the money for Blu-Ray gear yet.
If that's your conclusion... someone messed up. Toshoba only mad 1.3 million HD-DVDs... that's world-wide, stand-alone, X-Box, PC drive, everything. There were about 10.7 million Blu-Ray players in the USA as of January 1, 2009... including an estimated 3.1 million stand-alone players. In the first quarter, another 400,000 were sold.
I think it's far more likely that the fools who answered this survey (think about it, too... this was a survey of people's opinions about their gear at home, not a factual analysis of what they really had) knew no difference between "HD-DVD" and "DVD player with HDMI upconversion". While someone can usually fudge sales figures if they like, Toshiba published the 1.3 million figure last year, and had no reason to lie about it, and they certainly weren't confused about the question.
The PS3 is certainly a gaming platform. It's also very much a first class Blu-Ray player, and planned as such. Sony did, in effect, throw their gaming division under a bus with the PS3 in order to ensure a likely win for the Blu-Ray format -- which was, of course, their baby, too.
One way you can tell is that, sure, while the PS2 played DVDs, it was a craptastic DVD player, even with the remote. The PS3 is about anything I'd want in a Blu-Ray player.. no compromises, it even does all of the audio format decoding on-board, which let me save $100 on an amplifier upgrade (HDMI support for 7.1 discrete PCM, no need for DolbyTS or any of the new formats). They've also kept the software up-to-date, making the PS3 a great machine for video enthusiasts (it'll play HD camcorder files over my gigabite wired network, or from flash cards, it does WMV and MP4/AVC, MP4/ASP, and DiVX video, etc). And sure, it does play games, I even have a couple.... along with over 50 BDMV discs.
It's looking like this was a smart move in gaming, too, in the longrun. The PS3 has overtaking the X-Box 360 in unit sales in Europe, despite the late arrival. It got a guy like me putting a game machine in his media room... never would have happened without the Blu-Ray. There are now games for the PS3 that use the whole 50GB of a dual-layer BD... you can't do that in any practical way on an X-Box.
Blu-Ray offers two flavors of lossless compressed audio, and of course, fully uncompressed surround-sound as well. Naturally, someone will claim it's no better than DVD, while listening though the built-in speakers on their 19" analog TV from Wal-Mart. Just as with the video, you need the right audio support to hear the advantage. And a well mastered disc, of course. If you already have this, and you can hear the sometimes VAST improvement of DTS over AC-3 (sometimes not.. depends very much on the material and the encoding done), well, on my system at least, it's better still. To the point where I'm thinking about new speakers... they're now the weakest link in the system.
This also has me buying lost of music on BD, whereas before, I usually just bought the CD, rather than the DVD... well, unless I knew from reviews they had a surround-sound mix you just had to hear.
Well, damn... I thought I bought a Blu-Ray player, and got a game console tossed in there for free. I mean, seriously... a year ago, the PS3 was downright cheap compared to most BD players. Plus, it had networked playing, it could play BD file structures from flash memory cards (well, the old 80GB model... not made anymore) -- I shoot video, I like to preview on a real TV, so these were top features for me. And of course, the fact that Sony uses the PS3 to work out Blu-Ray issues for their stand-alone models, thus ensuring all new features possible and the first bug fixes would show up first on the PS3.
The kids get the X-Box 360 and the Wii... they have to ask to use my PS3.
The PS3 does a great job of upscaling DVDs... it's actually the first upscaler that (in my expert opinion) outperformed those built-in on every single HDTV as stock (ok, even those vary, but a top HDTV model has a great upscaler built-in). But it's silly to claim it looks "just as good"... time for either a real HDTV or glasses.
1) Once bandwidth and/or compatibility issues are resolved, the preferred medium for video will be SuperVHS. 2) Can't rip or make backup copies the way it's possible to with VHS (legality notwithstanding). 3) Ubiquity of VHS readers. I have four devices that can read VHS, including my VHS Camcorder, my Telebikko, $50 HQ VHS player, and TV+VHS player. Since I don't have a PS2 (don't plan on getting one) or a $350 DVD player (don't plan on getting one) I need to go out of my way to get one. 4) My existing movie collection is all VHS. I have no desire to start replacing it, as I finally caved in recently and starting replacing 3 of my 8mm films with VHS tapes. 5) HQ VHS player makes my VHS tapes look great on my 26 inch Faroujda-enhanced TV. Granted, it's not as good a DVD, but I'm not a videophile, so I probably won't see a significant difference.
The movie studios will have to address all of the above if they hope to convert me to DVD.
----- (oh... note from the future... you can back up your Blu-Ray discs with exactly the same legalities and problems as your DVDs. Only, they're far more rugged, so you can save that $3/BD-R cost and not back 'em up, if backing up is your real concern).
If the movies are cheaper than renting, go for it. If not... do consider that, when the laser dies on that HD-DVD player (and it will), you most likely lose those movies for good, unless you've managed to either rip them to another format (which means finding the even rarer HD-DVD PC drive) or you've found a still-working used HD-DVD player on eBay, at a yard sale, etc.
