Post by hanser January 17, 2008 (61 of 104)
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FunkyMonkey said:
Picture - DVD gives pristine, clinical images.
With this I strongly disagree. DVD gives acceptable, but flawed images: Details are missing, artificial sharpening adds double contour, MPEG noise is distracting. On a large screen all of this is very noticable. Some Blu-ray still have a bit those issues,depending on the master and the encoding, but much less than DVD. A BD with mediocre picture quality like "Music and Lyrics" is still better than the best DVDs I know of, like "Return of the King" or Star Wars Episode 3 and 5.
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zeus said:
Having just watched Jobs' Macworld keynote, it seems to me that HD delivery with Apple TV (take 2) direct to your TV forced the studios to get their act together on the delivery format. This is a pretty compelling solution and something even Blu-ray will have a hard time competing against. If like me you worked out long ago that buying movies isn't such a great deal check out Apple's latest offering. I have reservations about the diversity of titles that will be on offer in the short to medium term though.
I'm not quite convinced that's really what's behind the breakthrough in the format war. Regardless of the final delivery format being optical disc or download, the studios stand to gain either way. Apple has no choice but to deal with the same studios.
Having said that, the quality is not quite the same. An Apple "HD movie" is a 4GB file at 720p resolution, compared to 10-50GB at 1080p for BD.
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Post by amatala January 17, 2008 (63 of 104)
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hanser said:
Exactly. On my 2.55 m wide projection screen the difference is dramatic.
Well, of course that this is true. My statement was referring to the large mass of consumers (myself included) with screens between 32" and 42" and watching the screen from distances between 2 and 4 meters. For these kind of setups I do not find that BluRay brings huge improvements over upscaled DVD - this is only a personal opinion, of course. I usually do not spend my time searching for minute details in the picture, I just watch the picture as a whole.
For people owning huge screens over 50" or projection screens BluRay is a must - but these consumers have already adopted the BluRay format - they do not count when talking about BluRay mass adoption because they cannot be included in the large mass of consumers...
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Post by dobyblue January 18, 2008 (64 of 104)
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hanser said:
With this I strongly disagree. DVD gives acceptable, but flawed images: Details are missing, artificial sharpening adds double contour, MPEG noise is distracting. On a large screen all of this is very noticable. Some Blu-ray still have a bit those issues,depending on the master and the encoding, but much less than DVD. A BD with mediocre picture quality like "Music and Lyrics" is still better than the best DVDs I know of, like "Return of the King" or Star Wars Episode 3 and 5.
Agreed - DVD just does not cut it once you've experienced Blu.
I first saw Blu-ray on a 32" TV at 480i using component cables and even in that set-up I was floored at how much cleaner and more visceral the picture looked. No macroblocking, no noise; a massive upgrade on any TV.
Jump up to 1080p and the difference is a thousand times more stagerring.
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hanser said:
With this I strongly disagree. DVD gives acceptable, but flawed images: Details are missing, artificial sharpening adds double contour, MPEG noise is distracting. On a large screen all of this is very noticable. Some Blu-ray still have a bit those issues,depending on the master and the encoding, but much less than DVD. A BD with mediocre picture quality like "Music and Lyrics" is still better than the best DVDs I know of, like "Return of the King" or Star Wars Episode 3 and 5.
What I meant was DVD was TOO clean, artificial. Blu Ray is so real, too real for some with grain from the original film often being classed as bad picture reproduction.
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Post by xb-940 January 19, 2008 (66 of 104)
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Amatala said: - There are no major differences between a well mastered CD and SACD in stereo - in any case there is no improvement which could justfy the mass adoption of SACD as a stereo format.
