You write “And it’s arguably much less significant than the giant jump we took over the last 10 years to get from standard television resolution to DVD resolution.” Well, there is simply no difference between standard TV and DVD resolution: Both are 720x480 (NTSC) or 720x576 (PAL).
I watch on a home projector, screen about 8 feet diagonal. The difference is very obvious.
Hello,
(for obvious reasons, I prefer to be anonymous with this posting)
Personally I think both blueray and HD-DVD are both completely unacceptable formats: All the effort put into copy protection ended up in creating a medium that’s full of compatibility issues. And all the different codecs that can be used for both audio and video don’t exactly help at making the whole mess cleaner.
As I see it, there’s currently no way to actually get a player, receiver and projector/tv capable of playing all the HD-DVD and blueray media I could throw at it.
Even worse: I paid a heap of cash for a receiver capable of decoding digital audio signal and putting that on my 7 speakers and the subwoofer. But thanks to the paranoia of the movie studios, digital players are not allowed to output digital signal when decoding high-quality audio - the players decode the signal and transmit it over the analog line - bypassing all the optimizations my receiver may do. This leads to either suboptimal sound (due to the player not doing as good a job as the receiver) or too high a price due to features duplicated in both the receiver (where they can’t be used any more) and in the player.
Even more so: While in the good old DVD days I had to program only one device with the distances and sizes of the speakers, now I have to do it in the player too.
Same goes for video signal: Sooner or later, the high resolutions will only be transmitted via HDMI which in theory would force me to update all cabling. Thankfully I just moved and actually migrated to HDMI due to other reasons.
Which brings me to the thing causing me to remain anonymous: Pirated movies (also available in HD) don’t have all those disadvantages.
They provide me as user with the best possible handling and quality: I can have all movies conveniently stored on one of my home server’s harddrive, I can watch them in HD over whatever connection I find useful (component comes to mind, though as I said, I DO have the luxury of HDMI) and I can use my receiver to decode the AC/3 or DTS signal. No need to change media, no expensive importing to get the movies in the original language and no strange concepts as region codes.
There is no reason what so ever to support the crap that’s called Blueray or HD-DVD as it’s WAY too limited, expensive and complicated.
But to the topic of your posting (sorry for posting a novel here):
The difference between HD and non-HD is very, very visible as screen sizes increase. For four years I’m now using projectors and I just recently migrated to a HD one (720p). Granted: Non-HD signals look WAY worse on a HD projector than they do on a non-HD one, but as you increase the diagonal of your screen, non-HD gets blurrier and blurrier while HD stays crisp.
Also, when you are watching HD, you don’t think it’s that good (with the exception of a Ghost in the Shell 2 video I’ve seen - wow) - until you watch the same thing in non-HD. Then you’ll notice one hell of a difference.
Quality-wise, I’d say things come in this order once you have more than 2 meters screen-width:
non-HD on HD-Projector non-HD on non-HD-projector (lots of empty space) HD on HD-Projector
Sub 2 meters (sorry for using metric units here - but where I live, we measure in meters), the difference between HD and non-HD isn’t that obvious. Only scenes with a lot of details in the background gain a lot from the additional pixels, but the foreground - even faces - stay more or less the same.
Once you scratch the 2 meters, non-HD material gets blurry all over the place and just looks strange, making you adjust the sharpness, but obviously without any success as the blur comes from too few pixels to fill the screen.
Where HD totally rocks is with games. When they came out, I tried both Kameo and “Perfect dark Zero” in HD and non-HD on both a HD and a non-HD projector with a screen a bit smaller than the “magical” 2 meters.
Both games felt cramped in non-HD. It felt like always looking into a box too small to actually see stuff. I always needed “more room” and I never got it. Details were missing and I had lots of trouble getting the levels, always getting lost.
As soon as I switched projectors, the world changed: Suddenly the screen felt “big enough”. I stopped feeling cramped and my generally good sense of directions kicked in again: I stopped getting lost and I had a lot more fun.
This was even more visible in the ego-shooter perfect dark zero than it was in Kameo.