I don't buy any videos I don't expect to watch several times... I expect them to by playable well into the future. A buck or two for an HD-DVD, maybe.. beyond that, I'd get the Blu-Ray... or even the DVD.
If you're only viewing HD on Apple TV and a 720p screen, you haven't really seen HD. It's not your screen size... I have a 1200p 24" computer monitor that shows HDTV just dandy... good enough for editing, not simply viewing. It's when you're viewing that 27" TV across the room that's the problem.
Just as a data point, Best Buy is selling between 40% and 50% of all retail Blu-Ray discs, and they're selling at or close to the full $25-$35 retail. Compare that to Wal-Mart's 40% of the DVD market, at heavy discounts. Best Buy is, already, making far more profit on BD than DVD... not in per unit terms, but total. That's why you see so much space devoted to BD... they're making more cash on BD than they are on DVD. And it's a growing business, while DVD sales are shrinking.
Troll much? This was clearly a faulty survey... and really, why get all excited about a survey of some otherwise unexplained but small group of people. Like any survey, the results tell you something about the group being surveyed, but it may not be that interesting on an absolutely scale. And so you can't even begin to extrapolate to the whole USA, or you'll just sound foolish. What the survey definitely seems to tells us... more Harris Interactive poll takers have HD-DVD stand-alone players than Blu-Ray.
But hey, this is public info... why not just do the math? About 500,000 stand-alone Blu-Ray players were sold prior to 2008, world-wide (Blu-Ray Disc Association Press Release, CES 2008). At the start of 2008, the HD-DVD players were ahead, though even by then, the Blu-Ray market had the numbers, if you added in PS3s. And it showed... at the start of 2008, BD software was outselling HD-DVD 2:1. Add in the PS3s, and that's about 10.7 million players in US homes at the end of 2008 (BDA again), including a total of 3.1 million stand-alone players (Adams Media Research).
And keep adding... stand-alone Blu-Ray player sales for 1Q09 topped 400,000 in the USA alone. That's nearly as many as all of the dedicated HD-DVD players ever sold in the US market (widely distributed press release, here's one example: http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_090506.html). Sony did 2.5 million PS3s in the same quarter, worldwide... I couldn't find US figures, but they're still doing a nice business, even with stand-alone Blu-Ray players a better deal these days (when the PS3 was the cheapest BD player on the market, it was kind of a no-brainer). So we're closing in if not already passed the 12 million mark on Blu-Ray players in the USA, including PS3s.
At the press conference in 2008, Toshiba's announcement of discontinuing the HD-DVD, they gave numbers:
At the press conference, Atsutoshi Nishida also revealed total HD-DVD hardware sales worldwide, facts previously made opaque in officially announcements. A grand total of 1.3-million HD-DVD players sold worldwide breaks down to 300k Xbox 360 drives, 300k PC drives, 600k dedicated US players, 100k dedicated Euro players, and 30,000 dedicated Japanese players. Against the more than 10-million Blu-ray players in circulation, HD-DVD was indeed fighting an uphill battle in the format war. Nishida also commented that Toshiba has "no plan at all this moment" to begin supporting Blu-ray.
Keep in mind... Toshiba made ALL the HD-DVD players other than the Samsung dual-more players. It seemed like an open spec, but with Toshiba heavily subsusizing their hardware in order to beat Blu-Ray on price, no one else could hope to compete. So no one else did... they all went to the Blu-Ray camp.
And so there are nearly 10x as many Blu-Ray capable players in the USA now as all of the HD-DVD players that will ever be made, world-wide. But even looking at dedicated players, there are over 2.5x more dedicated Blu-Ray players sold in the USA now than Toshiba made HD-DVD players for the whole world. This post was nothing but a troll.. the post itself might even have mentioned that this result was from a poll, not an actual examination of published or tracked sales figures.
First, of all.. "blu-ray isn't doing any good"... projected sales of 100 million discs in 2009, $800 million in player sales (not including PS3s), and at least for some vendors, more PROFITs on BD vs. DVD on an absolute level, you can bet that Blu-Ray is "doing well".
Now, for the other fallacies:
Most people DO have HDTVs... but even more important, most people who actually spend money do have HDTVs. If I'm selling discs, it doesn't matter to me what TV you have if you don't buy anything. In 2007, 25% of US households had at least one HDTV. This grew to 34% in 2008 and . The adoption of HDTV has been faster than that of color TV in the USA, and that's all based on data before the analog switch-off. But it's true today that the only non-HD sets left on the market are tiny portables (even they're required by law to sport digital tuners, of course). If you're too cheap to buy an HDTV, you probably don't care enough about television to be a significant DVD buyer, either. That's why gear sales or installed base are less of a real predictor on the health of the market than media sales.
DVD costs less, that's true. Too much less, in fact... Wal-Mart sells over 40% of all DVDs in the USA, at heavily discounted prices. Best Buy sells nearly 50% of the Blu-Ray discs these days, at the $25 to $35 price point, full retail. You may not consider Blu-Ray a good deal, but for those of us who do, it's right where the DVD was not so long ago. More to the point, this means that retailers and Hollywood, Inc. are making dramatically more loot on a Blu-Ray than a DVD...the materials cost difference is minor. So Best But this year will make substantially more money on Blu-Rays than DVDs, on an absolute scale. It's even possible that Hollywood, Inc. will make more on Blu-Rays than DVDs this year. That's a significant tipping point, and it doesn't require 50% or even 25% of unit sales to be Blue-Ray, as long as Blu-Rays remain 5x-6x more profitable. And this is all that matters for the health of the format.
