Home Cinema

Sony's products are not superior products...but the the company's PR, spin and advertising ability is second to none.

BR is not better than HDDVD, the PS3 is not anymore entertaining than the Xbox 360 and even the PS2 was not a clear improvement over the poor Dreamcast, (the 'Emotion Engine' - what a load of tosh).

RIP HD-DVD. The best man lost.

i am still interested in what will happen to HD DVD china?

Thank god..!!! Piper cut your loss and switch to BR you know you wanna LOL.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: one format good, two formats bad!

Hi,

At least the consumer knows which format to back now. No longer a fear of buying into the wrong format. I said before and I say it again - the bigwigs should have sorted this out ages ago.

I hope lessons have been learned.

Cheers,

Cofnchtr.

Yes, but what is the future for BR? For the forseeable future the userbase are casual videogame players who might buy one or two BR discs out of interest. Decent, affordable (ie. sub £150) final version BR players are some way off. Can the format survive without mass popular support? Will Toshiba - a major manufacturer of good quality hardware - ever back BR? I don't think so. Look at what Tosh did for DVD. I don't think that BR is going to crack the most popular format of all time.

The death of HD DVD does not mean BR will necessarily survive in the long run, or that it is even alive and well. The expensive hardware may be there, but the software leaves much to be desired. There is certainly no worldwide rush on the part of consumers to move from DVD to BR.

PiperUK - You have absulely no evidence to back up your false claims!

It's certainly true that the Blu-ray Disc Association (of which Sony is only a part) went to the market quicker than they would have liked.  HD DVDs evolution mean't that their finished product was ready to roll.  The BDA had to respond, otherwise I think that HD DVD would have taken off and become the successor to DVD.

I have no problems with that whatsoever.  I have always maintained that one unified format from day one would have penetrated the mass market much more than both have done collectively.

Genuine high quality fans will be pleased that Blu-ray has won this messy, unnecessary and sometimes nasty war because the potential for Blu-ray to get even better than now is there.

I'm not talking about picture in picture and internet access, but the real quality issues like picture and sound quality/options.

Not least because of the capacity advantage of 50GB, Blu-ray has the distinct advantage that it can cope consistently higher bitrates resulting in better picture and sound quality.  Both formats claim 1080p resolution, but many discs on both sides don't fully utilise this figure!

I can understand why HD DVD supporters feel aggrieved - I was very close to buying an HD DVD player in October.  Blu-ray offered approx 90% of the titles I would like to purchase at the time.  That was the choice.

It may take a little time, but I think Toshiba will develop Blu-ray products, but maybe when the market dictates.  Standard DVD will be around for some time to come, and rightly so.

Blu-ray player prices will come down, just like DVD players did before.  As people will need to replace their DVD player they will have a Blu-ray player as an option.  Many will take this up.

In the UK, we may like to think we are different to those in the USA, but we're not that different.  A recent pole regards hi def media suggested that approx 1/3 of Americans wanted a Blu-ray or HD DVD player to join their LCD/Plasma!  Approx 85% cited confusion over two competing formats and not wanting to pick the loser!  Even allowing for margin or error, and downturn in economy, this means a significant number will buy into Blu-ray is the USA.  I don't know if Blu-ray will ever overtake standard DVD, maybe it will, maybe it won't.  It's likely that downloads may play a part in all this in years to come.

You have to ask yourself, if Toshiba are a producer of good quality hardware, why did all the other majors (except Onkyo) side with Blu-ray?  They are all members of the DVD Forum!  I suggest they saw that Blu-ray had much more potential.  As for the Blu-ray userbase being game players, there are obviously lots of them out there, as they have purchased an aweful lots of discs (about three times as many as HD DVD).  I'm not a PS3 owner myself, but don't underestimate their buying power.  I would actually argue the opposite of your claim.  Most HD DVD supporters cite the low prices of the players as being one major reason for choosing HD DVD.  As the prices of the discs are fairly equal, then that maybe a shock for many HD DVD owners.  If your primary concern is the price of the hardare, then you're hardly likely to build a library of HD DVDs.  I would love to see actual statistics on player / disc ownership!  Would someone who paid say £800 on a Pioneer player own more discs than a PS3 (£400) or Samung (£250) owner?  FWIW, my family have a Samung BD-P1400 and collectively we have 38 BDs!  We may add a Panasonic DMP-BD50 later this year to have hi-def in two rooms!  Buy the way, when I contacted Panasonic, they suggested that this player maybe between £399-£499 when released in the UK in the spring.  Reports of £1,000 are way OTT, it would appear!

