Give it SOME time! HD just came out a few weeks ago and BR is coming out in the next couple weeks! The prices will drop. I paid $300 for my first DVD player, and that was a great deal at the time. By the time Christmas rolls around, you'll probably be able to get one of the players for $400 or less. By next Christmas, probably $250 or less. BluRay is more now but will achieve parity very soon. (Or buy a PS3 for slightly more.) So far, movies are about the same price - that's what I'm really impressed by.
Sure oyu can--but is that the HD-DVD talking or the HDTV talking? Anything will look sharp on an HD display, and comparing a DVD to an HDDVD isn't completely fair by itself--what you should make sure you're comparing is an HDDVD and a DVD that's been upscaled.
Sorry to say, but that's one of the most ignorant statements that Joe Consumer can make, and one of the most shameless "screw you"s sold by the electronics companies.
Guess what - if you're watching a DVD on an HD screen - it's been upscaled! Hook up a seven-year-old DVD player to a brand-new HD television - and you'll get upscaled DVD. Hook up that old Beta player that's collecting dust in the basement and you'll get upscaled Beta, too.
The ISSUE is the quality of the upscaling. If you hook up an old DVD player, then the HD TV will upscale it, just like it upscales standard-def TV, VHS, game consoles (except X360), etc. If your TV has a nice scaler, it's a waste of money to buy an "upscaling" DVD player which may have a worse upscaler, just because it outputs a 720p image instead of a 480p image. (You should have a progressive-scan DVD player, though.)
My projector is 1280x720. Every single thing it displays, no matter what the input is, is projected at 1280x720. The upscaling is done by the PC, which does an extremely nice job, better than the upscalers in most TVs and upscaling DVD players. I use the same software player for DVD content and HD content. And there is a clear difference between DVD content and HD content. To be fair, we're talking about a 102" screen. But the difference is definitely there.
But even on a smaller screen, the idea that "anything will look sharp on a HD screen" is bullshit. I had DirecTV hooked in for a while and I eventually turned off that receiver as it was nearly unwatchable on the big screen, even going through DScaler, which has incredible quality. VHS is still crap. Laserdiscs are mediocre. DVDs - very nice, but HD is way better. Look at it this way - if you load up Doom, set for 320x200 (or 640x480), are you going to expect it to look like Far Cry just because you're playing it on a 19" LCD with 1280x1024 resolution? Your LCD is showing Doom at that resolution...
As a matter of fact, you won't. At the moment, teh only HDDVD player out on the market only supports up to 1080I.
What does that have to do with anything?
1080p is getting more common on "regular" TVs, and no doubt 1080p projectors will become affordable in a few years. Currently, they're something like $30,000+.
Movies encoded on HD-DVD and BluRay are stored in 1080p format, and apparently even at 24fps if they're film-sourced. So 1080p is the ideal display format for them.
Anyway, while we're on that subject, I don't really see the point of buying a 720P screen, the future is 1080P so why not just wait until those get good and affordable and then buy one of those? That way you know you won't be being left behind.
Why buy a Playstation 3? You know that the Playstation 4 will be coming and will blow it away. Maybe PS2 owners should have not bought it and just waited for the PS3.
The reason is that I've been watching 720p content on a huge screen for nearly two years now. If I waited for 1080p, I'd be sitting around for many years waiting, watching nothing in the meantime, or crappy 480p.
Yes, I'm sure you've seen the compression you get over digital cable. Hah hah hah hah hah! Hah hah hah hah hah, eh? Hah hah hah hah hah!
Are you being sarcastic?
Hell yes, I can see the compression. That's one of the reasons I dumped digital cable and went to DirecTV. (That and my very hacked DirecTV Tivo.) I can see the compression on DirecTV, too, but it's not as bad as I got with cable. I can also see different compression being used on different channels.
As for HD, yes, you can definitely find HD broadcasts with pixelation problems. I've got many that have certain scenes that have clear pixelation when there's extremely fast action and lots of picture changes. Spraying water, fog, etc are the usual culprits. This was a problem in the early days of DVD until they got better than authoring - they manually go through and find those scenes and up the bitrate to compensate. Wth the extra care that'll go into the factory HDDVDs/BRs plus the extra bitrate overall, there will be even better quality... and the existing stuff is already amazing. Especially stuff authored for HD, like the Pixar movies. Or Star Wars Ep3 - just nabbed that in HD, and wow is it pretty.
Oh trust me--I believe you and everyone when you say that HD-DVD is significantly better looking than regular DVDs. I just think that there are enough hastles in the way to make that differernce not worth the time of a standard consumer, and I don't like sinking money into things that I can do just fine without when they didn't go about it right.
So don't buy right away. I'm not planning on it. But the only real problem here is the dueling formats. I am assuming (and hoping, due to more storage) that BR will win the war and this will all fade into memory... like Divx. (Remember Divx? Not the video codec, but Divx players, which competed with DVD players... there was similar hand-wringing about competing standards, etc.)
What they could do and do very easilly if it was all about hte content is just make two different versions of hte DVD; a "movie" version and a "delux" version or something like that, where the delux version is the regular DVD with all the features and whatnot, and the "movie" version is jsut hte movie, maybe with alternate audio tracks or what have you, but that DVD is encoded with the HD codecs that are being placed onto the HD-DVD and Blue Ray discs.
You overestimate the power of compression. You can't fit a quality HD movie onto a single DVD. Hell, you can't fit Godfather 2 in regular DVD format on a single DVD with good quality! OK, you'll save room going to WMV9 or H264 or Mpeg4 instead of Mpeg2, but you'll still not have enough room to do the format proud.
Most of the stuff I have is in Transport Stream format, which is basically mpeg2. Most movies take 3-4 DVDs to store them. The biggest is one of the Lord of the Rings movies - that's about 6.5 DVDs. And that's not the extended cut. That's with only a single 5.1 Dolby audio track. That's at cable/satellite bitrate (relatively high, but still less than you'd want on a storebought movie.) Now, you're expecting them to fit that movie, plus multiple audio tracks (including higher-quality ones - HDDVD and BR are having new, better Dolby and DTS formats), menus, and extras, onto a single DVD? No way. Can't be done, with good quality.
There are efforts to do that - I think China's homegrown HD format uses regular DVDs. But the 30g of BR or 25g of HDDVD mean far more quality for the movie itself than the 8.5g of a dual-layer DVD.
Plus, much of the cost of the players is in the processing power - it takes a huge amount of CPU to decode HD at full speed. Example, they used to recommend 300mHz on your PC for watching DVDs... for HD, you better have at least 3gHz (or comparable AMD "plus" speed) if you want smooth playback. I have an Athlon 2500+ o/ced to 3200+, and I get the occasional stutter still.
Really/ Coudl you link me/ I'm not saying this to call you a liar, i'm saying this because i just don't believe that they can. I was under the impression that the terms of the blue ray specification included locking hardware manufacturerers out from creating a duel-format player.
No time at the moment, but I believe it was Samsung who was working on it. I know at least one of them was. update...Sanyo apparently is, maybe in addition.
Also, geez, work on the typos and misspellings. It's ridiculous. Especially in one's tagline.