Blu-Ray players are not THAT expensive. Consumers don't buy on an absolute scale... they buy based on various psychological thresholds. This is why you find prices clustered at $99.99, $199.99, etc. in consumer electronics. Entry-level Blu-Ray players are routinely available below $200, and are closing in on the magical sub-$100 price point (that's for Christmas 2009). That's also where upscaling players were largely clustered a year or so ago.. well below the "impulse buy" threshold for entertainment electronics. Less than most iPods, to put it in prespective.
As for display size vs. preceived resolution, you're missing the critical factor: viewing distance. If you're too far away, you can't tell 1080p from 720p. Move further still, and you can't tell 720p from 480p. Thing is, at the proper viewing distance for your screen, you can always tell 1080p from 720p and 720p from 480p. Think computer screen... I'm in front of a 17" 1050p screen (1680x1050) at normal laptop-user screen... you better bet this is dramatically better than my old 780p laptop screen. And it's visually lower resolution than the dual 1200p (1920x100) 24" monitors at home.
Naturally, if I put my 24" monitor where my 71" DLP is, walked across the room and sat in the theatre chair, I couldn't tell HD from SD... well, I could tell digital from CVBS or Y/C analog, based on the color gamut... but I digress. There are commonly known rules for normally sighted people and viewing distance. Any old home theatre site will give a you calculator for this; Engadget made this nice chart some years back: http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/12/09/1080p-charted-viewing-distance-to-screen-size . So, for example, if you're 15ft from a TV, and it's smaller than 50", you might was well not have HDTV. Sure, there's some "mileage may vary" factor based on eyesight... but as long as folks continue to be blown away by the picture on my TV on good HD material, I pretty much know I'm doing it right, even without the math. Of course, that's just on
Most Blu-Rays from film are 1080/24p, which is certainly superior to either 1080/60i or 720p, for the purposes of viewing a film. All digital television technologies are progressive-only, anyway, so they're going to internally scale to 1080p or 720p or 960p or whatever the actual display resolution is, anyway. Nearly all handle 60fps, anything out in the last year probably supports 120fps, and they've been doing inverse telecine on 24p material shipped out as 60i anyway for some time.
The real problems are resolution and compression. While it's true that for a few things, 720/60p is better than 1080/60i (both being ATSC broadcast modes), that "better" is largely limited to fast action where resolution isn't important. So for autoracing, sure. Tennis, certainly. Golf... who cares? Cinema.. nope. Football (either kind), nope. Baseball.. action? Hockey... maybe. Anyway, the original 720p argument came primarily from ABC, by way of ESPN, because they wanted the 60p for action. No one else found half the spatial data to be so compelling, even at half the temporal data rate.
What you'll find online, though, is usually 720/30p... the worst of both worlds.
Also, the HD-DVD players did have a head-start. And yeah, they were cheaper, because Toshbia made each and every one of them, and to they subsudized the costs, just as Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft typically do for consoles on release... in both cases, they made it up on disc royalties. Or would have, if they HD-DVD had been the winner.
The real telling factors, even in late 2007, while the HD-DVD players had more installed units than Blu-Ray (PS3s included), the Blu-Ray disc sales were 2:1 over HD-DVD. See, that's the problem with selling cheap... you're selling to cheapsakes. Everyone knew that BD was suprior to HD-DVD (in the true, same video formats, though higher potential bitrates on BD, but the BD disc is more durable and much higher capacity), so the low-end folks went HD-DVD and the high-end folks went Blu-Ray. And guess what... high end buyers spend more... imagine that.
Then you have to couple in the fire sales at the start of 2008, when the format war was all but over. Toshiba unloaded their HD-DVD players cheap, often for less than the price of a top-quality upscaling DVD player. So many folks bought HD-DVD players to use as plain old DVD players near the end, never intending to buy HD-DVD. In fact, that would be rather foolish... even when the HD-DVD discs were pushed out cheap, one has to realize that, in two or three years, when the blue-violet laser dies in your discount HD-DVD player, that's it... no more HD-DVD players, 'sept maybe the used dregs on eBay or the local flea market.
According to the CEA, Blu-Ray players are expected to comprise about 10% of worldwide sales of DVD players in 2009, reaching about $800 million in sales. That will result in a doubling of the installed base from the end of 2008. And it's not just in the USA... projections are on target for 2.5 million players being sold in Europe this year... excluding PS3 sales, which are also growing in Europe. In fact, the PS3's installed base beat that of the X-Box 360 last summer in Europe, and has sold at about double the X-Box 360 rate (total: over 10 million units as of 2/2009, including the UK).