Not enough room - not enough stuff to look at - that was my problem with all console 3D shooters I’ve played (which is just Halo and the Metroid series). My brain needs to see a certain amount of detail from a scene to get a feeling of where I am and how I got there.
Non-HD can’t provide me with enough of that and I begin to feel cramped and I’m getting lost - totally independent of screen size.
So to sum up:
- Blueray HD-DVD: Rip-off
- HD for movies: Difference visible, though not needed for screens with smaller width than 2 meters
- HD for games: Not really needed unless it’s a first-person view game. In that case, immediately feel lost without the details a HD-world is able to provide.
Just my heap of 2 cent coins 
Philip
man i dont mind the extra quality tho its true it wont make any diff seen 10 feet away …
but hey who cares … finer the better
I’m actually quite happy with my Blu-Ray + HDTV. The difference is astounding. Now only if the studios would get on the ball with giving us good transfers. Some of them are awful, harkening back to when DVDs first came out.
The training day one isn’t using a HD source, it’s prolly just an up-rezed DVD image
The training day comparison shows the official Blu-Ray and HD-DVD versions of Training Day, in comparison to the DVD edition.
Did you take a look at the closeup of Aragons face? His whole expression changed when the image got sharper.
Wow!
there is simply no difference between standard TV and DVD resolution: Both are 720x480 (NTSC) or 720x576 (PAL)
TV is interlaced, so the vertical resolution is halved. And on top of that, analog TV looks much much worse than a digital DVD.
No it’s not halve. It’s interlaced, but it’s 60 half frames a seconds, it ends up giving you the same resolution and smoother motion. VHS is half the resolution.
However, as I think you mean to mention, when we watch DVD we use component outputs and the sampling is much better, we usually get twice a much luminance resolution as analog tv, and also digital TV which is very compressed.
Personally I don’t really understand your post. I have a 42 in tv at about 10 feet, and I watch TV in HD, a few shows on NBC, the CW and the canadian equivalent of HBO. It looks absolutely glorious, you can really see the difference. Also, don’t forget that these are still images, but the difference is even more obvious with MOVING images. Staring at the pixel of two still images is not a good way to evaluate what the experience will be.
The luminance and gamma factors of HD are not the same as NTSC and PAL, as well, and this also has a huge impact. There is much more dynamic range in HD images, and the blacks are true blacks
All I can think about is my enormous DVD collection that somebody* is trying to tell me is obsolete.
(*companies which produce Blu-Ray and HD-DVD)
Let’s think a bit. What exactly made VHS Obsolete? Was it the picture quality? Was it the size of the tapes?
No. DVD beat VHS because it introduced menus, immediate chapter selection, multi-language and multi-subtitle capabilities… all-in-all greater CONVENIENCE for us, the users. Sure, the picture quality was better and the sound too, but what really got us buying DVD’s were the overall convenience. Let us not forget this.
It seems to me that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray only bring two new things that are better than DVD:
- Picture resolution.
- More capacity.
I don’t deny that the better picture resolution is appealing… sure it is. Is it noticeable? Yes. But… when Star Wars came out in 1977 the picture by today’s standards was awful and the sound in some theaters (if not most) was MONO. And even so, Star Wars turned out to be the movie that changed the movies, without High-Definition.
HD-DVD and Blu-Ray bring no new capabilities to us aside from those listed. No revolutionary technology, no new user-friendly devices.
I will continue buying DVD’s and enjoy them with my progressive scanning and great Home Cinema sound sistem… and I will wait until the day comes that movies come out in 3D or with holographic projectors (no TV or screen necessary)… Only then will DVD become “old” but to me, never “obsolete”.
Ok, I may be a late comer to this discussion, and maybe you are all over it now… but I have some things to add to this.
First, 99% of the comments I’m seeing here are from people who don’t actually own or use the gear. I have to tell you, watching a BD movie on a 60" 1080p screen is simply amazing.
To the last poster, you are partly right, but not entirely about DVD beating VHS. Actually, it won because we don’t have to rewind a DVD. BUT if the image quality had not been improved, and sound not been improved, I think the migration would have been slower. Plus, DVD’s were the same size as CDs which had lots of advantage to people, because now they have 2 elements (Music and Video) that fit the same format for the first time ever in history.
