PC-Engine said:
1. It's not higher than standard DVD resolution.
2. It results in marginally better video quality by using a hack (stripping all bonus material) to gain more data storage space from a DVD.
1. I love how resolution still seems to be the end-all be-all of movie quality for you.
2. They also use larger-capacity disks to offer even MORE storage for quality improvements--which most other don't and certainly substantially earlier releases didn't. They exclude extra features from the movie disk to offer as much quality as the DVD format is capable of (or at least the highest balance they think will please the most people). They also stitched extra content right back in with 2-disk offerings, so the only thing missing is commentary tracks. (Which most DVD releases still don't come with initially by and large--though they do tend to come in later on with Special Editions! Ooooh!)
It's fragmenting the market because it has created a hacked psuedo sub-format so when a person goes to purchase a DVD movie, they now have to ask do I get the SB version or the standard version?
"Do I get the Widescreen or Fullscreen? Do I get the "clean" version for the kids or the "unrated" version because I'd like to see the extras they didn't show in the theater? Do I get the DVD when it comes out immediately, or wait until they bundle it with the sequel? ...or release a Director's Cut? ...or and Extended Edition? Do I buy episodes singly when they come out, or wait until the boxed set?"
Yes Pat, you get all that and much much more! The market is plenty fragmented anyway. Superbit is just another drop in the bucket.
Upgrading the hardware isn't a problem when you're getting something that's an order of magnitude better not to mention backwards compatible.
...and that's why anything is acceptable when it's not causing a hardware upgrade. It's just targetting a different segment of the public. (And of course, being a new marketing gimmick to attract people's attention whether they're interested in it or not.)
Superbit is a stop gap by Jimmy Rigging the DVD format to get a marginal increase in quality while losing other features.
The sum total of loss here (since they offer Superbit Deluxe packages WITH the extras) would be commentary tracks, since they have to be overlaid over the movie itself and would take up space they want to devote otherwise. Considering that itself isn't utterly commonplace on initial releases (nor always appreciably good when they are included), the amount "hacked" is rather trivial. And for that the consumer is getting reasonably better visual quality (certainly no huge leaps, no) and heck, even just getting 5.1/DTS would be worth it for many folks, as that's still fairly uncommon among movies. (Common on audio-focused DVD's like concert recordings. And for movies even LESS common since many times it takes a new edition or re-issue to get to adding it in.)
As cops would say, "Move along, there's nothing to see here." By your logic, ALL DVD's are "hacks" since they're removing content (quality lower than what they could offer) to include Special Features as
well as the other way around. Either way, there is a
loss of one kind of content and a
gain of another kind of content. This is why it's called a "trade-off" and aimed at different segments of the public. The only real "hack" to be annoyed at would be a company taking, say, a release on dual-layer and re-releasing the same thing at lower quality on single-layer later on to save production costs; net loss and no gains.
You're just spinning your wheels here, PC.
