Re: HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray, and other matters....

In response to James Plath's question regarding displays - I'm running a Mitsubishi HC3000 projector 񡾀x720, DLP). There's black material covering the wall around the 100 inch screen, and vertical masking for 2.35:1. Black curtains can be pulled down the side walls for a very dark room. It's pretty makeshift, but the difference has to be seen to be believed.
I've found that HD only REALLY sings when you're viewing on a very large screen - at least 80 inches. I'm getting a far better picture at 100 inches with my 720p-setup, than any 1080p LCD or plasma setup I've seen. Looks better with standard-def, too.
If you're in a position to put in a projector - don't hesitate. You'll never look back.

Is 9-10 feet viewing distance too close for a 100" projector display?

Haggis I totally agree. A friend of mine also has a 720P projector (I forget which brand but it was top of the line when he got it) and an 8 foot wide Stewart screen. Let me tell you it blows away any plasma or LCD. Its so much better that I wanna move into a house now and turn the basement into a home theatre with a projector. Just think, if a 720P projector looks THAT good, imagine how good a 1080P projector would look :)

My setup at home is a 50" Sony Grand Wega, PS3 hooked up via HDMI, XBOX 360 with HD DVD add-on hooked up via components. My brother has a 50" Pioneer plasma and we have hooked up the PS3 and the XBOX 360 with the add-on to it for comparison. For bluray he purchased Lord of War and for HD DVD we got Grand Prix, King Kong came with the add-on player, Superman Returns, Batman Begins and some others. Lord of War on bluray honestly looks like an upconverted DVD on both tv's, my brother was not impressed either. Every HD DVD we played looked MUCH better. It actually looked like high definition. To be fair we should have compared a movie thats available in both formats but you can read the many reviews online and you will see which is better. I've also seen bluray demos at electronics stores and was not impressed either. I honestly have yet to see a bluray movie that makes me think its on par with HD DVD. In my opinion and my brothers HD DVD wins every time.

Falcon

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[Post edited by Falcon01 on Feb 12, 2007 - CST 9:01 AM]

I agree almost completely with the original poster.

You will find decent arguments for the sound part with the Blu-Ray PCM getting very high marks. It isn't a new HD audio anything, but as I understand it it's uncompressed old school and sounds VERY good as much as I hate to admit it.

As for the 1080i vs 1080p, to the best of my knowledge (unless the new Pioneer, Sony or other model now process straight Progressive from the disk to output to the TV), all the initial (and current) Blu-Ray players still do a conversion to and from 1080i at some point in the playback chain so would be no different than an HD-A1 outputing in 1080i and your 1080p TV doing the "p" part lol. Mine works very well and the picture is the best of anything I have ever seen by a long shot.

I have an HP Pavillion 65" 1080p.

Cheers

Falcon's comment on Blade Runner on the 11th prompted me to take a look at my copy - the Director's Cut. Falcon, you are right, the quality, both video and audio is AWFUL. I never realized it until you mentioned it. It would need some serious remastering for HD, but I would love to see that.

I just got the HD-DVD issue of "Equilibrium" ["Rebellion" in Japan] from Xploited Cinemea in the mail today. It's another near future dystopian film, maybe a little like Blade Runner or more like the Matrix. It's a Japanese release, so It took me a while to find the correct audio setting without subtitles, but at quick glance it looks very sharp and the sound is great. I'll watch it probably Wednesday when we get snowed in here in Boston.

I dropped in my local BB last night and went to the HD-DVD section just to look around. While I was looking at a few things, a rather geekey 20-something kid in front of the BD section looked at me and said clear out of the blue "Hey dude, HD-DVD sucks, Blue-Ray rules." I was dumbfounded. Just to be polite I asked him what kind of HD TV he had. His response: "I don't. I just play them on my PS3." Huh??? I walked away. I'm sure he isn't typical of the PS3-BD population. At least I hope not.