I hope it comes quick.  The quicker I can pick up HD-DVD's for a quid, the better :)

The only real conclusion here is that big marketing money has apparently won the war. Blu ray is in no aspect better than HD DVD but has way more problems and still no final software and hardware. It's only pro, it's greater capacity, is only used to fill the discs with even more extras no one ever watches. And for you Niftynigel, if all of us were as easy as you in defending propaganda 70 years ago we all would be speaking German.

As a self confessed Sony fan I'm pleased that BluRay has started to obtain the dominant market share. Not only does this clarify the mess that has so far made any kind of purchase of an HD player a nightmare, but its also about time Sony had a bit of good luck. (Although I dont think luck has much to do with it) Until recently they have suffered on almost every front despite some excellent technology and products e.g MD, Walkman/Atrac (ok dodgy software until the last few months), initial failure to take up LCD production, robotics (Aibo and Qrio)...oh and then of course there was Betamax haha (much better than VHS!)

PiperUK, stop being such an HD-DVD fanboy, you can't make claims like "BR is not better than HDDVD" and "RIP HD-DVD. The best man lost" without some sort of basis in facts. In this case, the facts are that ;

1) Bluray was the first blue laser format

2) The codecs are pretty much the same for both formats, which means that for video and audio quality, the disc that can support the most data, and the fastest transfer rates is, without question, the best format. In both respects, Blu Ray is clearly vastly superior (25GB/layer as opposed to 15GB, and 6x vs 2x transfer rate) While you may point out that higher capacity HD DVDs (60GB discs) were on the horizon by increasing the number of layers, the same is true of Blu Ray (100GB) so the capacity (and therefore quality) gap is only ever going to increase in Blu ray's favour, and the same applies to transfer rates.

3) PS3 is a perfectly legitimate Blu ray player, you can not discount it simply because it also happens to be the most powerful games console. I don't know for deffinite, but at £350 I would have a guess that many people wanting to buy a Blu ray player to play films on might well buy a PS3 instead of a dedicated player simply because it is perfectly good at doing just that.

4) Given fact 3) how can you claim that affordable Blu ray players are "some way off"? The PS3 is already price competitive with HD DVD players, admittedly it is not sub £150 yet, but neither are HD DVD players. The PS3 is software upgradeable to support the latest profiles, for free, and has more than enough processing capacity built in to support the new profile features, can the same be said of your beloved HD DVD players if some improvements to the HD DVD standard materialised? I doubt it.

5) Blu ray has, (and since the beggining had) the backing of nearly every major electronics and movie industry player, AND sold more discs than HD DVD, so how can you suggest that it doesn't have support?

6) Toshiba do indeed make quality kit, (but I would have placed Sony and Panasonic higher up the "quality" ladder personally). Do you really think that they won't adopt Blu ray? of course they will, they have admitted that HD DVD has no future, and they will jump on the Blu ray waggon as fast as they can to grab a piece of the market (which will grow much faster now there is only 1 format). Companies like Toshiba are clever enough to know when beaten, and not to sulk. I am sure we will see some great Blu ray players from them in the not too distant future.

7) Admittedly the first generation BR blayers were not as pollished or cheap as the HD DVD ones, but both of those things will change in the next generation players, it is not an advantage of 1 format over the other. Its better that we end up with the better format, not the format with the best first generation players.

8) Region coding is a non issue, most BR discs are region free anyway, and you should buy your discs in this country anyway, support your country's economy!

9) Although the interactivity on HD DVD is more standardised than it currently is on BR, this will change fairly quickly, and many players will simply be softaware upgradable. Anyway, who the hell buys a disc for it's "interactive features"? surely these things are just bonuses and it is much more important to have a higher quality main feature. The basis for the interactivity on BR is java based - a propper mature, sophisticated, open and cross platform programming language, not a glorified web page full of proprietry (microsoft) extensions, as is the case with HD DVD's HDi interactivity. It will mean much more sophisticated and genuinely useful interactive features are possible on BR.

