Comments on: Beware the BD

By: steve

steve — Wed, 27 May 2009 10:59:17 +0000

sounds good, I wont be going above 37″ (my TV is 32″ at the moment) and my Denon DVD Player upscales too, although when i played casino royale the difference was night and day really

I would be loathe to spend £10 on a movie unless it was a favourite, for example i do want blade runner on bluray but already have the R2 and R1 ltd edition 5 disc boxsets.

They need to get some nice boxsets and steelbooks too.

By: Kirk

Kirk — Wed, 27 May 2009 10:46:10 +0000

I agree. With new releases I’m waiting and buying them on Blu though. My upper limit is £10 so when they drop below that I’ll think about buying (depends how much I want the film as to how close to £10 I’ll go). There are also some nice 3 for 2 offers around (I think Amazon still have one running) that meant that the disks worked out at £6-7ish.

I do still buy the occasional DVD though. They tend to be the older films that I wouldn’t mind adding to the collection, but I’m not that bothered about. With the PS3 being a pretty good upscaler and me only having a 37″ TV I don’t think I have a DVD that becomes ‘unwatchable’ on my HD telly. I’m mainly buying the Blu’s to future proof against purchase of a bigger 1080p telly in the future.

By: steve

steve — Wed, 27 May 2009 09:36:10 +0000

I noticed this too and I must admit I cannot wait, I would love to replace all my SD with BR versions but I just don’t have the funds, plus I have some nice funky boxsets in SD and you don’t really get many in BR.

The DVDs that I buy at the moment average about £5 a pop, so I will go to £8/£8.50 for BR at the moment, I am not paying this £15 a time for old movies on BR

By: Kirk

Kirk — Wed, 27 May 2009 09:33:10 +0000

Disk prices are really starting to come down now though. If you wait a few weeks you can get titles below £10, some at HMV are £6.99 and those are amazing prices at this point in the formats lifespan. At this stage for DVD prices were nowhere near this.

By: steve

steve — Tue, 26 May 2009 10:27:18 +0000

I think the SD DVD portion of those discs is through composite or s-video, ive since watched BR Casino Royale and SD Casinno Royale, there is a difference, but not as great as the demo, and not enough for me to shell out 100% more per movie

By: Russ Greeno

Russ Greeno — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:28:59 +0000

Nice post Steve. I was thinking of writing a similar but not identical one myself. For sure the demo disc will show SD in the lowest quality possible, it's all marketing after all. One thing to remember is not all movies have been shot using ultra high def cameras and many more have not been produced very well which means transfer to Blu Ray doesn't end up with a massive and stunning difference from DVD. All in all though movies on Blu Ray are still compressed and the maximum possible quality possible is still far from reach with our current crop of televisions and media storage. A movie shot in ultra high definition resolution needs terrabytes of storage and even if we could make discs big enough to store them on, no TV screen yet is good enough to show them in their full recorded quality. An HDTV is more important for gaming than movies at the moment. Russ Greeno’s last blog post..My top 5 highlights of Windows 7

By: sjp1966

sjp1966 — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:38:41 +0000

the images on my discs look great and i use a component connection which isnt upscaled, I am thinking of getting an HDMI connection to upscale, i cannot see me going HD soon

By: Kirk

Kirk — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:25:26 +0000

Sneaky if they did that, but I wouldn’t put it past them. It was probably a VHS image that’d been converted to DVD!

SD images through a decent upscaler look fine from the usual viewing distances. It’s only if you have a huge screen that you sit very close to or are using a projector, then you’ll really see a difference.

The other advantage with a few titles is that you get the theatrical film and the extended cut on one disc. The extended is run through seemless branching and you get to choose which version you want to watch. The vastly increased storage size allows them to do some neat stuff.

By: sjp1966

sjp1966 — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:40:00 +0000

ahh the demo disc, I was about 5 ft away, i think they purposly degraded that sd image when comapred to the HD one on the same screen to make the HD one look much better

By: Kirk

Kirk — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 10:48:24 +0000

Were you 7/8 ft away in the shop? I’m just trying to think why the image looked that bad in the shop. When I sit 14ft away I can just about tell the difference, but when I get right up close it’s night and day. I did compare Casino Royale (when I owned it on DVD and Blu Ray) and the difference was staggering up close, but less so from viewing distance. I would’ve thought that a 46″ screen from 7/8 ft would also be noticeably different. I think 1080p only really comes into it’s own above 42″.

I only got my PS3 ’cause of a priceing error if you remember. For me it was the other way round though, it was a Blu Ray player firstly and the fact that it plays games is a bonus! Things can only get better for Blu Ray though, prices will continue to fall and the catalogue is ever expanding. For me it’s only really worth buying the big blockbusters on Blu though, they’re the ones that are going to benefit most from HD picture and sound.