Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer? (1 Viewer)

[Jari K]

Oh boy..

 

[Jerome Grate]

That same thought came across my mind as well. To me it would seem logical to build a good cheap BD player to kind of nudge Sony into lower prices for BD. I guess it's that agony of defeat thing that's remains a bitter taste in your mouth.

We shall see when the tech arrives. Eventhough it seems like a plausible approach for Toshiba, what price range will this be in. I think if it's over 150.00 it's difficult to sell (I have to admit) "scaled to HD" in comparison to selling HD.

But if does a really good job scaling video to look close to HD and incorporate those interactive menus seen on HD-DVD and BD, well it might be hard to pass up. I have to admit if BD came down in price significantly let's say below 200.00 it would be hard to sell to us anyway. The masses however is a different story.

Gimmicks and gadgets can capture the attention of the mass consumers and if cheap enought and marketed well meaning "now enjoy you current collection in HD quality" it can do well.

 

[Dion C]

Quick question for current Blu-ray player owners:

How IS the upscaling of SDVDs with your BD player?

I am waiting for the new Sony to make my first BD player purchase -- the handful of as-yet-unplayed BD titles I have already purchased mock me on a daily basis until then -- but I recall hearing how impressively the Toshiba HD-DVD player upscaled standard discs. Was curious how Blu players stacked up in that department.

If Blu-ray players only do a so-so upscaling job on standard discs AND Toshiba actually does the seemingly impossible with this allegedly new upscaling technology, then I would have both a BD player AND a Toshiba upscaler in my HT.

 

[FrancisP]

Toshiba is not aiming this at bluray owners. This is clearly aimed at the average person that has not bought into bluray. As to whether it can be done maybe we should wait and see. Again competition is never unhealthy.

 

[Jari K]

You probably find more info from some other thread, but at least PS3 has very good upscaling. But of course, even the best upscaling looks "like SD DVD" at the end of the day..

 

[Hanson]

Like 1080p?

 

[Jari K]

Mr. Yoo, we kinda "argued", "debated" and "discussed" on these similar issues ("HD will be a niche market", "SD DVD still rulez", "Upscaled DVD is good enough", "downloading will be the future", "Joe 6-pack won´t buy HD", etc etc etc) during the format war and soon after that in the "doomsday"-threads.. I have done too many "arguments" already. You probably missed those 100 threads back in the days?

This thing seems to go in cycles. I guess now when the HD DVD is gone, we still need to go through the "super-upscaling Toshiba" vs Blu-ray (or was it "SD DVD is good enough vs Blu-ray", I got confused).

No matter, Blu-ray will prevail. As always.

 

[jhinesjr]

It's hard to believe that in the 21st century some people are trying to champion up-scaled dvd.

 

[Edwin-S]

I'm curious. Do you actually own a high definition player of any kind?

 

[Scott-S]

I am still waiting for a VHS upscaler. I have some VHS movies I want to watch in 1080P.

 

[Chris Atkins]

Eh, not really buying into this. Mostly because my Toshiba HD-A2 already does an amazing job of upscaling my existing DVD collection, so much so that it takes a good HD-DVD or Blu-ray transfer to create enough of a difference between the two to justify the added cost of the Blu-ray player I just bought.

Since the two can be so close, I just can't see that there is anyplace in between for Toshiba's new tech to comfortably fit. Joe 6 Pack would just be better off buying one of the (many) Toshiba HD-DVD players (or any good upscaler) currently on the market.

 

[chuckg]

How can anyone believe that missing detail can simply be conjured up out of thin air? Photoshoppers, try this: take a 1920x1080 still photo with true 32-bit color. Change the image size to 640x480, and squash the color space to 12 bits. While you are at it, save the image with a 4:1 compression ratio.

Now open up your new file, and change the image size to 1920x1080 and set the color space to 32 bits.

Compare, critically, the unchanged photo to the newly mangled one. If you think the two are comparable, then I think you need a new pair of glasses!