More critical to the success of the format, though, are disc sales. They're expecting to top 100 millions discs sold in 2009. But even more importantly, it's actually possible that overall profits from Blu-Ray will exceed those of DVD this year -- largely because the vast bulk of DVD sales are at the discout level (Wal-Mart accounts for 40% of all DVDs sold in the USA), while Blu-Rays are still largely sold at the $25-$35 price point once occupied by DVDs (Best Buy is currently selling close to 50% of all retail BDs in the USA... they're already making considerably more on BDs than on DVDs).
It's also not quite right to consider HDD delivered media without really considering HDD costs. Sure, if I'm making my own, a 25GB BD-R runs around $3.00 if you buy a small cakebox... maybe a bit more if you want printable. So that's $0.12 per gigabyte. Today on Newegg, I can get a 1.5TB HDD internal for $130, so that's 0.09 per gigabyte, a bit better, though falling in cost much slower. If I don't have a spare drive bay, I see $110 for a 1TB external drive... not too shabby, but that's now $0.11 per gigabyte, practically the same.
But now think about actually paying for HD video. Forget the problem with getting your ISP to think it's ok to download hundreds of gigbytes per month... or the time, or the load on your system. Let's go for it and get a disc set I actually have on Blu-Ray: "Lost: Season 3". That cost me $39.95 last year on BD, from Amazon, with free shipping. That's on six 50GB discs, so it's definitely less than 300GB. That 300GB would cost me an additional $36, today, if I made my own BDs, $33 on the cheap external drive, or $27 on the cheap internal drive.
But here's the big problem: I can get a cheap price at Amazon on BDs because they're in direct competition with other vendors of the same disc. This is kind of happening in music downloads, too, primarily due to the lifting of the DRM
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, HD-DVD was weird, and you have to look at it as what it was... Toshiba's proprietary format. They subsudized the cost of the players, directly, like Sony does for the PS3 or Microsoft for the X-Box 360. The goal, of course, was to make it up on licensing fees... Toshiba collected most of those, so they could do this. That, however, prevented anyone else (well, aside from Samsung's dual-mode players, which cost more than one of each) from competing in the HD-DVD player market.
Sony was brilliant here. They could subsudize the PS3 as any old gaming platform, keep it as the cheapest Blu-Ray player for a few years, and yet let the hardware market for dedicated units follows its natural course. Thus, every CE company except Toshiba joined the Blu-Ray alliance, and they all made players, and you got the same kind of dynamic that the DVD market had, rather than something controlled only by Toshiba.
The other side is the disc market... Toshiba claimed a price advantage, and they had it for a short time. Today, that's long gone.. the cost of a BD vs. an HD-DVD vs. a plain old DVD is negligable in Hollywood quantities. Hell, I can put a DVD in a case with pro-looking labels and all for under $5.00, quantity one. But the ugly side of Toshiba's strategy is that they could never really give you a lower media cost, because they counted on extra licensing fees per disc... they had to, since they lost money selling you the cheap players in an effort to defeat Sony.
The other thing up Sony's sleeve was that Blu-Ray really had been out for three years already... they had already become pretty good at making the discs, at least the readers and the BD-Rs... I guess BD-ROMs had a few early glitches in 2007 (they didn't get dual layer until early 2008). The disc technology was the basis of their XDCAM format, released in 2003.
So Toshiba's two big advantages were ultimately not advantages. And we should all be glad Sony won.
Well, yeah. So how about this... Toshiba made a grand total of 300,000 HD-DVD drives for the X-Box 360, world wide. Last quarter, 400,000 stand-alone Blu-Ray players were sold in the USA alone. That should answer why no one really cares about how many HD-DVD drives were sold for X-Boxen.
Whoops.... "just over $3.00 each for printable surfaces". BD50s are still kind of pricey, most folks don't need 'em. Like DVD/DLs.
If you buy a cakebox of 25 BD25-Rs, you can get 'em for just under $3.00 each, or just over $25 each for printable surfaces. This makes them more expensive than DVD-Rs per bit, a bit more expensive than internal HDDs, and just about the same per bit as large external HDDs.
But in six months, they'll be much cheaper per bit than those same HDDs.
The player/recorder for the Japanese market sold in 2003 was using essentially the same Blu-Ray media, but in cartridges.. they hadn't figured out the hard-coating yet, and had to protect the discs. Plus, it was very different firmware -- no Java, no AVC, no VC-1... MPEG-2 only. They sold these recorder/players for time-shifting satellite HDTV.. that's all they did.
I could also mentioned Sony's XDCAM video format, which also uses Blu-Ray-like discs (called "Professional Discs"), and also came out in 2003. But that's also MPEG-2 IMX only, and at that, totally different than the consumer BD format.
Blu-Ray as we know it was introduced in 2006.
If they're identical HDTVs, you're probably not crippling DVD much. All digital TVs do internal up/down scaling anyway, most also do inverse telecine on 24p material that was pulled down to send over at 60i. Digital displays don't directly support interlaced video, you need good 2D rescaling to avoid pixelization of SD material, most run at 60Hz if not 120Hz refresh these days. A digital link from your DVD player helps, and sure, there are upscalers of different quality out there, but it's actually kind of hard to not upscale a DVD on a modern TV today. The upscaler in the DVD player was largely a way to sell new DVD players to people who already had them.
