HD DVD vs Blu-Ray

For what its worth, my bet is neither; look for a"compronise" fornat with the next year or so, likely backward-compatable to either. If ya gotta have one right noow, HD DVD offers more available pre-recorded material, and if you ain't got a current-model, bleeding-edge burner and the latest premium burning software, all you're gonna have is pre-recorded stuff.


Should add, however, I gotta basement fulla top-shelf stuff that no longer has any current market support - from quadraphonic stereo to laser disc. Some collector value, I s'pose, but little else. Oh yeah ... I got all you need to set up a BNC/Token Ring network for just about any reasonable number of clients - ''case any body's interested.

This has been discussed in the Consumer Electronics forum:

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=72118

The difference in the two formats is more capacity and a slight edge in quality for Blu-Ray, with HD coming up with cheaper playback equipment and an immediately larger software library. It's Beta against VHS all over again. It's hard to say what will happen.

Yep, timber, by laserdisc player is still in the garage and the discs have long been given away or sold. Never had Beta, and don't remember what happened to my quadraphonic LP playback equipment. Fortunately, I no longer have any 8 track but I do have cassettes. One of my recorder/players is DBX which produces really good sound from cassette so I'm keeping it to maybe one day relegate it to an extra room. Not.

I have a boatload of casette tapes, and an old Sony Walkman. I use it when I am exercising. CD player are too cumbersome, and I am not going to get involved with Ipods.

If my Walkman breaks, I am in BIG trouble!

I do have a DBX walkman somewhere in the house but I haven't used it for years. Actually, as DBX compresses the dynamic range by 50% and then expands it on playback, they used to sound good on my car stereo as the soft passages were never masked by traffic noise.

Blu-ray is dead. Get a good quality HD-DVD player.

Chuck

I dont know why but many motion picture firms are releasing their movies in Blue ray Disk formats, whern the truth is BD players are costliest of all. more than $300.

I believe I would rather stick to my simple DVDs until the prices come down.

Blu-Ray is hardly dead -- it's capacity is far greater and in the future it's the only HD DVD media software which can carry a very long film on one disc and full PCM 9 channel digital audio, which is the only way to hear a movie soundtrack to it's full potential. Disney is only releasing on Blu-Ray as well as other studios. Universal is the only hold-out. The players are coming down, but right now I'd purchase a DVD upscaler which improves your present library of DVD's by upscaling to 720p, 1080i and 1080p (if you've recently invested in the latest display technology). What is likely to happen, however, with LG in the lead are chips that play both since the HD DVD format also uses a blue laser.

Also remember that few movies have improved definition and those are the projections that were 70mm in the theaters. Otherwise, on even a 92" hi-def display even in 1080p, you aren't going to be able to tell the difference if you're sitting a normal distance from the screen. It's all pretty much hype. If you have a 42" or smaller screen, it's just buying a toy that won't really be appreciated.

Unlike BETA, it looks like this time the better quality product will win out.

The scuttlebutt in industry is that Blu-Ray will be the standard but that several manufacturers are planning on including the blue ray laser reading chip for HDTV in their players. It's when it gets to recording that will separate the men from the boys and, hands down, Blu-Ray has the edge on that capacity factor. The best theaters are 9.1 Dolby or DTS, which means there's two side and rear channel speaker pairs and two more up-front that handle the discrete DSP channels which give depth behind the screen. One could also record two or more standard DVD's onto one Blu-Ray recordable disc, depending on the copy protection.

A nail in the coffin for HD-DVD? Warner Bros drops HD-DVD.

Even though it's difficult to discern any picture or sound quality difference at first between HD DVD and Blu-Ray, there wasn't a great deal of difference between RCA's SelectaVision and Laser Disc. The RCA product somehow lasted five years even though it had become obvious from the outset that just because the players and discs were cheaper, it was an analog system and the discs would eventually wear out from the physical contact of a stylus.
It's the manufacturers who are thinking of recording. more elaborate sound systems and capacity, especially when Blu-Ray Hi Def DVD Burners are introduced into the US market (like always, there are already burners in Japan). For data storage from a PC or MAC, the Blu-Ray is clearly superior and more and more home systems are including a PC tied into a large screen television monitor.