Author:
PJL
Level:
Interns
Points:
116
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Um, maybe you didn't see any of the first generation worth of "BluR-Ray" players and movies. They probably picked up that quote from a blog written a couple of years back (and they didin't check the date). For the first six to nine months or so, BluR-Ray really stank when put next an HD-DVD player running the same movie on an identical HD screen....
Sony screwed up their first player because they "had to have" 1080p instead of 1080i output to "one up" Toshiba (marketing gimmik, no differenece in actual quality between the two), which I guess caused some other thing to be activated on their silicon, that basically put a lot of noise into the picture. Then to top it off, the initial studio versions of BluR-Ray movies were only encoded in MPEG2, which comes nowhere near the bit rate (or compression quality) needed for HD movies.
Hence the moniker "BluR-Ray" was spawned, and HD-DVD took a major lead in quality! Look at the reviews from two years back, and you'll see that the concensus was that BluR-Ray stank, and HD-DVD rocked (color, clarity, etc...)...
The biggest problem HD-DVD had was the fanboys who worked at Best Buy (aka Worst Buy) and Circuit City would always spout out the specs of BluR-Ray players being better because they were outputting 1080p instead of HD-DVD's puny 1080i (again, same quality). I was actually told this by a salesman at Circuit City. I "tried" to set him straight about the facts of 1080p vs 1080i. Finally, when asked if he'd ever actually seen any HD-DVD content, the answer was "um, no we don't have any hooked up"......
And EVERY electronics store I was in a couple of years ago wouldn't even hook up the HD-DVD players for people to test/compare, but they'd have several BluR-Ray players running on their best tv's. Best I ever seen was an HD-DVD player hooked up to some cruddy CRT TV (480i) in the corner.
The reason this happened, is probably because the sales people get a lot bigger commission for selling a $1000 BluR-Ray, rather than selling a superior product that only listed for $500.... That, and most of those "kids" don't even know what the spec's mean, even if they can spout them out by wrote memory.
BTW, I don't own either format. When BluR-Ray players get into the sub $100.00 range, I MIGHT think about getting one (knowing $ony, that'll be a decade from now). Meanwhile, I'll just enjoy my Dish-HD programming, and my upconverting DVD player (which produces better picture quality than the original BluR-Ray players & movies ever did).
Heh, that was a much long rant that I originally intended 8^].
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