10) Bluray is the better format for data since it is faster and stores more data, simple as that.

11) It wasn't sony and the BDA that started a format war in the first place, It was Toshiba, NEC, Intel and Microsoft (who were anoyed that BR had gone with Java instead of their system)  who have tried to force a second format on the world. BR was in development way before HD DVD, and it was only because Toshiba were in charge of the DVD forum that BR wasn't accepted in the first place as replacement for DVD.

I am sorry if you bought into the wrong format, but you can't change anything by making ridiculous statements about the clearly superior system. Format wars are bad for everyone, and I am pleased to see that the technically superior technology has won this time. Now we can all enjoy HD movies safe in the knowledge that there is only 1 format.

As for the comments of lbwdevoer, well they don't even deserve a response, pure oppinionated rubbish.

I'll hold the coats, shall I?

I do wish hddvd had won but I own both formats players so don`t really care anymore and look forward to buying cheap hddvd`s.Anyway,Toshiba hasn`t confirmed this so don`t believe it until then.

...I remember seriously thinking of buying a Sony Elcaset .......!

30GB HD-DVD vs Blu-ray 50GB need i say more?

20GB less would mean 20GB less in image/audio data.

it has nothing to do with Sony vs Toshiba, it's the simple fact one holds more data.

and if u haven't noticed company's are already putting their DVD's on sale, in preparation for blu-ray.

the masses will buy blu-ray and this is mainly to thank to Disney/Pixar/Sony (sony because of james bond and older MGM/united artists titles).

So many arguments about why BR or HD-DVD is the better format. The way I see it, and it is just my humble opinion, is that BR is better when seen from the manufacturer's point of view (higher profit margins?, copyright protection through region encoding), and HD-DVD is better from the consumer's point of view (cheaper, no region encoding).Majority of consumers just want plain and simple good picture at a decent price - most of them can't tell the difference between quality and in the end it's the quality of their flatscreen that will probably have a bigger role in determining the quality of the picture that they are seeing. So do most consumers really care which format holds more data?  I prefer to stick to DVDs, but have not been able to find a good quality DVD player that is multi region, so I make do with my 9-year old Tosh player. Yes an upgrade is overdue, but why would I buy HD players that are region encoded?

Interesting that Toshiba shares have gone UP more than 5 percent on the speculation that it's pulling out  - the market sees it as a good move that it isn't prolonging the pain....

<p>Interesting that one of the comments as Blu-Ray going against the consumer is the higher profit margins for the manufacturer. Walking around Croydon last weekend, I noticed that HD-DVD discs were generally more expensive than Blu-Ray discs. Since they are (in theory) cheaper to produce, this suggests the opposite. I know the story is different on the internet, but the mass market appeal people talk about happens on the high street. Is this a Blu-Ray ploy to steal the market and once it has, prices will rise? Possibly, we'll have to wait and see. Personally, I don't buy any BD discs that are over £15 so it won't affect me, I'll just wait for the sales / deals.</p>

<p>The region encoding argument is not likely to last anyway - if HD-DVD had won, it wouldn't have been long before this would have been slapped on. I also have plenty of non-region encoded Blu-Ray discs bought from MovieTyme.</p>

read this from BBC - news.bbc.co.uk/.../7250068.stm

As an owner of both the Sony PS3 &  Microsoft XBOX 360 ELITE with the HD DVD add-on, I must say that in my honest opinion,

HD DVD appeared to have a slight edge in terms of image quality & a huge edge interms of interactive features.

Therefore i have purchased many more HD DVD movies than Blu-Ray movies.

In fact i have only ever brought one Blu-Ray movie and that got taken back to the store a day later.

However the powers that be & the millions of other customers seem to disagree with me for some strange reason :)

In the end who cares who wins, i'm  certainly not getting any of the millions in profit from either camp for supporting them.

I tned to go with the "who cares"/"one format good/2 formats bad" approach too.

Personally, im not going to invest in either for a while, and the majority of the public (as opposed to the early adopters you get on sites like this) seem to agree with me.