The huge advantage of SACD over CD comes from the surround capabilites SACD can offer. People interested in listening to music in surround will adopt the SACD format much faster:
// I found that the case with my stereo only Sony xb-940 (bought august 2001). On a really superb setup from my dealer (think 10.000E+ in stereo) It sounded warmer and more full-bodied, but not that exciting. I thought there could be more improvements in mastering and recording on the way, there was anyhow not much software, and I needed a cd-player anyway, so why not buy this player instead of a surround one next year. It took almost a year before I had enough Sacd's to make a 3 hour program of music of my taste, pop/rock/blues mainly. And all that time I thought Sacd wasn't that necessarily. But what was only a slight advantage in the beginning, turned out to be a total relaxing listening event after 3 hours, which I hadn't experienced before with normal cd on the same player. Because there's more depth you can move around on your listening position and even focus on other things because you have far less concentration needed and of course, you can listen Sacd on a higher AND lower volume because you hear more. But that's what I think is the problem with budget stereo Sacd-players, Most people don't hear a huge improvement, because they are not musicians and will hear the difference only after an extended period cd only and than Sacd only listening on the same player. Bear in mind though that the xb-940 was selled for 900e and a stereo replacement if on the market should now cost +/-200e new(philips highly praised sacd963 for example costed 500e with multichannel-sacd and dvd in 2004) and you will hear much more improvement on more expensive players. Another problem I think is that when people meet each other at home, they prefer to see a movie or play a videogame in stead of listening an evening to music. You have something to talk about next day on your work, because everyone has seen the new movie, you really have a problem when there's a soccergame (not in the US, I know) and you belong to the 25% who don't like the game. And I think, music is more personal and timeless-so what's new, and less attention attracting. So listening to music is apart from background listening in pubs or of course live music not a really social thing, Further more the industry should make stereo Sacd-players With digital output for multichannel/stereo. So you can spend less money for a good transport and spend more on your surround receiver, which will always be the limiting factor for all those stereo goldies, a good stereo performing surround receiver will be a lot more expensive then a stereo amp, but using the dac's of the receiver though is generally far better than that from the player in the same pricerange, I remember my Sony scd-xa333 Sacd-player and dvp-ns999 dvd-player with normal cd on my str-va555 receiver all roughly in the same price catagory. Concluding, if the industry will make also surround receivers of about 400E-600$ with digital connection for multichannel/stereo Sacd (maybe optional dac-module, I believe nowadays they use computer motherboard layout) there will be a future for it, because as people taste the enhanced sound of Blueray-disc, they want to listen to this quality with the convenience maybe of a normal cd/Sacd-player (also:portables/carstereo). (sorry for the bad text-layout, apart from Sacd, bits I find a little confusing, bet next week will be a new arrangement of them;))
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Post by azure January 19, 2008 (67 of 104)
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From http://www.newsarcs.com/cda/story.php?article_id=1040, about AppleTV movie downloads:
> "Apple has sold 7 million movies, and that number has been more or less deemed a failure. However that’s a million more than the six million Blu-Ray Discs sold as of the end 2007 according to Home Media Research, which beat HD-DVD by a near 2-to-1 margin and iTunes Movies hit the 7 million mark after 15 months, beating the 18 months it took Blu-Ray out hit the six million mark." <
Indeed that's not a major success for movie downloading. Imagine iTunes downloads only barely managed to beat SACD and DVD-Audio purchases. What a different world this would be. And these downloads weren't even the HD versions which are only becoming available now.
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Post by zeus January 23, 2008 (69 of 104)
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The Seventh Taylor said:
Indeed that's not a major success for movie downloading. Imagine iTunes downloads only barely managed to beat SACD and DVD-Audio purchases. What a different world this would be. And these downloads weren't even the HD versions which are only becoming available now.
If you followed Steve Job's keynote, the conclusion Apple reached was that people just didn't want to buy movies and didn't want to watch them on their computer. Hence the move to rentals and the decoupled Apple TV.
That said, there was a lot of interest in Blu-ray the last time I was in an electronics store. The Full HD packages from Sony looked pretty compelling and not toooo expensive (though more than I could justify).
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zeus said:
That said, there was a lot of interest in Blu-ray the last time I was in an electronics store. The Full HD packages from Sony looked pretty compelling and not toooo expensive (though more than I could justify).
This is really off topic (sacd) but I am curious to discover if you find the same difficulty with large screen HDTV that bothers me. There are two things - one is that every HDTV I see in stores is set up to dramatically overstate color and brilliance. The other is motion artifacts.
Those things, more than any other, (like price) have kept me away because even though prices are falling, I don't want to pay anything for a set whose departures from realism bother me more than I am bothered by the deficiencies in my old 1995 Sony 27 inch set. I've been told that plasma sets are not bothered by motion artifacts but that they have a tendency to "burn in" the bars on top and bottom of wide screen movies. To prevent that you can set up so that the picture is stretched vertically or horizontally depending on what you are dealing with. I've seen the effects of that stretching. Then there is the unwarranted phenomenon of pixels going dead in the set - if it happens, repair (replacement) is on your dollar PHOOEY! They have a long long way to go!
But maybe if I could get the Metropolitan Opera, some Boston Symphony concerts under Levine, and the likes of Yo Yo Ma, Yevgeny Sudbin, or Julia Fischer in concert on Blu-Ray with 5 channel surround sound.....
Like I said they have a long long way to go!
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