I think there are a bunch of different ideas on what's optimal; some are simply used by salescritters trying to upsell you a larger TV. Others have history.
I would favor the use of either SMPTE standard EG-18-1994 or the THX certification standard. Both of these are concerned with the viewing angle, both really created for theatre setups, but applicable to the TV. THX requires a 26 degree viewing angle, and recommends a 37 degree viewing angle. SMPTE recommends a 30 degree viewing angle.
As for visual acuity, a nomally sighted person (20/20 vision) can detect or resolve details as small as 1/60th of a degree of arc... yeah, one arc-minute.
So, you put these together and, magically, produce numbers for ideal viewing distance based on the size of the screen. And from that, you can use the resolving power of the human eye to suggest the limits on your vision. Now, of course, this is based on one's vision... a poorly sighted person will have to sit much closer to fully resolve the picture (possibly too close... there are also numbers for maximum viewing angle), and Superman can watch from the other side of a football field and still get the full 1080p effect.
I tend to agree... if I have want to own the disc, I buy the Blu-Ray. That means there's a really good shot at me wanting to watch it over and over... I don't buy all that many, just the best stuff. I also got Blu-Ray because, after three years of shooting HD video, I could finally author projects to the specs of the final HD consumer deliver format. No more hand hacking WMV/HD javascript and HTML code!
I would love to rent Blu-Ray in-store. Unfortunately, the local creatins who watch only DVD apparently all went to Netflix, so our local "largest major national video chain" store closed down, and given that they managed to put all the local guys out of business, I have to drive 15 minutes to rent, rather than five. That's annoying enough, I don't do it much.
Next... I'll just wait for it to be on HD satellite. True, it's downrezzed a bit, but at least in general, Dish Network isn't crapifying their HD to the extent of folks like Comcast. It's still good, and their PVR is nice enough to let me dump stuff off to a spare 750GB HDD, for viewing later. They have HD PPV, too, and even 1080/24p "rentals" that play from the PVR itself (not quite BD quality, but really close, other than the fact it's still plain old 5.1 AC-3 audio)... but they charge enough for PPV, it would tempt me back to the BD.
Formats live or die on profits, not unit sales. DVD profits have been down for awhile, given that the majority of DVDs sell at heavy discount these days. Wal-Mart, for example, sells 40% of the DVDs in the USA... quite a few, I'm sure, in those $5.00 and $10.00 bins.
Some companies, like Best Buy, are already making more profits on Blu-Ray than on DVD. It's actually possible... no guarantees, but possible, that the industry will make more profit on Blu-Ray than DVD in 2009. And it's a virtual certainty in 2010.
Yeah, this has quite a bit to do with DVDs selling cheaper than ever, while Blu-Ray discs are in the $25-$35 retail niche that DVD was in a few years ago. These two facts are not just a coincidence... consumers willing to spend $25+ on a video buy Blu-Ray, those who won't go over $10 didn't spend the money for Blu-Ray gear yet.
Toshiba announced it at the "we're ending HD-DVD" press conference, in February 2008. They made exactly 300,000 external drives for the X-Box 360.
If that's your conclusion... someone messed up. Toshoba only mad 1.3 million HD-DVDs... that's world-wide, stand-alone, X-Box, PC drive, everything. There were about 10.7 million Blu-Ray players in the USA as of January 1, 2009... including an estimated 3.1 million stand-alone players. In the first quarter, another 400,000 were sold.
I think it's far more likely that the fools who answered this survey (think about it, too... this was a survey of people's opinions about their gear at home, not a factual analysis of what they really had) knew no difference between "HD-DVD" and "DVD player with HDMI upconversion". While someone can usually fudge sales figures if they like, Toshiba published the 1.3 million figure last year, and had no reason to lie about it, and they certainly weren't confused about the question.
The PS3 is certainly a gaming platform. It's also very much a first class Blu-Ray player, and planned as such. Sony did, in effect, throw their gaming division under a bus with the PS3 in order to ensure a likely win for the Blu-Ray format -- which was, of course, their baby, too.
One way you can tell is that, sure, while the PS2 played DVDs, it was a craptastic DVD player, even with the remote. The PS3 is about anything I'd want in a Blu-Ray player.. no compromises, it even does all of the audio format decoding on-board, which let me save $100 on an amplifier upgrade (HDMI support for 7.1 discrete PCM, no need for DolbyTS or any of the new formats). They've also kept the software up-to-date, making the PS3 a great machine for video enthusiasts (it'll play HD camcorder files over my gigabite wired network, or from flash cards, it does WMV and MP4/AVC, MP4/ASP, and DiVX video, etc). And sure, it does play games, I even have a couple.... along with over 50 BDMV discs.
It's looking like this was a smart move in gaming, too, in the longrun. The PS3 has overtaking the X-Box 360 in unit sales in Europe, despite the late arrival. It got a guy like me putting a game machine in his media room... never would have happened without the Blu-Ray. There are now games for the PS3 that use the whole 50GB of a dual-layer BD... you can't do that in any practical way on an X-Box.