C'mon, folks. The claims made are false, pure and simple. The average braindead citizen might not realize they are being hornswoggled if they have never seen real hi-def in the same way that a certain audio manufacturer has pulled a million yards of wool over the ears of unsupecting consumers. I admit that upscaled DVD looks pretty good, but it sure does not look as good as HiDef - the devil is in the details: blades of grass, whiskers, striped ties, and so on.

Enough from me, I've told you the truth and you can rant against it all you like. btw: we really did land on the Moon.

 

[Hanson]

Actually, I missed the whole thing

 

[Aaron Silverman]

I have yet to watch any OTA HD content that rivals the quality of a BD or HD-DVD disc. It always suffers to some extent from compression and delivery artifacts.

1080p may not be a huge improvement over 720p for the average person on most sets, but it certainly isn't a "gimmick."

 

[Scott-S]

Hanson, Are you getting your HD truly over the air, or via cable/satellite?

it is not fair to say that Blu-ray HD is the same as the HD on Sat or Cable. The amount of compression I get on my cable HD is very bad. I have no doubt that Toshiba might be able to make a DVD look as good as my HD on cable.

The HD via Blu-ray is much, much better than HD over cable.

I don't think they will ever be able to get the Dvds to look like Blu-Ray quality HD.

I have never seen actual over the air HD so I don't know what it looks like. If your local channels use sub-channels then you are not getting the full HD quality either.

 

[Hanson]

I watch OTA, and the CBS station has no subchannels (the FOX station has only one, a compressed SD feed of what used to be WWOR that so bad it's worse than analog cable -- way, way worse).

I recently added a HD digital cable into the mix, but I've never done any A/B testing. I haven't noticed that the cable HD is appreciably worse than OTA, but it's much easier to record OTA, so I actually don't watch a lot of the cable HD feed (it is TV doldrums time, after all).

If this Tosh player can make a DVD look like cable HD, I'll reserve one at Best Buy right now!

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

I agree there though I really doubt they can pull all that much more out of the heavily compressed MPEG2 stream as the source. If the source video stream is good quality, lossless, full res 480p, then you might be right. But that's not the case w/ DVD. Also, not quite that many DVD titles have fully utilized the format's potential either, so that makes it more difficult for such tech to work well across the board. In the end, even if it works great for the best DVDs out there, it probably will still be lacking for a large majority of lower quality DVDs.

Of course, you're probably right that many folks will not care about the diff between Blu-ray and this tech, if this thing pans out. OTOH, like others point out, most of those folks probably also won't care about this tech either. They're probably satisfied enough w/ any old upconversion, including the one native to their display device.

This is all just a lot of speculation at this point. The only certainty we have right now is that Blu-ray is here (and no longer hindered by a HDM format war) and offers us very good HD quality (when done right). You're free to wait for the next step forward in DVD upconversion, if that ever really comes about. For myself, if I'm gonna buy a new title, I'd much rather go for the Blu-ray at this point. If DVD upconversion does improve to become "good enough" for me, I'll still have my existing DVD collection around to make use of that -- I'm not in a big hurry to hock off my entire collection just because I started spending $ on Blu-ray.

The rest is just gonna be a lot of back-and-forth speculation...

_Man_

 

[Hanson]

I dunno -- to take this analogy further, they gave meat substitutes to a bunch of chefs on Hell's Kitchen. With the blindfold and without any expectation, none of them realized they were eating procssed soy protein. I guess if you know going in that it's upconverted SD, you'll find every flaw, but if you didn't know better, it's possible you'd wouldn't be able to tell at first glance.

Now, it really wouldn't be noticable if you watched it blindfolded.

I've tried the fake duck, and if I didn't know it was fake duck going in, I don't know if I would have known it was fake duck, you know?

 

[Jari K]

Consider yourself as one of the lucky ones. 2 years full of bitter stuff (and some cheap prices, though...).

It´s also true, that many of these issues has been talked (almost) to death already. This "upscaled Toshiba" might be just one "short extension" from the tree that we can humorously call "format war"-tree.

 

[troy evans]

This explains alot. My friend, you need to get a Blu-ray player and enjoy the difference.