Sony Announces Blu-ray Movie Pricing

[GB123]

Personally i don't care, i'll be getting 720p Bluray video and i'll bloody love it. Then if i feel the need to go for a 1080p set, maybe i'll splash out on it... All depends on many things really.

Good for you .. !!

Me on the other hand will wait and buy a 1080p with HDMI and HDCP, just so i know im not shooting myself in the foot.

I would be pretty depressed if i spent a lot of money on a set up only to find out that it wasn't up to par.

If upscaled DVDs don't look good on your setup then 1. You have crappy equipment or 2. You have good equipment but it's crappily adjusted. A modest $4K home theater setup can rival and even surpass the real theater experience if setup correctly.

you are still only working with 480p though, there is only so much polishing you can do.

 

[London Geezer]

Good for you .. !!

Me on the other hand will wait and buy a 1080p with HDMI and HDCP, just so i know im not shooting myself in the foot.

I would be pretty depressed if i spent a lot of money on a set up only to find out that it wasn't up to par.

Internet Forum peer-pressure is very bad for our pockets, and very good for big companies like Sony, Panasonic and friends...

 

[London Geezer]

you are still only working with 480p though, there is only so much polishing you can do.

480i actually, all DVD are set to 480i. From there, to the final picture on your eyes, the image goes through so much processing it's kinda scary.

 

[NANOTEC]

Other DVDs are just a bit crappy and the equipment i have shows the flaws in all their glory.

That's the fault of the mastering not the DVD technology.

You can rest assured everything is connected properly. Really.

It's not about connecting it properly. Connections are basic. The magic is in the fine tuning and tweaking, the things some people actually pay a technician hundreds of dollars to come to their home to do. I do that stuff myself because I know how and it makes a HUGE difference between out of the box default settings.

you are still only working with 480p though, there is only so much polishing you can do.

Sure, but my point is upscaled DVDs can look REALLY good even on a modest setup. I know this from experience as I've built modest HT systems for friends and relatives and I've been into audio/video gear since I was 8 yrs old. A recent example of a very visually good DVD is Into The Blue. That DVD looks amazing probably even better than LOTR EE.

 

[London Geezer]

That's the fault of the mastering not the DVD technology.

Sure, my point is that some DVDs just look crap.

It's not about connecting it properly. Connections are basic. The magic is in the fine tuning and tweaking, the things some people actually pay a technician hundreds of dollars to come to their home to do. I do that stuff myself because I know how and it makes a HUGE difference between out of the box default settings.

Again, that's nice and all you can rest assured my setup is well tweaked and does not have out-of-the-box settings, but personally i don't see the point in paying hundreds of pounds to someone to setup my equipment, when in the end it's what my eyes like that matters.
Especially if in the end you're going to play DVDs, there's only so much butter you can put on a burnt toast.

Sure, but my point is upscaled DVDs can look REALLY good even on a modest setup. I know this from experience as I've built modest HT systems for friends and relatives and I've been into audio/video gear since I was 8 yrs old. A recent example of a very visually good DVD is Into The Blue. That DVD looks amazing probably even better than LOTR EE.

Of course, as i said before mentioning Madagascar as example, DVD can look VERY good with the right setup, but Madagascar is one among hundreds and hundreds of DVDs that look grainy and lack "the punch" of better encoded ones if you know what i mean.

 

[GB123]

Again, that's nice and all you can rest assured my setup is well tweaked and does not have out-of-the-box settings, but personally i don't see the point in paying hundreds of pounds to someone to setup my equipment, when in the end it's what my eyes like that matters.

Totally agree with you there, especially considering everyone precieves colours differently.

Of course, as i said before mentioning Madagascar as example, DVD can look VERY good with the right setup, but Madagascar is one among hundreds and hundreds of DVDs that look grainy and lack "the punch" of better encoded ones if you know what i mean.

My all time reference DVD's are Bug's Life and Dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs having some of the higest detail i have seen in a DVD.

 

[NANOTEC]

Sure, my point is that some DVDs just look crap.

So how is BR at 720 going to change mastering quality? Didn't you imply that BR will be the answer to your DVD problem even if it's dowscaled?

 

[NANOTEC]

Totally agree with you there, especially considering everyone precieves colours differently.

I think color accuracy should be what the director and cinematographer intended first. After you have that correctly calibrated then you can talk about personal color preferences.

My all time reference DVD's are Bug's Life and Dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs having some of the higest detail i have seen in a DVD.

Those do nothing for accurate human flesh tones. You need movies with real people. I'd say all CG movies appear to look very clean as it should on DVD.

 

[GB123]

So how is BR at 720 going to change mastering quality? Didn't you imply that BR will be the answer to your DVD problem even if it's dowscaled?

I'm sure the extra bit-rate and resolution would improve movies that are shot in dark conditions considerably.

 

[NANOTEC]

I'm sure the extra bit-rate and resolution would improve movies that are shot in dark conditions considerably.

Can you elaborate?

 

[Mr. Hanky]

It's a long shot, but perhaps when they downscale BR resolution, they are only supersampling the luminance resolution and leaving the chrominance resolution (maybe just a light resampling so the pixel numbers work out). That way you can hit a nice sweet spot (for sd and non-hdcp compliant users) where the images could be very close to 4:4:4 color space (in practice, better than 4:2:0, and just short of 4:4:4, perhaps). That would be far better than any DVD could deliver and better quality material than any prosumer has ever had their hands on to date, regardless of the similarity of the overal resolution. It would be big win for everybody.

