DVD: 11 Years Later. Anyone tired of this format yet? (1 Viewer)

[Ockeghem]

I'm not tired of it at all. Then again, I'm not tired of VHS (or for music and spoken recorded material, CDs or LPs). I won't be making the transition to Blu ray unless forced to do so one day. And should that happen, older formats will still be used by me for many years for a variety of reasons.

 

[RickER]

Its been said before, and i will say it again. That sounds fine for a rental system. But i want to OWN the disc. I dont want someone turning it off if they go out of business, or if i buy a new machine that wont play my "chip". Give me a format that is mine to keep, as long as a player exists that i can use it on!

 

[David Deeb]

I don't know if I'd call it "tired of it", but I certainly have just about dropped it in favor of BD. BD and HD source material is so much better picture quality and audio. On old and new films.

There is no since in throwing out my SD discs, but I'm enjoying classics again in BD with my jaw on the ground. Dirty Harry, Speed, and Blazing Saddles just this past week.

The only SD titles I'll buy going forward are the Three Stooges Collection. I'm sure other BD fans are picking up some of their favs on SD, just to make sure they get a physical copy. Could be a while before many of those old 4x3 tv series make it to BD (if ever).

 

[Joe Karlosi]

A few observations...

I bought my first 46" HDTV only this past May. I thought the regular DVDs would look lousy, but was surprised to see that just about all of my regular DVDs look great on it. I've been toying with the idea of going BD somewhere down the line, but in honesty there really doesn't seem to be any pressing reason to do so.

You'd better be willing to return to "old standard DVD" a lot of the time, as many of the movies on DVD will not make it to BD, especially older movies and "offbeat" films. So if it's true that "once you go BD you can never go back", you're going to have a very rough time trying to enjoy what you perceive to be "inferior-looking SDs" along with your BDs.

My VCR is not in the basement, the garage, the attic, nor the trash. It's hooked up along with my DVD player, because there are still movies on VHS which haven't even been released to SD yet. May never be.

That 2/09 threat of TV "changing everything" because it'll be "all digital" won't amount to a hill of beans for most average Joe Six Pack Consumers - and they're the ones who'll drive BD to wide acceptance, or not. The average viewer will still be content watching their broadcast TV shows in HD and playing their SDs on the set,which will still look great to them.

There'll always be a way to play SD. For starters, the Blu-ray players play SD, so in theory you could buy a BD player if you had to, and could still play all your old SD movies.. they'd even be upconverted. You can still find turntables and projectors, and play vinyl records, 16mm films, etc...

 

[Jim_K]

The bigger your HD display's screen size and the closer you sit factor into how much difference you'll see between upconverted DVD and Blu-ray. HD Resolution is another major factor as there's a pretty good leap from 720P to full 1080P. Proper calibration is another factor.

Also the DVD quality itself varies from title to title. Some look pretty good upconverted while others with heavy EE, digital manipulation and or crappy encodes look like ass in 1080P resolution.

Even on my 37" display in my bedroom there's a significant difference between the best upconverted DVD and the average Blu-ray. On my 70" well.... forget about it.

As for the original question why should I be tired of DVD? I don't buy many anymore and when given the choice I'll always pick the BD version but there's no reason I can't enjoy my standard DVD collection.

Maybe if people thought of Blu-ray as a much higher quality version of DVD and just an extention of their movie library they wouldn't be as threatened by it. Be a movie buff rather than a DVD buff.

BTW - Long live disc based physical media!

 

[David Deeb]

I think that is where many on this forum are at too Jim.

This isn't scientific by any means, but I decided to look at the "replies" and "views" for 3 new popular releases in both the "SD Film and Documentary" and the "HT Software - High Definition" sections here at HTF.

I picked these 3 because both versions (BD & SD) are released on the same day. (unlike a BD version of Beetlejuice for example, that has been on SD for years). As of 9pm 10-6-08. The "reply" count is listed first, followed by the "view count".

Speed Racer SD Thread 23 / 1,319
Speed Racer BD Thread 89 / 2,457

Iron Man SD Thread 8 / 1,463
Iron Man BD Thread 48 / 2,348

Indiana Jones Crystal Skull SD Thread 11 / 1,370
Indiana Jones Crystal Skull BD Thread 36 / 1,854

 

[Tony J Case]

Meh - From the demos I've seen, Blue Ray doesnt look all that much better to me, and the films I'm interested in will never ever EVER come out on Blue. Oh, sure it might be fine for your multi-billion dollar Iron Mans and Batmans, but are we really going to see Women in prison flicks, Mondo films, Chambara and Blaxploitation on Blue? Is Plan 9 From Outer Space and Night of the Living Dead really going to be that much of an improvment with another 400 lines of resoultion?

 

[PaulDA]

Screen size, as stated above, makes a difference in how one perceives the improved PQ of BD/HD DVD vs SD DVD. In my "HT room" (functionally so, not decoratively so), I have a front projector with a 64 inch 16x9 screen (not large for a projector, but quite large enough for the room dimension and seating position) and a 22 inch 16x10--with a 16x9 setting, though, so no distortion--HD LCD computer monitor (that I use as an alternate display for watching anything under 90mins--no need to fire up the pj--and as a display for some of the material on my DVD-A). When I watch BDs/HD DVDs on the "big screen" and alternate them with SD DVDs, the image quality improvement is ALWAYS evident, if not always dramatic (it is always at least a moderate improvement, usually significant and sometimes dramatic--all terms subjective, of course). However, on my LCD monitor, while the difference between SD cable and HD cable is ALWAYS dramatic, the difference between SD DVD and BD/HD DVD, while maintaining the same relative differences as on the "big screen", overall is (except in rare cases with truly bad SD transfers) far less notable. So, if I ONLY had the small monitor, my desire to get BD/HD DVD would have been less pronounced. With the projector, however, the difference is noticeable enough that I had no qualms about getting each format. That said, I still enjoy my SD DVDs on the "big screen" routinely--I'm not going to wait an unknown number of years for my SD DVDs to be re-released in BD (even if I were so inclined as to automatically replace each title as that happened--which I'm not). Moreover, I selected my projector, in large part, for its well-rated (at the time) video processing and have been quite happy with the results with SD releases.

In the end, despite what some have argued elsewhere, I do not think an upgrade to HDM is essential unless one has a display large enough for the upgrade to be noticeable. How big that is should be an individual decision but at average viewing distances I suspect 50 inches becomes the tipping point for most people. One thing that is noticeable, even on my small monitor, is an improved colour balance. I've directly compared HDM with recent SD releases and while the difference in perceived resolution is fairly minor at that size, the differences in colour balance are less so. But that may not be a major factor for everyone.

FWIW--I sit 7.5 ft from the "big screen" and 3.5 ft from the monitor.

 

[Jason Seaver]

It's been a while since I saw any of Night of the Living Dead, but doesn't it have fairly nice B&W photography? The way I look at it is that if something looks noticeably better on film, it will look noticeably better in HD (depending, of course, on your equipment).

 

[Jack Theakston]

Yes, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD has some stunning black and white photography, and the new HD transfer of it does do it justice.

For years I was a proponent of disc-based digital media, even before it was a reality. I saw in the '80s what CDs could do for the convenience factor of audio (not necessarily the quality) and always wondered, "why can't they put a video on a CD?" Laser Discs seemed to be the way for a while, but I didn't want to invest in something that was, for one thing, that expensive, as well as bulky. In 1997, when the DVD format started selling in retail outlets regularly, I went out and snatched one of the players up-- and I still have it, too!

 

[James 'Tiger' Lee]

That's true for any film. If it really bother people, they should stop going to the cinema