Blu-Ray offers two flavors of lossless compressed audio, and of course, fully uncompressed surround-sound as well. Naturally, someone will claim it's no better than DVD, while listening though the built-in speakers on their 19" analog TV from Wal-Mart. Just as with the video, you need the right audio support to hear the advantage. And a well mastered disc, of course. If you already have this, and you can hear the sometimes VAST improvement of DTS over AC-3 (sometimes not.. depends very much on the material and the encoding done), well, on my system at least, it's better still. To the point where I'm thinking about new speakers... they're now the weakest link in the system.
This also has me buying lost of music on BD, whereas before, I usually just bought the CD, rather than the DVD... well, unless I knew from reviews they had a surround-sound mix you just had to hear.
According to Toshiba, they made 300,000 HD-DVD drives for the X-Box 360. Total.
Well, damn... I thought I bought a Blu-Ray player, and got a game console tossed in there for free. I mean, seriously... a year ago, the PS3 was downright cheap compared to most BD players. Plus, it had networked playing, it could play BD file structures from flash memory cards (well, the old 80GB model... not made anymore) -- I shoot video, I like to preview on a real TV, so these were top features for me. And of course, the fact that Sony uses the PS3 to work out Blu-Ray issues for their stand-alone models, thus ensuring all new features possible and the first bug fixes would show up first on the PS3.
The kids get the X-Box 360 and the Wii... they have to ask to use my PS3.
Toshiba admits to making 1.3 million HD-DVD devices. Total... that's players, PC drives, X-Box drives. All there are or ever will be.
The PS3 does a great job of upscaling DVDs... it's actually the first upscaler that (in my expert opinion) outperformed those built-in on every single HDTV as stock (ok, even those vary, but a top HDTV model has a great upscaler built-in). But it's silly to claim it looks "just as good"... time for either a real HDTV or glasses.
javacowboy in 1998:
Why should I invest in DVD?
1) Once bandwidth and/or compatibility issues are resolved, the preferred medium for video will be SuperVHS.
2) Can't rip or make backup copies the way it's possible to with VHS (legality notwithstanding).
3) Ubiquity of VHS readers. I have four devices that can read VHS, including my VHS Camcorder, my Telebikko, $50 HQ VHS player, and TV+VHS player. Since I don't have a PS2 (don't plan on getting one) or a $350 DVD player (don't plan on getting one) I need to go out of my way to get one.
4) My existing movie collection is all VHS. I have no desire to start replacing it, as I finally caved in recently and starting replacing 3 of my 8mm films with VHS tapes.
5) HQ VHS player makes my VHS tapes look great on my 26 inch Faroujda-enhanced TV. Granted, it's not as good a DVD, but I'm not a videophile, so I probably won't see a significant difference.
The movie studios will have to address all of the above if they hope to convert me to DVD.
-----
(oh... note from the future... you can back up your Blu-Ray discs with exactly the same legalities and problems as your DVDs. Only, they're far more rugged, so you can save that $3/BD-R cost and not back 'em up, if backing up is your real concern).
If the movies are cheaper than renting, go for it. If not... do consider that, when the laser dies on that HD-DVD player (and it will), you most likely lose those movies for good, unless you've managed to either rip them to another format (which means finding the even rarer HD-DVD PC drive) or you've found a still-working used HD-DVD player on eBay, at a yard sale, etc.
I don't buy any videos I don't expect to watch several times... I expect them to by playable well into the future. A buck or two for an HD-DVD, maybe.. beyond that, I'd get the Blu-Ray... or even the DVD.
If you're only viewing HD on Apple TV and a 720p screen, you haven't really seen HD. It's not your screen size... I have a 1200p 24" computer monitor that shows HDTV just dandy... good enough for editing, not simply viewing. It's when you're viewing that 27" TV across the room that's the problem.
Just as a data point, Best Buy is selling between 40% and 50% of all retail Blu-Ray discs, and they're selling at or close to the full $25-$35 retail. Compare that to Wal-Mart's 40% of the DVD market, at heavy discounts. Best Buy is, already, making far more profit on BD than DVD... not in per unit terms, but total. That's why you see so much space devoted to BD... they're making more cash on BD than they are on DVD. And it's a growing business, while DVD sales are shrinking.
Troll much? This was clearly a faulty survey... and really, why get all excited about a survey of some otherwise unexplained but small group of people. Like any survey, the results tell you something about the group being surveyed, but it may not be that interesting on an absolutely scale. And so you can't even begin to extrapolate to the whole USA, or you'll just sound foolish. What the survey definitely seems to tells us... more Harris Interactive poll takers have HD-DVD stand-alone players than Blu-Ray.
But hey, this is public info... why not just do the math? About 500,000 stand-alone Blu-Ray players were sold prior to 2008, world-wide (Blu-Ray Disc Association Press Release, CES 2008). At the start of 2008, the HD-DVD players were ahead, though even by then, the Blu-Ray market had the numbers, if you added in PS3s. And it showed... at the start of 2008, BD software was outselling HD-DVD 2:1. Add in the PS3s, and that's about 10.7 million players in US homes at the end of 2008 (BDA again), including a total of 3.1 million stand-alone players (Adams Media Research).
