I highly encourage anyone who's interested in purchasing a High Definition player to check out the reviews mentioned above. If you read the reviews you'll find that basically the experts are saying HD-DVD has much better video quality over Blu-Ray. In one review, engineers actually flew from South Korea to New York to try and fix the low quality of video projected from the Samsung BD-P1000 player. They first thought it was a scaling chip that was shipped with the wrong setting. However, after they fixed the setting the lame video quality was still there. In the end, the Korean engineers flew back in defeat. Since that was the only Blu-Ray player on the market at that time, it was still hoped that future players would have better video quality. Really, the goal is for Blu-Ray to somehow match HD-DVD's superior quality. However, early reviews of the new Sony Blu-Ray player say the video qualtiy is just as bad as Samsung's Blu-Ray player. Why is this? Overwhelming consensus is that Sony's video compression technique is just not good enough to match HD-DVD's. In the end, please do your homework by checking out the reviews and if you can, view side by side comparisons before going out and spending a lot of money for an inferior product. You spend a lot of money for this upgrade from standard video to High-Def and you deserve the best video available for your money.
I highly encourage anyone who's interested in purchasing a High Definition player to check out the reviews mentioned above. If you read the reviews you'll find that basically the experts are saying HD-DVD has much better video quality over Blu-Ray. In one review, engineers actually flew from South Korea to New York to try and fix the low quality of video projected from the Samsung BD-P1000 player. They first thought it was a scaling chip that was shipped with the wrong setting. However, after they fixed the setting the lame video quality was still there. In the end, the Korean engineers flew back in defeat. Since that was the only Blu-Ray player on the market at that time, it was still hoped that future players would have better video quality. Really, the goal is for Blu-Ray to somehow match HD-DVD's superior quality. However, early reviews of the new Sony Blu-Ray player say the video qualtiy is just as bad as Samsung's Blu-Ray player. Why is this? Overwhelming consensus is that Sony's video compression technique is just not good enough to match HD-DVD's. In the end, please do your homework by checking out the reviews and if you can, view side by side comparisons before going out and spending a lot of money for an inferior product. You spend a lot of money for this upgrade from standard video to High-Def and you deserve the best video available for your money.
The quality of the movies has nothing to do with Bluray or its players, its all about video codecs etc. If BD movies were encoded exactly the same as HD-DVD then the movie would look exactly the same on both formats. HD-DVD does use a bloody good compression format that is far superior to what BD uses but with the extra space of BD more compression isnt needed so its useless.
I just got the Xbox 360 HD DVD add on and I am very happy with it. I have 6 HD DVD titles I recently purchased for only $23 canadian at Walmart. I am watching on only a 32 inch flat panel Samsung and I do notice a difference. It would be more noticeable on a larger set but I recommend this to anyone. I will never go back to regular DVD's again!
In all likelihood it will be the movie studios that determine the fate of the HDDVD/BR "war". Regardless of what format or player is better, if the titles that the consumers want are only available in one format, then that's the one that will come out ahead. Betamax and VHS were equal in terms of picture and sound quality, although the betamax's short recording length was a drawback. Even then, it held on for almost 10 years, eventually succumbing to lawsuits from Universal studios and others (the suits were never filed against makers of VHS machines). Declining studio support eventually led to its demise. BR does have the advantage of added storage. People will always need more room. Inevitably there will be value priced recorders and larger, practical, EASY to use storage media (who the hell uses ZIP disks?) will always be sought after. Sure, players are $1000.00 but so were DVD players when they first arrived on the scene. Hell the first recorders for PC's were over $1000 and can now be found for less than $40 on sale! Who will come out on top? Too early to say. Knowing Sony's reluctance to cut prices there is a window for HDDVD to sneak in with value priced equipment. Whoever gets ahead must get all the exclusive backing they can from studios.
To be honest with you this whole war thing ticks me of because i own a Blu-Ray player but there are some movie i want to see but there on HD-DVD or vice verse.Its sucks.
This is already a huge issue. Since neither the Sony Blu-Ray nor the HD-DVD consortium will ever back down (there's simply too much at stake) the only answer to this problem is a player that plays both formats. Supposedly this technology exists, I certainly hope to see a combo player in the future instead of one side losing to the other.
