HD, Bluray and stuff: What's your experience?

[Bauzi]

Hey there,

So Bluray and HD have been out in the world for a couple of years, but what's your personal experience with it?

Personaly I watch a lot of HD anime releases on my laptop lately, but I hardly notice the influence of HD outside the internet. Our local free avaible tv channels are just about to start to broadcast HD television next year. I only know one guy who has a full HD tele (with the proper size to use full HD) at home, but don't know anybody who owns a bluray or a bluray player (beside PS3s).

When I go to our local electric stores (the bigger ones), I never see full hd teles showing full hd shows. They almost show the usal PAL signals. Yeah I never looked that hard for it, but I still never noticed one

The first time I saw full hd in action was in a games room of an anime convention. They played Soul Calibur IV on a full hd tele. Now that was impressive! Anyway I never saw a full hd film/show on a full hd tele.

... and what's up with the prices for bluray movies? Do they really expect me to pay 30 bucks for ramstered copies of crappy movies Alien vs. Predator 2? Hell no I won't!

I was too young and uninteressted to take care about the switch between vhs and dvd, but I have the feeling that the change from dvd to bluray is much slower. For the switch of vhs to dvd you just had to buy a player (well almost only a player), but for bluray you need the player AND a new tele to see the advantage of bluray and hd. That's why I think the switch goes on much slower this time.

Also I don't think the cd or dvd will die out soon. They're just too handy to use and have enough memory for a lot of things. Just look at PS3 and 360 games. There are hardly games that would benefit of the huge memory of a bluray disc.

[mirkosp]

My pc monitor runs 1920x1200 and I have a blu-ray player in my pc so I'm game for full HD. The only Blu-ray disc I bought over here was Animatrix and it was 19.90 euros, and worth them.
I know that we have the HD channels on Sky, I oftentimes see HD Ready and Full HD screens out for sellings, and also blu-ray players. As for the other channels, some on the DVB-T have the 16:9 but aren't HD, and as for the rest, they're still in 4:3, even.
I'm not sure how many people own HD setups, but a decent amount sure does. I think we're more or less ready over here... perhaps in a matter of a couple years or so the HD will completely take over.

I guess that we see more HD stuff on the Internet because HD is a de-facto standard in Japan, considering that all the channels broadcast in 1080i and most if not all shows get released both on DVD and BRD.

[Qyot27]

I thought PS3 discs were BDROMs in the first place.

Anyway, this is probably more regional. The major department stores around here have had all HD sets up for a good 2 or 3 years, and most of the major broadcast networks have an alternate HD (720p or 1080i) stream. Not to mention the additional HD stations the cable providers supply.

The issue, I think, is more that the VHS->DVD transition and analog TV set->digital-equipped TV set (not analog->digital broadcast) were minor transitions. HDTV is a fairly major shift in terms of the quality of a set. At least here, most new sets are capable of at least 720p - even the cheap $300-400 sets (that's ~210-285 EUR).

Blu-ray is the complimentary technology to accompany HDTV, but people don't really see it that way - they see DVD more in that role, because while DVD fit nicely with a standard DTV, most people didn't run out and buy one of those. Chances are, they went straight from an analog TV to HDTV. Sure, they could see the difference in quality between VHS and DVD on the old TVs, but they weren't thinking of how the technology was optimally paired.

The prices at rollout time are also usually much higher. I can probably find Blu-rays for under $20 now - although they are probably from that first crop of releases after the format was brought to the market. Some of the manufacturers are also bundling the DVD release in with the Blu-ray, so that might cause a price hike over just a Blu-ray release. That's mainly because they're trying to push the adoption of Blu-ray along, so if all DVD releases now are actually dually-bundled with the Blu-ray edition, consumers already have a bunch of Blu-ray discs they can use when they finally get a new player - which is one of the major inconveniences cited when transitioning from one video format to another.


Europe usually has the US beat when it comes to high-speed internet though (most ISPs in the States are limited to 3mbps or 7.1mbps down, with only a small number offering 10, 15, or 20mbps); to be honest, I'd much rather take that over more selection of broadcast HDTV, if I had to choose one or the other.