Those who say Blu Ray is the superior format simply are wrong - it has a higher storage capscity and therefeotre has the potential to best HDDVD, but its only potential as yet - lets not forget, hddvd came to market as a finished product, and blu ray is going to be updated a couple of times in the near future, and most current players are incapable of taking advantage of these updates - and the public ern masse dont know that - so theyll get ripped off again.

The many problems with blu ray are all over the relevant sections of this site for all to see!!!

Moreover, im surprised at those saying that BR has better picture quality - majority consensus ON SITES LIKE THIS would indicate that theres little diference between BR and HDDVD in that regard.

Oh, and people do like the extras, it just depennds on the film for most - i admit there are probably very few hardcore cinephiles for whom extra features would be a deal breaker.

Niftynigel and Rigadig...are you employed by Sony? It wouldn't surpise me if your beloved company paid people to infiltrate internet forums to spread the Sony love. Joking aside, I just want to correct some of the points you make:

-There are already sub £150 HDDVD players.

-You said - "Blu ray has, (and since the beggining had) the backing of nearly every major electronics and movie industry player" - check your facts. I thought Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios, HBO Video, New Line Entertainment, Warner Home Video, Microsoft and Intel supported HDDVD 'at the beginning'.

-Placing Sony higher up "the quality ladder" than Toshiba?  Sorry, I don't agree. There have been plenty of build quality issues with Sony products if I recall.

-  You said "interactivity on HD DVD is more standardised than it currently is on BR, this will change fairly quickly" - Will it? This is your personal opinion and you have no evidence to suggest that it will happen quickly, if at all.

Your whole post sounds like an advert for Blue-ray.

And yes I did buy a HD-DVD player - and I do not regret it one little bit.

Does this mean we'll finally get Lord of the Rings on Blu-ray now? I hope it means that the studios, no longer having to choose sides will finally release some of back catalogue of the big films now?

I bought a HD DVD player with the knowledge that it could lose the hi-def war but that I would substantially improve my DVD quality and so it has proved. I have no regrets because I have an exceptional DVD player that can play the Matrix trilogy & Transformers in HD, It beats the PS3 for upscaling on my TV (42" LCD) and with 800 DVD's in my collection I look forward to many years of happy viewing.

The fact is Blu-ray may not become ubiquitous before it's superceded by HD downloads, but having said that I'll almost certainly buy a Bluey when Star Wars or LOTR comes out on the format.

Actually, the only Sony kit in my current hi fi and home cinema set up is a PS2, the rest is composed of Panasonic, Yamaha, Phillips and B&W. The last TV I had before upgrading to a Panasonic LXD70 was a toshiba crt, and it failed after only a couple of years (the older sony in the other room has always performed admirably) but I don't have some sort of vendetta against ANY electronics company (as you and the other HD DVD unfortunates seem to have against Sony) I had a toshiba laptop and my parents have a toshiba DVD player at their home which are both excellent pieces of kit.

Both formats are should produce identical quality video and audio for a given bit rate since both use the same codecs, more space and faster transfer rates DO mean that BR can support significantly (100*25/15 = 166%) higher bitrate, higher quality audio and video, all it requires is for the studios to encode at a higher rate. I don't know if the extra bitrate will be used to support more uncompressed audio channels, higher resolutions, or just less compressed video, but the point is that the capacity is there, and it will be used at some point, meaning that the format is more future proof. This has to be be good for the consumer, since it means it will last longer, delaying the whole hassle of having to switch to a new format when capacity is eventually exhausted. First generation BR players do (as I acknowledged earlier) appear to be of poorer design than their HD DVD counterparts, but this argument only applies to the 1st generation machines, a format should last for many generations of playback hardware, just look at the difference in quality between a 1st generation DVD player and a modern high quality upscaling DVD player, they both play the same discs but the difference is enormous.

Cost will go down, especially since there is only 1 format, and BR can move fully into the mainstream market without HD DVD induced consumer cofusion. If you don't believe that prices will fall to be comparable with how DVD is today, then just look at pretty much every previous mainstream format. If I was mistaken about the £150 HD DVD player, then my appologies, but it is the consumer electronics industry and prices change very quickly.

