Monday, January 14, 2008
DVD buying opportunity!
Amazon is running a huge sale on HD-DVDs. Buy them here!
7 Comments:
By 
Georg Felis, at
Mon Jan 14, 05:48:00 PM:
I can set them next to my Beta tape collection....
By 
, at
Mon Jan 14, 07:27:00 PM:
Side notes to TH:
1. Is this the first time in Tigerhawkblogspot history that 66% of the combined headers and sentences have exclamation marks at the end of them? Just a small benchmark for the records.
Smoke your lunch? :)
2. It's "Hi-Def" discs. "HD DVD" is a format. And, to point something out, a lot of computer people are upset that the retailers are dropping the hyphen from "HD-DVD", as it originally was there for a purpose. Without the hyphen, you'd have to write, "Now take your HD DVD DVD..." which is just asinine and ripe for confusion. A Blu-ray disc, by definition, is also a "HD DVD"; i.e., a high-definition digital video disc.
________________________________
So, may I offer up a few thoughts? I don't want to be a party-pooper, but there are two things to keep in mind:
1. The winner between Blu-ray and HD-DVD has hardly been resolved. It's been swinging to Blu-ray's corner as of late, but there are still unseen forces at work. The porno industry, for example, is still solidly behind HD-DVD, and that's the hard of-, pardon me, the heart of America.
2. It needs to be kept in mind that the value of hi-def DVDs is somewhat proportional to the size of your TV and how far away you sit. If you're sitting two feet away from your 52" mega-plasma TV, then sure, hi-def would be the way to go.
But if you've just got a regular ol' TV and you watch it from across the room, I'm not sure you'll see any difference. Or, it might be a case where you notice that it seems a little sharper for the first five minutes or so -- then never notice it again.
I'd be asking myself this question:
When was the last time you complained that a DVD was "too blurry". As you were watching the movie, you were thinking in the back of your mind, "Boy, this thing sure is blurry."
Never?
I mean, I watch them on a hi-res computer monitor about two feet in front of my face, and I'm not sure if I can ever recall thinking, "Gee, this thing sure is blurry." Some older movies look "grainy", of course, but that's not the same thing.
Anyway, don't get me wrong. This is my field of expertise, and I highly applaud the industry for jacking up the standards. A standard DVD has a size of 720 pixels wide by 480 high, but, if you'll note, both your computer monitor and TV are wider and taller than that. So, when you watch a DVD full-screen, you're relying upon the player to stretch the movie out to fill the screen.
Hi-def DVD has a much larger original size (hence the larger file size and the need for a new disc format), so there's less 'stretching' and the picture is much sharper as a result. There's more to it than that, but that's the nutshell.
By , at
Mon Jan 14, 11:24:00 PM:
"But if you've just got a regular ol' TV and you watch it from across the room, I'm not sure you'll see any difference."
You will. I was playing Conan on my X Box 360 a few months ago, and remember complaining aloud to the wife that certain bits of text and such were hard to read. (20/20 uncorrected vision here, so that isn't the issue)
A short time after that some back pay arrived and we got a new HD TV. Suddenly, I could make out every little curve and corner.
Regular TV is fine; that's what we're all used to, after all. But once you go to HD, it would be almost painful to go back. You kind of get used to the TV having resolution as good as real life.
By , at
Tue Jan 15, 02:40:00 AM:
I agree with Dawn. I LOVE my HD-DVDs. The difference, for a true audio/videophile, is fantastic. 2001: A Space Odyssey has an absolutely gorgeous transfer. I tend to notice that normal TV is indeed blurry or when put on a large TV too pixelated. It truly enhances a movie-going experience even from 20 feet away. The colors are SO much brighter and the sharpness of outlines is very noticeable.
-david
By , at
Tue Jan 15, 10:54:00 AM:
Dr. M
I think a lot of folks are overestimating the influence of the Porn industry. Sure they were decisive in the days of VHS vs Beta, but these days they're getting their lunch eaten by the internet. DVD sales are way down, due in large part to the easy free availability of amature porn and relentless copyright violation on the various 'tubes.
RPD
By , at
Tue Jan 15, 10:41:00 PM:
Ummm ... actually since "Blu-ray discs and HD DVDs are always at least 30% off or more" on Amazon, a sale where they go to 40-50% off isn't all that interesting.
What really moves these discs is a "buy one get one free" sale, where you get 2 "$40" discs for $27 total. Since Amazon adds other customer discounts in a way advantageous to the customer, people were picking up these discs for a net $8 a piece a few weeks back.
It remains to be seen, now that HDDVD seems to be mortally wounded, whether blu-ray discs will ever go 2-for-1 again.
By Pax Federatica, at
Wed Jan 16, 01:30:00 AM:
Then of course there's the matter of the next-gen DVD format wars being intertwined with the next-gen gaming console wars, with MS Xbox 360 playing HD-DVDs and Sony's Playstation 3 doubling as a Blu-Ray player.
As far as I can tell, MS has treated Xbox 360 as a gaming console first and foremost in its marketing, and has never made that big a deal of its HD-DVD capability. Sony, on the other hand, has treated PS3's Blu-Ray capability as one of that console's "killer apps," almost co-equal with gaming. Sony even makes a Blu-Ray remote control for the PS3 (sold separately), whereas MS has apparently left it to a third-party manufacturer to produce an Xbox 360 HD-DVD counterpart. It's hard to say how these differences in next-gen game console marketing are impacting the next-gen DVD format wars, but over time I don't see how this can do anything but help Blu-Ray in a big way. (Full disclosure: I recently bought a PS3, mainly for its Blu-Ray capability, and love it.)