Bruce
For your 9' seating distance an 82" would give you the 6' width and put you in the front 1/3 to 1/2 of a movie theater. If you like to sit in the front row you could go bigger but you would need the 1080p projector. I am 13' away from a 110" screen, which is 8' wide, and the screen door effect on my 720p projector clears up at about 11'.
There is no substitute for size! :)

Steve, Equilibrium is one of my fav movies ever. I strongly believe that movie got Christian Bale the role of Batman. Funny enough after watching Equilibrium my buddy and I said he woulda made a really good Anakin Skywalker.

Anyway let us know how it looks in HD :)

Falcon,

"Equilibrium" on HD-DVD is FANTASTIC. The picture is crisp, a little grainey in spots, but I think it was filmed that way [this is the first time I have ever seen the film] and the Dolby Digital+ was right on the money with a lot of low frequency signatures which sent my dog heading for the basement. The gunfight in the dark in the opening scene is fantastic I played it back three times! The menu is imaginative and very different from the bland Warner and Universal styles although, of course, I had to search around the Japanese audio menu to find the right setting without subtitles. I am very satisified with this Japanese import as well as with "The Gift" which I bought last month. I highly recommend both of them, even a $44 a pop. I'm still interested in the Japanese issue of "Reign of Fire" IF it has the scene with Christial Bale fighting the three headed dragon which was not included in the US SD release. Has anybody seen it?

On the format wars: On another forum, one BD supporter posted that Amazon had sold out all of its 302 BD copies of "The Departed" whereas they still had 110 or so of the HD-DVD copies left out of 329 [my numbers may be slightly off]. Therefore, he concluded, BD is outselling HD-DVD big time. Really? Another poster on that forum pointed out that, according to Sony, BD has a 6x installed base compared to HD-DVD. If that's the case, then the BD version is not selling anywhere near as well as the HD-DVD. Right? I love fuzzy math!

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[Post edited by StevePro on Feb 13, 2007 - CST 9:57 PM]

If choosing upgrading to HD-DVD or Blu-Ray wasn't enough, nere comes a third contender on the HD war... New Medium Enterprises, Inc. is set to offer up yet another disc format to the growing market for high definition video content.

HD VMD is a red-laser based format that offers capacities of 9GB and 20GB (two layers and four layers respectively) and supports full 1080p HD content. Hardware players, authoring software and playback software are ready to be released.

One of the main aims of HD VMD is to immediately offer consumer high definition video content at prices similar to those of the DVD format now. The company also emphasized how the DVD format has proven the reliability of red-laser based media. HD VMD video supports MPEG 4, VC 1 and H.264.

HD VMD audio supports Dolby Digital, DTS, and PCM audio. It is a true high definition format with 1920 x 1080 progressive video with data transfer rates up to 40 Mbps.

If choosing on the winning HD format isn't enough, the biggest impediment for most consumers is the excessive prices on HD players and HD movies... sure, either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD movies offers you higher quality in picture and sound, but the reality is that most consumers think that standart DVD movies are overpriced (you can figure out their thoughts about paying even more for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD movies)

Also most consumers express reluctance to upgrade all their current DVD collection (once again... double dipping) ir order to get a higher quality for already owned movies, when the current quality offered in standart DVD movies released in recent years, isn't bad enough to feel forced to upgrade, which wasn't the case when upgrading to DVD from VHS.

Even more, instead of eventually displacing standart DVD, the studios should continue to release movies on this format side to side with HD releases (as they do currently) as a cheaper option to consumers who wish to pay less and really don't care for higher quality, instead of barebones releases.

Therefore it all comes down to one outcome, the first one in this HD war that offers their releases at current standart DVD prices, side to side to reduced by half price standart DVD releases will win, and the rest will be history.

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[Post edited by genbar dardren on Feb 16, 2007 - CST 2:31 AM]

With all of the top Hollywood studios already committed to one or both of the already established HD formats, the question is how a new competitor could hope to find anybody but a handful of small studios to support it.

John