after American Gangster HD DVD its back to DVD for me

after watching American Gangster on HD DVD last night i have to say that i'm done with HD. This film looked no better than a standard DVD. I only have a small HD DVD collection of 21 movies but i have 400+ DVD's and with the upsacling of the DVD's its difficult to tell the diffierence between some HD DVD's & DVD's . The only film i own that completely blows me away is Riddick which i have to say looks great.

I will definatley not be getting into Blu Ray anytime in the future as i cannot justify the cash outlay when normal Dvd looks better than ever on my Toshiba unit.

Here we go, another disgruntled HDDVD person saying how little difference there is in upconverted vs HD. I don't know man, maybe i have a different set of eyes, but there is NO WAY that upconverted pictures come CLOSE to being in the same league or even ballpark as an HD picture.

Go ahead and get over it and getcha a PS3 my brother, you won't be sorry!!!

Having both all three formats at home, for the most part there are marginal differences between HD and the scaled SD. That is the honest truth. I do see what he was talking about. I own both versions of American Gangster, and there is little to no difference in the two. What people fail to recognize is that the SD versions are already mastered in HD, then downconveted for SD. For the most part they are pretty much flawless. Not all SD disks are mastered in HD, but if there happens to be a HD version of that title, you can guarantee that the SD version was mastered in HD. There is exceptions to everything. For example Ratatoulille, looks great in HD, but its SD counterpart is pretty darn close. The biggest change I noticed was in the rats fur. Not everyone in this forum is a disgrunted HD DVD owner. That comment was a little biased. Anyways, I have pulled apart a lot of movies in my day, and for what it worth, the DVD version nowadays are pretty damn, good as opposed to three or four years ago. Like I said, if there is a HD version available, chances are that the SD version pretty damn good as well.

Some SD DVD's are better than others....the REALLY good ones look pretty awesome upconverted on a Toshiba HD player. With that said, some HD DVD's look REALLY good but there are some out there that were done poorly and are not much (if any) better than a SD DVD.

However, as a rule of thumb...most HD DVD's look better than their DVD counterparts, you would have to be blind to say otherwise. Also, don't forget about the new lossless audio codecs you get..

Well I'll admit one thing, American Gangster on HD DVD is a pretty crappy example of a high-def release regardless of format. Lets just say this title didn't meet my expectations on any level, and people are probably right that this isn't a huge upgrade in PQ over the standard DVD.

That being said, why the sudden generalization over this one crappy release? For example, although AG disappointed me greatly, I was floored by the visual presentation of Across the Universe, and felt like every individual pixel in my 1080p display was fully resolved and up to something discrete - an amazing feeling that no standard DVD could ever give me. It just shows that even new releases aren't made equally. Perhaps the crappy high-def transfer of AG was the director's intent, in which case the theatrical presentation probably doesn't exceed the standard DVD much either!

OK, see you on the SD threads. Bye.

you guys gotta realize that "american gangster", like "munich", was shot to emulate 1970s movies. the color scheme is muted, and the visual style is intentionally drab and "wet".

that being said...the movie is another botched hd dvd effort from universal. the hd dvd has fewer extras than the sd dvds (just like "knocked up" and many others), and the PIP content is next to worthless compared to the great PIP streams on "beowulf", "harry potter 4", "harry potter 5", and "the bourne supremacy".

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Anyways, I have pulled apart a lot of movies in my day, and for what it worth, the DVD version nowadays are pretty damn, good as opposed to three or four years ago.

Agreed. I guess we are just getting spoiled on PQ in this HD age, I dunno. Also, I did NOT mean to sound biased, but it's like some guys are pissed at Sony because they won the format war, which I do NOT get, and it's like now, they wont come over to BR because of it. To me, that is just retarded.

I also have both formats and just ordered 6 HDDVD's from Amazon at 11.95 each, so I am not totally blu.

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it's like some guys are pissed at Sony because they won the format war, which I do NOT get, and it's like now, they wont come over to BR because of it. To me, that is just retarded.

You must be new here

The die-hard HD DVD fanboys here hated Sony way before Warner announced their Blu-ray exclusivity. I suspect it's a major reason why they were HD DVD fanboys to begin with.

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it's like some guys are pissed at Sony because they won the format war, which I do NOT get, and it's like now, they wont come over to BR because of it. To me, that is just retarded.

Not anymore retarded than peoples hate for Microsoft. It would be nice if all the people who HATED Microsoft refused to use their products, too. Then they could use their Apples or Commodore 64s and use their 300 baud modems to access the bulletin boards.