Interactivity on BR is capable of so much more than what HD DVD's system could do, perhaps you don't fully appreciate the power of having a full, open, object oriented programming language for interactivity which BR has in the form of Java, it is a language that has been used successfully for years in some very demanding applications. HD DVD's system on the other hand is much more limited since it is basically just a scripted web page, which made it easier to write simple things, but much harder to do anything truly spectacular. It is not a matter of oppinion, the new profiles for BR ARE being standardised, manufacturers won't release new models with support only for old profiles.

Of the companies you listed who initially supported HD DVD,y ou only give 2 electronics companies (niether of which has any real history making HiFi and home cinema equipment), as opposed to the many (Panasonic, Pioneer, Sony, Sharp, Samsung, LG, Phillips etc) which support BR, and of the movie studios you list, how many were exclusive to HD DVD at the beggining? and how many have jumped to BR now?

Its not all about the initial batch of players, a format is for the long term, not just 2007. Early adopter always get ripped off, its the price we pay for having the latest gadgets. Don't blame sony or BR for the format war, if you must blame someone, then blame Toshiba and Microsoft, since BR was around first and is a much broader collaboration.

As a recent HD DVD convert, I'm now like a vulture seeking out bargain discs on auction sites, on forum classifieds and in the High Street - the panic selling is just fantastic -e.g.  World Trade Centre for £3.

It's not like HD DVD is suddenly gonna stop working just because (as seems inevitable now) Toshiba stop making new units - they'll still offer support to existing customers, there'll still be movies available for months to come, at ever reducing prices, and at the end of the day I have a more than capable upscaler and (dare I say it) CD player, as I have the first generation US model, the XA1.

I don't think Blu-Ray fans should be too chuffed just yet - let's face it, hi-def DVD hardware has hardly broken through into the public consciousness. It took DVD a fair few years to really break VHS, and the step-up to hi-def only really benefits those with HDTVs anyway.

With movie downloads still a more than distinct possibility (although unlikely in the UK due to our rubbish broadband), I'd say BD still faces a tough time ahead, with SD-DVD and downloads its biggest competitors.

Go on Piper you tell um... I have an excellent HD DVD Collection with over 30 movies and only a few costing full price (new releases 17.99) and my player was only 189.00 and was voted Best High Def player by this and other specialist magazines. I too am a very happy HD DVD owner.. And will continue to be until they bring on 24 meg broadband in my area so i can download my high def movies (oh and buy the odd few for acouple of quid on e bay or amazon) Long live HD DVD (and yes i own a ps3 too and dont work for tosiba)

PiperUK - I most certainly don't work for Sony.  The only loyalty to Sony products I have ever had was to their TVs.  Apart from that, I show no loyalty whatsoever to any manufacturer anymore.  My TV localty to Sony ended a few years ago, when I purchased a Panasonic LCD!  I have shown loyalty to Sony Ericsson mobile phones, but that comes from an Ericsson background!  It's certainly true that most of the consumer electronics companies supported Blu-ray from day one - how can you dispute that?  Also, only Universal, of the majors has exclusively supported HD DVD.  I am certainly not anti HD DVD or Toshiba (and have never been), so your remarks aimed at me are quite without reason!  I have the choice to go for one or both formats, and I chose Blu-ray last October, purely because of the range of titles available in the that format at the time.  I have always acknowledged that Toshiba have produced excellent quality HD DVD players, and that their insane low pricing was unsustainable - I was proved right - they just couldn't sustain the losses!  It matters not, who is at fault, Microsoft, Sony, Toshiba, whoever!  We now have what we should have had from the beginning, one high def media format to sell to the masses.  I plead guilty in being a fan of high definition.  If HD DVD had won, then I'd be equally passionate to get that to as many homes a possible - that's the best and quickest way to bring prices down for all of us!  I hope that Toshiba will lick it's wounds and produce Blu-ray products, but it may take time, it's a proud company!

again, its a gross distortion to say br was around first. it wasnt. it was in development first, but not on the market first. Moreover, it is on the market in unfinished form. hddvd isnt. as i say, i dont care, but the facts of the situation are really simple and easy to express in very few words - rather than gargantuan essays.