...of course quality paranoia from movie publishers might prevail, and they will nullify that benefit, as well.

 

[GB123]

Can you elaborate?

Blu-ray is capable of higher detail/information which would help when mastering movies which are complicated such as very dark and low contrast scenes.

 

[NANOTEC]

Blu-ray is capable of higher detail/information which would help when mastering movies which are complicated such as very dark and low contrast scenes.

Mastering quality is affected by many factors. Bitrate is only one of them. BR is not a solution to sloppy mastering/encoding.

 

[NavNucST3]

l-b, becareful when comparing animation to live action. Animation seems to have no bounds when scaled, that is why people are paying $200 for a copy of Ice Age on D-VHS. Try throwing some other animated titles into your player and you should notice the same thing. But Madagascar does look GREAT, not good, GREAT in HD.

I just bought an upscaling dvd player today sams. hd-845, I'll give it a go and see if I am impressed, regrettably I will be trying it out on my LCD TV. It has become painfully obvious to me that I am more excited about TV technology at the moment, SED especially, than I am for HD movies. Maybe because I have been watching them for years or maybe the formats just don't move me, I think I am still in the digi.distro camp.

Whoever is the first to $500 with HD component output has my buying dollar(s).

 

[NavNucST3]

snipped for brevity

...of course quality paranoia from movie publishers might prevail, and they will nullify that benefit, as well.

As paranoid as they are it does seem that they have one or two people in the industry with common sense; who would have imagined that they would have even considered allowing HD over component. The fact that most of the industry doesn't want to implement ICT, does bode well for us as consumers...that is until the first couple of hacks come out and they begin to lock down the devices.

 

[ban25]

If they didn't have progressive scan TVs, then they didn't really receive the image quality benefits of DVD (the real benefit was a lack of rewinding). But, aside from that, a question...who here does not have HDTV? Seriously, I don't know anyone who doesn't.

Maybe someone should make a poll.

Like shifty said.

If you think of the amount of people who have recently bought plasma tv's or standard CRT tv's, they won't want to buy another TV for at least another 5 years or so.

Buying a TV is a pretty big deal for most people.

Blu-ray's target resolution is 1080p isn't it ? and there are barely any TV's which currently support this resolution.



I have no idea.. but if PS3 is the tool they are going to use to get Blu-ray into a large amount of homes then i would say 2 years.

The thing with Blu-ray is that it is ahead of the technology to display it, unlike DVD was.

Anyone could get a DVD player and use it out the box regardless of what kind of TV you had.

 

[NavNucST3]

While doing some checking on something over at avsforum I came across an article from awhile back, that was somewhat troubling. I don't remember if this was posted anywhere, but here you go:

Las Vegas (NV) - In what may be one of the more stunning revelations of this year's Consumer Electronics Show, representatives of manufacturers of Blu-ray disc players and equipment - who did not wish to be quoted - told TG Daily that the first generation of Blu-ray high-definition disc players, to be made available soon, probably will not have full on-screen interactivity features after all.

The interactive layer - the component which Blu-ray proponents say makes it competitive with rival format HD DVD - is supplied by Blu-ray Java, or BD-J, an interpreted protocol created by Sun Microsystems. But since the Java interpreters are apparently not yet ready to be implemented in hardware, some manufacturers will apparently release "basic" or "plain" or "player-only" Blu-ray players in advance of BD-J. The watch-word for Blu-ray players with full BD-J capabilities - and with other features the basic players may to omit, such as recording capability - is full-profile.

So what does this mean for the discs, will the early ones just forego the BD-J features, will they be on there and just hidden/disabled for the basic players, also where do we think the PS3 will fall in the categories mentioned in the article? Between this and the AACS issues, I am ready to say the hell with both of these formats. My D-VHS player keeps looking better and better, compared to these formats...

 

[randycat99]

The interactivity of the title screens are hardly a pivotal point for the value that a BR disc could offer, imo. It's a nice icing for the cake, but it's the performance of the actual cake that really defines its reason for being, no?

If this does concern you, is it not reasonable to expect the support of BD-J features will come down to the implementation of software/firmware that should be readily upgradeable? This isn't really fundamental to how the optical system operates. I think it is safe to believe a PS3 BR player could be software updated when the time is ready and if it is Sony's intent. As for standalone players, you can always wait for a later model, and that is likely what would happen anyway if you are waiting for a more mass market pricing.

 

[London Geezer]

If they didn't have progressive scan TVs, then they didn't really receive the image quality benefits of DVD (the real benefit was a lack of rewinding). But, aside from that, a question...who here does not have HDTV? Seriously, I don't know anyone who doesn't.

Maybe someone should make a poll.

Well i'm in London so things are different, but i am the only one i know who has a HDTV. And trust me, i know a lot of people. Some friends have plasmas, but they're not HD, and the owners have no idea what HD is and have no intention on splashing out again for another set any time soon.
Most of the people i know think i'm crazy for having spent "all this money" for a HDTV, when really it wasn't that much money anyway, and probably cost a fraction of those non-HD plasmas my mates have.

 

[pipo]

Well i'm in London so things are different, but i am the only one i know who has a HDTV. And trust me, i know a lot of people. Some friends have plasmas, but they're not HD, and the owners have no idea what HD is and have no intention on splashing out again for another set any time soon.

Agreed. The situation is exactly the same in the Netherlands, and I suspect this is true for the rest of Europe as well...