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Blu-ray Disc Coating (2 Viewers)

Paul Arnette

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As lame as it may sound, the scratch-resistant and antistatic coating applied to Blu-ray Discs are fast becoming one of the biggest reasons I prefer Blu-ray to HD DVD at the moment. I'm probably just amazed as some of you are right now reading this post going, "Oh, my God! This guys is nuts!" But I have to tell you after receiving two copies of The Game from Amazon, both of which were finger-printed and scratched at the factory, that seemingly inconsequential feature of Blu-ray Disc is really factoring into my buying decisions. Of course, the fact that the only way you can currently output 1080p/24fps is on a Blu-ray Disc player may also be affecting my purchasing habits, but damn it if that coating isn't the bee's knees.

I have a feeling I'm alone on this one, but I just thought I'd share my oddity with everyone else. :D
 

Neil Joseph

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I used a disk as a test a few months ago (league of extraordinary gentlemen) and tried to scuff the hell out of it. As well, I had my dirty fingerprints all over the disk.

It played plawlessly from start to finish.
 

Zack Gibbs

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That's not weird, I remember back when they announced it saying the layers were so thin it took a while to find a strong enough coating to protect them. They said it was so resistant you couldn't even write on it with a permanent marker, sounded neat in a geeky way.

Now someone go write on a disc with a permanent marker and report back here.
 

Ben_Williams

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Paul... I'm with you on this one. Durabis is a pretty cool protective coating. I like the way that you can actually feel the stuff on the disc. It's got a more substantial feel to it. Of course, the real benefit is that I've yet to have a single Blu-ray disc suffer from a scratch or any kind of interruption in play. I wish I could say the same for my HD DVDs.
 

Andrew Bunk

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I agree too. I had two floaters in my Planet Earth Blu-Ray set from Amazon, and no marks were to be found.
 

Chris S

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The video above is another reason why I love the internet. Companies aren't able to get away with saying anything anymore without having someone out there willing to challenge them on it via YouTube. :emoji_thumbsup:
 

Norman Matthews

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Look like I won't be eating steak off of any Blu-Ray discs anytime soon. And to think I was actually considering buying in...
 

Edwin-S

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Of course, it did pass the test that was orginally claimed: the steel wool test. The disc stood up pretty well, considering the abuse that was committed. I would like to see if an HD DVD would play after being rubbed with steel wool, written on with a ball point pen, and scarred with a pizza cutter. Three out of four is pretty good in my books.
 

Norman Matthews

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That was my point exactly. No disc-based media should ever be expected to stand up to half of that abuse in a realistic environment. It was a joke.

On the other hand, all the video showed was the disc booting up. That's a long way from playing through flawlessly.
 

Rob Young

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The coating is sweet. It doesn't make me prefer BD over HDDVD but I will say when I get discs in both formats and the hd dvd is off the spindle I wish it had that sweet coating.

I received my first bluray via rental yesterday and the surface is flawless...that was odd to see for a rental disc.:)
 

Jim_K

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Yep. The coating is a big plus. Got 3 floater discs from Amazon so far - not a mark on em.
 

ppltd

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The coating on the BD disks, IMHO, is the single biggest plus BD has over any other format. All of the bitrate and storage capacity is of no value if you can not read the disk. I can not count the amount of SD's I have trashed because someone I loaned them to scratched the heck out of them. I imagine I will have the same problem with my HD DVD's as they are loaned out to friends. The industry as a whole should adopt this coating as a standard.
 

Stephen_J_H

All Things Film Junkie
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This coating has been adopted by Maxell on its premium DVD-Rs. Here's hoping the rest of the industry will see the light.
 

Paul Beck

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Jun 23, 2002
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This is an interesting group of posts since I own over 200 High Definition DVDs of both types and have updated both the Samsung BDP1000 and the Toshiba XA2 players with the latest updates.
I have stopped buying Blur-ray discs since I have had to return 7 Blu-ray discs for replacements and in 6 of those cases the replacements also were defective. For instance, King Arthur plays fine until chapter 5 then stutters both in sound and picture. I even tried a rental copy of this movie from Netflix and had the same problem. I contacted Netflix and they have had a number of this movie returned as defective, so I am not the only one with this problem.
I now own 89 blu-ray discs and will not buy any more until the quality control takes care of the product.
I now own 148 HD-DVD discs and have had two different Toshiba players which played them all. (I gave my XA1 to my niece so she could play the discs she had been given and so I could feel ok to buy the new Toshiba!)
So far I had one disc HD-DVD that was defective and the replacement from Amazon plays perfectly.
By the way, I don't care about the format - just give me excellent quality of the movie. Playing these with the current players I see HD-DVD superior in quality of picture using HDMI connections through a Yamaha RX-V2700 to a Hewlett-Packard 65" DLP MD6580N.
I find the surface just fine on my HD-DVDs since I do not use then as coasters!
 

Dave H

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I also agree....the coating is great. I've been renting 2-3 Netflix BD's per week since January never to have a single playback issue on my PS3.
 

Sanjay Gupta

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Jun 30, 1997
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This coating on Blu-Ray discs is absolutely amazing. I own a DVD rental library and believe me the single biggest wish I have had all along was for DVDs and any future media to be in a caddy. In fact when the studios forced Sony & Toshiba to get rid of the caddy in the original DVD specs I had been extremely dissapointed. Then the story repeated itself when Sony due to competitive reasons dropped the caddy for Blu-Ray which was originally designed to have a caddy like the mini disc. Over the years the single biggest issue we have had with our customers is over the huge number of discs damaged by them due to their stupidity and negligence. But looking at this video gives me hope for Blu-Ray as the chosen format for rentals. Believe it or not we have gotten discs back from customers that actually looked like someone had taken a butchers knife to.
 

Grant H

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All my Bu-ray discs have played flawlessly, all my rentals also played flawlessly.

Perhaps the "superior" looking HD DVD titles are the ones from the same transfer (obviously it has to be the same transfer to do a comparison) with VC-1 encodes on the HD DVD version and MPEG 2 on the Blu-ray (like MI:3) where the Blu-ray shows the film grain and the HD DVD filters it out, so when you zoom in you get pixelization instead? :) Hopefully that encoding problem has been fixed by now.

One thing I've learned, so many people hate film grain. But removing it eliminates detail; it doesn't add it.

Also, when I read about a Blu-ray transfer looking awful, 9 out of 10 times it's a Super 35 film. If the film's ugly, the transfer's going to be ugly. IMO most Super 35 films just look more muddy than others (often with slightly blown out contrast), not much you can do about it. All the digital post-processing and digital color timing has changed the look a bit, but they'll never have the clarity of films shot with other methods.

So most of the time I see people hating a Blu-ray disc it's really been that they hate film grain or hate Super 35.
 

ppltd

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I have owned HD and BD for some time now and am beginning to believe that any difference one perceives between the quality of the image is more perception than fact. I certainly have not been able to tell any differences that could not be attributed to the hardware. I think the days of one format producing better quality images than the other are behind us, and individual perceptions have taken over.

I have made it a point to read as many reviews of releases as I can find, focusing on the reviews of titles released on both formats, and almost to the letter, all reviewers are stating that there is little or no differences in PQ between the dual format releases. That is good enough for me.

SQ seems to be another matter entirely, as it seems that BD is getting shorted changed in the sound department on many Warner and Paramount releases.
 

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