And keep adding... stand-alone Blu-Ray player sales for 1Q09 topped 400,000 in the USA alone. That's nearly as many as all of the dedicated HD-DVD players ever sold in the US market (widely distributed press release, here's one example: http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_090506.html). Sony did 2.5 million PS3s in the same quarter, worldwide... I couldn't find US figures, but they're still doing a nice business, even with stand-alone Blu-Ray players a better deal these days (when the PS3 was the cheapest BD player on the market, it was kind of a no-brainer). So we're closing in if not already passed the 12 million mark on Blu-Ray players in the USA, including PS3s.
At the press conference in 2008, Toshiba's announcement of discontinuing the HD-DVD, they gave numbers:
At the press conference, Atsutoshi Nishida also revealed total HD-DVD hardware sales worldwide, facts previously made opaque in officially announcements. A grand total of 1.3-million HD-DVD players sold worldwide breaks down to 300k Xbox 360 drives, 300k PC drives, 600k dedicated US players, 100k dedicated Euro players, and 30,000 dedicated Japanese players. Against the more than 10-million Blu-ray players in circulation, HD-DVD was indeed fighting an uphill battle in the format war. Nishida also commented that Toshiba has "no plan at all this moment" to begin supporting Blu-ray.
Keep in mind... Toshiba made ALL the HD-DVD players other than the Samsung dual-more players. It seemed like an open spec, but with Toshiba heavily subsusizing their hardware in order to beat Blu-Ray on price, no one else could hope to compete. So no one else did... they all went to the Blu-Ray camp.
And so there are nearly 10x as many Blu-Ray capable players in the USA now as all of the HD-DVD players that will ever be made, world-wide. But even looking at dedicated players, there are over 2.5x more dedicated Blu-Ray players sold in the USA now than Toshiba made HD-DVD players for the whole world. This post was nothing but a troll.. the post itself might even have mentioned that this result was from a poll, not an actual examination of published or tracked sales figures.
First, of all.. "blu-ray isn't doing any good"... projected sales of 100 million discs in 2009, $800 million in player sales (not including PS3s), and at least for some vendors, more PROFITs on BD vs. DVD on an absolute level, you can bet that Blu-Ray is "doing well".
Now, for the other fallacies:
Most people DO have HDTVs... but even more important, most people who actually spend money do have HDTVs. If I'm selling discs, it doesn't matter to me what TV you have if you don't buy anything. In 2007, 25% of US households had at least one HDTV. This grew to 34% in 2008 and . The adoption of HDTV has been faster than that of color TV in the USA, and that's all based on data before the analog switch-off. But it's true today that the only non-HD sets left on the market are tiny portables (even they're required by law to sport digital tuners, of course). If you're too cheap to buy an HDTV, you probably don't care enough about television to be a significant DVD buyer, either. That's why gear sales or installed base are less of a real predictor on the health of the market than media sales.
DVD costs less, that's true. Too much less, in fact... Wal-Mart sells over 40% of all DVDs in the USA, at heavily discounted prices. Best Buy sells nearly 50% of the Blu-Ray discs these days, at the $25 to $35 price point, full retail. You may not consider Blu-Ray a good deal, but for those of us who do, it's right where the DVD was not so long ago. More to the point, this means that retailers and Hollywood, Inc. are making dramatically more loot on a Blu-Ray than a DVD...the materials cost difference is minor. So Best But this year will make substantially more money on Blu-Rays than DVDs, on an absolute scale. It's even possible that Hollywood, Inc. will make more on Blu-Rays than DVDs this year. That's a significant tipping point, and it doesn't require 50% or even 25% of unit sales to be Blue-Ray, as long as Blu-Rays remain 5x-6x more profitable. And this is all that matters for the health of the format.
Blu-Ray players are not THAT expensive. Consumers don't buy on an absolute scale... they buy based on various psychological thresholds. This is why you find prices clustered at $99.99, $199.99, etc. in consumer electronics. Entry-level Blu-Ray players are routinely available below $200, and are closing in on the magical sub-$100 price point (that's for Christmas 2009). That's also where upscaling players were largely clustered a year or so ago.. well below the "impulse buy" threshold for entertainment electronics. Less than most iPods, to put it in prespective.
As for display size vs. preceived resolution, you're missing the critical factor: viewing distance. If you're too far away, you can't tell 1080p from 720p. Move further still, and you can't tell 720p from 480p. Thing is, at the proper viewing distance for your screen, you can always tell 1080p from 720p and 720p from 480p. Think computer screen... I'm in front of a 17" 1050p screen (1680x1050) at normal laptop-user screen... you better bet this is dramatically better than my old 780p laptop screen. And it's visually lower resolution than the dual 1200p (1920x100) 24" monitors at home.
