Australian DVD Podcast #45: The HD Blu-Ray Blues
In this weeks late night edition of the Australian DVD Podcast, we sacrifice our beauty sleep to bring you tales of our hands-on Blu-ray experience and we review Mission Impossible III.
Information and Links
Join the fray by commenting, tracking what others have to say, or linking to it from your blog.
Reader Comments
Just a quick note, it actually isnt the color that is the problem, quite the oppisite, in most blu-ray reviews I’ve read they say that the color is bright and really ‘pops’. aparently its a very soft transfer, sadly. But my money is still on blu-ray being the winner in this race.
Well, I’m at the point where my money actually is going on one format or the other. I might change my mind next week but right now I’m going to buy into HD-DVD because:
* It’s cheaper
* There’s no region coding at the moment
* looking at Amazon I found dozens of movies I’d buy in HD-DVD but only a few Blu-ray releases.
The way I see it is that I’ll spend as little as I can now to get the movies I most want to watch (which means HD-DVD) and wait for the inevitable dual format players that I’m sure will turn up at a fraction the price next year.
And a cheap HD-DVD drive for your PC
http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2006/11/8303/
Im damn tempted to get a HD-XA1 (the first gen high end model at 120V) for AUD$956 inc shipping from PriceJapan
Food for thought…
P.S. for some reason the last couple of comments were cued for moderation - I have no idea why - maybe because they had live links in them?? :-/
Here is another link to updated HD format stats:
Some interesting stuff on the dvd wars link and I think I’ll chat about it on this week’s podcast.
I was in JB HIFI this morning and was glad to see a hi def tv playing a Blu Ray demo disc. Goody, I thought, I could only begin to imagine what incredible things I was about to see. As I got closer I realised it was a guy fixing/making a friggin watch/clock.
A guy playing with cogs is not what should be showing off next gen tech!
It would be like trying to sell a surround sound system and using ‘Hannah and her sisters’ as the demo disc.
To really rub salt into the wounds they had a standee next to it with Blu ray titles such as Hitch, Hostel, Underworld evolution, Tears of the sun, and a few more I cant remember, all for a sadly high 37 ish bucks.
*Remember also that 90% of Blu-ray titles out right now, are only MPEG-2, which are lower quality than the MPEG-4 variant on HD-DVD (it also requires more space cancelling out the blu-ray media size advantage)
*Blue ray players in Australia are 2.5 times the cost of entry level HD-DVD players
*Sales of HD-DVD discs are roughly ten times that of the same Blue-ray discs on Amazon
*In reference to ‘Fifth Element’ hopefully being a reference disc in HD - the Blu-Ray version has color problems compared to the DVD and is only MPEG-2
*Sony have admitted that their content strategy is to get people to buy the same titles over and over by moving people to new media regularly. The HD-DVD camp are more likely to stick with the format longer as they make more money from the media licensing as opposed to the content. Sony will quickly dump Blu-ray if the tide goes against them. (Think UMD)