What will differentiate the “next generation” will not be ability to rewind. It will be improvements in sound delivery (7.1 surround or better), and image quality. I also think the bigger capacity is an advantage, and hits the “Rewind” factor for many videos. I can list dozens that span 2 DVDs these days. I hate having a movie stop in the middle and ask me to put in another disk. With HD and BD, that is a thing of the past, and they have thought far enough ahead that even an extended movie like LOTR special editions will play on a single dual layer HD or BD.
I hate that there is a “war” between the two formats these days, but it is what it is. Dual players will make that point moot in the future anyway, I expect. As for DVDs… I have bought my last one. But to the poster who says “Makes my DVD collection obsolete” it most certainly DOES NOT! Another cool thing that you didn’t get with your shift from VHS to DVD is ability to play it in the same player. (Yes, there were some “dual” players that were on the market but they were more a novelty than a solution). With both HD and BD, they play previous version DVDs flawlessly. (Do have to pay attention to region codes, but HD/DVD has halved the number of regions from 6 to 3, and of course won’t be long before that won’t be an issue either.)
If you really want to talk about what will make them all obsolete is the acceleration in internet bandwidth and HD storage spaces. Soon, there won’t be a media, just a storage location. We won’t need Block Buster or Cox Cable, because we’ll be able to get it all on demand from the internet as either a streamed broadcast, or download the file and play with VLC (I think VLC even have a media player for the Vic20!).
The new formats are brilliant. If you can’t take advantage of them now, you will in the future. They are stunning. Go have a demo.
-S
lolz. the difference is insane if you have a really large screen. Watching blu ray on my 102" 1080p panasonic projector is INSANELY different the watching a dvd. The difference is incredible. All hail Sony.
First off Jeff; thanks for all the work putting this together - pict 7 does not work quite right…
Had a interesting experience the other night - friend just hooked up his new blu ray (sony ps) to a new 42" plasma and bose system. First movie looked and sounded…off…somehow. Can’t say how, but the motion was just not right and the sound was very echo-y. I did not want to say anything until he mentioned the same thing. All the other discs looked great. Very noticible difference.
Joe
I have a measly 32" inch screen and watched my first BD movie on it yesterday. On the HTPC freshly built with the parts you advertised a couple of days ago plus the cheapest BD-Rom drive I could find (109 euros).
The thing which struck me most was the color rendition. There is just so much detail in it. I’ve been watching upres-DVDs and 8Mit-DVB-C channels for a year now, and the first thing I noticed with them was all the color banding. Especially in the darker areas, DVDs tend to show just blobs of the same color over a large area. The BD movie doesn’t have any of that.
Even if I can’t really see the difference in absolute resolution when I sit on the couch, I can still see BD movies have a much, much higher bitrate.
Many people here mention 7.1 as an advantage. I personally made a downgrade from 5.1 sound to so called 2.0, or in everyday language stereo. The reason was I couldn’t experience any big wow with the 5 channels of sound. No, can hear the directions etc, but I had an impression only some sound effects come from the rear speakers. Later, when i began to go deeper in to the matter, it appeared true, my ears were right. Only in making of several films real 5 channel sound recording systems were used. mainly the 5 channels are made in postproduction. Yes, they add some, let’s say, expression, but they sound to me artificial. Or should I be called an audiophile or perhaps some other paranormal word? 
Anyway, for me 7.1 or more channels is not a big selling point, as i don’t even like 5.1 in the current form.
Jeff,
DVDs are stored on discs in an interlaced format as well (480i). But you are right that they look much, much better than analog TV.
The Geek’s comments reminded me of a study LucasArts conducted many years back. They put the audience through the same movie of equal visual quality, but one in a THX theater while the other with conventional (back then) audio equipment.
While the audience generally didn’t comment on the sound quality, they mentioned the movie looked_better in the THX theatre.
Somehow our brains will take the sound we hear and “enhance” the image we see with the “additional data”.