Naturally, if I put my 24" monitor where my 71" DLP is, walked across the room and sat in the theatre chair, I couldn't tell HD from SD ... well, I could tell digital from CVBS or Y/C analog, based on the color gamut... but I digress. There are commonly known rules for normally sighted people and viewing distance. Any old home theatre site will give a you calculator for this; Engadget made this nice chart some years back: http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/12/09/1080p-charted-viewing-distance-to-screen-size . So, for example, if you're 15ft from a TV, and it's smaller than 50", you might was well not have HDTV. Sure, there's some "mileage may vary" factor based on eyesight... but as long as folks continue to be blown away by the picture on my TV on good HD material, I pretty much know I'm doing it right, even without the math. Of course, that's just on
780p? Not a video standard.
Most Blu-Rays from film are 1080/24p, which is certainly superior to either 1080/60i or 720p, for the purposes of viewing a film. All digital television technologies are progressive-only, anyway, so they're going to internally scale to 1080p or 720p or 960p or whatever the actual display resolution is, anyway. Nearly all handle 60fps, anything out in the last year probably supports 120fps, and they've been doing inverse telecine on 24p material shipped out as 60i anyway for some time.
The real problems are resolution and compression. While it's true that for a few things, 720/60p is better than 1080/60i (both being ATSC broadcast modes), that "better" is largely limited to fast action where resolution isn't important. So for autoracing, sure. Tennis, certainly. Golf... who cares? Cinema.. nope. Football (either kind), nope. Baseball.. action? Hockey... maybe. Anyway, the original 720p argument came primarily from ABC, by way of ESPN, because they wanted the 60p for action. No one else found half the spatial data to be so compelling, even at half the temporal data rate.
What you'll find online, though, is usually 720/30p... the worst of both worlds.
Yup.
Also, the HD-DVD players did have a head-start. And yeah, they were cheaper, because Toshbia made each and every one of them, and to they subsudized the costs, just as Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft typically do for consoles on release... in both cases, they made it up on disc royalties. Or would have, if they HD-DVD had been the winner.
The real telling factors, even in late 2007, while the HD-DVD players had more installed units than Blu-Ray (PS3s included), the Blu-Ray disc sales were 2:1 over HD-DVD. See, that's the problem with selling cheap... you're selling to cheapsakes. Everyone knew that BD was suprior to HD-DVD (in the true, same video formats, though higher potential bitrates on BD, but the BD disc is more durable and much higher capacity), so the low-end folks went HD-DVD and the high-end folks went Blu-Ray. And guess what... high end buyers spend more... imagine that.
Then you have to couple in the fire sales at the start of 2008, when the format war was all but over. Toshiba unloaded their HD-DVD players cheap, often for less than the price of a top-quality upscaling DVD player. So many folks bought HD-DVD players to use as plain old DVD players near the end, never intending to buy HD-DVD. In fact, that would be rather foolish... even when the HD-DVD discs were pushed out cheap, one has to realize that, in two or three years, when the blue-violet laser dies in your discount HD-DVD player, that's it... no more HD-DVD players, 'sept maybe the used dregs on eBay or the local flea market.
According to the CEA, Blu-Ray players are expected to comprise about 10% of worldwide sales of DVD players in 2009, reaching about $800 million in sales. That will result in a doubling of the installed base from the end of 2008. And it's not just in the USA... projections are on target for 2.5 million players being sold in Europe this year... excluding PS3 sales, which are also growing in Europe. In fact, the PS3's installed base beat that of the X-Box 360 last summer in Europe, and has sold at about double the X-Box 360 rate (total: over 10 million units as of 2/2009, including the UK).
More critical to the success of the format, though, are disc sales. They're expecting to top 100 millions discs sold in 2009. But even more importantly, it's actually possible that overall profits from Blu-Ray will exceed those of DVD this year -- largely because the vast bulk of DVD sales are at the discout level (Wal-Mart accounts for 40% of all DVDs sold in the USA), while Blu-Rays are still largely sold at the $25-$35 price point once occupied by DVDs (Best Buy is currently selling close to 50% of all retail BDs in the USA... they're already making considerably more on BDs than on DVDs).
It's also not quite right to consider HDD delivered media without really considering HDD costs. Sure, if I'm making my own, a 25GB BD-R runs around $3.00 if you buy a small cakebox... maybe a bit more if you want printable. So that's $0.12 per gigabyte. Today on Newegg, I can get a 1.5TB HDD internal for $130, so that's 0.09 per gigabyte, a bit better, though falling in cost much slower. If I don't have a spare drive bay, I see $110 for a 1TB external drive... not too shabby, but that's now $0.11 per gigabyte, practically the same.
But now think about actually paying for HD video. Forget the problem with getting your ISP to think it's ok to download hundreds of gigbytes per month... or the time, or the load on your system. Let's go for it and get a disc set I actually have on Blu-Ray: "Lost: Season 3". That cost me $39.95 last year on BD, from Amazon, with free shipping. That's on six 50GB discs, so it's definitely less than 300GB. That 300GB would cost me an additional $36, today, if I made my own BDs, $33 on the cheap external drive, or $27 on the cheap internal drive.
But here's the big problem: I can get a cheap price at Amazon on BDs because they're in direct competition with other vendors of the same disc. This is kind of happening in music downloads, too, primarily due to the lifting of the DRM