It's not just video that gets an upgrade though. The audio of most blu-ray discs is quite superior to dvd. A lot of films are granted a lossless audio track on BD.
I'm pretty much sold on Blu Ray. I bought a PS3 in November and I was only buying BD's with title like Star Trek, but now they are converting a lot of movie in that format which costs just as much as the DVD. They usually have the same content or better, so I have given up on DVD for now . 3-D I am not sold on and it will be quite a few years before I am. It took about 3 or 4 years to really get into blue Ray and it will take even longer for 3- D considering I just baought my HDTV not long ago.
Exactly, cult of the new. Being "new technology" doesn't make it better technology. We aren't obligated to adopt the new just because it's new.
There was never a forced upgrade. The cable company may have forced you to upgrade to a digital box, but your old TV would have worked just fine. The audio upgrade is an even smaller upgrade though. Dolby Digital/DTS has been trying to convince people for years that the only audio loss was information we can't hear anyway. They can't turn around now and claim we can hear the difference. Now, don't get me wrong, I use lossless audio whenever it's available, and I probably have a better speaker system than most Blu Ray owners, but I wouldn't buy Blu Rays just because of the audio. And if you only listen to Blu Rays through your TV speakers, then you won't hear the difference at all.
So how's that SACD player, Apple TV, 3DO and betamax player treating you? Blu-Ray, sold. 3D movies that require a HUGE investment in the form of a new TV (when a large majority have just adopted plain-old HDTV), expensive incompatible headache-inducing glasses for each viewer and a new BD player, epic fail.
Sorry, but you're wrong. (Assuming you're talking about the same DVD and the same HDTV and we're just switching out the player.) This is a massively simplified example, but it kind of works like this. Averaging pixels gives you a smoother image than mindlessly duplicating them does. It's ok to not care about any of these things, but saying there's no difference is just wrong.
So if the follow up question is "Then why buy Blu-Ray?" it's because that middle pixel is still a guess. It's a good guess, but it's just a guess. The Blu-Ray may actually look like this: Oh...look at that! It was supposed to be green! Well, that's some extra detail the Blu-Ray has that the DVD doesn't. So the Blu-Ray is better than the up-converted DVD, no doubt. But the up-converted DVD is still better than the non-upconverted one. The guess may be wrong, but it's a smoother, nicer-looking "wrong" than the original. So to say that the up-converting process didn't improve it is clearly not an accurate statement.
Ok 1st I do see enough of a difference in the movies and the price has come down to the point where I have a Blu Ray Player. And even thou the prices of the disk are often fantastic now I don't buy many disks. Why ? I think its because I burned out on the DVD Format, I bought so many disks there, to build a collection, that many sit unwatched more than once, that I am not interested in doing that again with blu ray. I pick up many disks even at ten bucks and cannot justify buying the title. I purchase now only AAA titles I know I will watch many times. Or TV Sets, but it has amounted to less than 30 or so Blu's. 3D I have zero interest in. I don't like even going to see a movie in 3D and wearing the damn glasses for 2 hours. I just don't see much enjoyment in it, I even think it degrades the image and experience.
No. It doesn't. It looks much better on blu-ray. Old shows were also shot in "high definition" on film, you just never could see it before blu-ray and HD TV. There is, in fact, more detail on the film of old TV shows from the 60s than even modern HDTVs will let you see. The Twilight Zone is about to be released on blu-ray, and that's a show that premiered in 1959. The DVD versions of the HD remasters have already been released, and the picture is amazing. I can't wait to actually see it in HD.
I enjoy Blu-ray and have approximately 20 BD movies, and an inexpensive Magnavox Blu-ray player (no BD Live or anything, it's no frills). The player is excellent. It has gladly chugged away at every new Blu-ray disc placed in the tray, and it doesn't even get network updates. That aside, the picture quality is crisp and superb. This is the image I was looking for after HDTV started to flood the buyer's market, as television broadcasts and VHS/DVD movies appeared as though through a film, almost like a type of plastic wrap in front of the lens. However, as you have noted, it's the audio that really wins out here. Watching the Star Trek movie collection on Blu-ray, I started hearing lines of dialogue and background music that I had never noticed before, and it enriches the movie. Star Trek: The Motion Picture in particular, gets my attention in that regard. As it stands now, I still buy DVDs, however, they are usually the $3 to $5 DVDs that complete a part of my library. When it comes to Blu-ray, I never spend more than $10 per movie title, thanks to websites like Amazon.com, and even Walmart is getting in on the game, offering $7-$10 Blu-ray titles. In regards to 3D technology, I believe the current form will be a fad, as it is too impractical, and is a problem for many of the people who attempt to view movies through the system. I, for example, cannot watch 3D movies with the glasses, simply because I get painful headaches when I do, so I avoid that technology. That stated, I am quite satisfied with Blu-ray and it's future potential.
Nonsense. Your non upconverting DVD player example isn't real. If it was, it would be an 'upconverting' DVD player that just so happens to do a horrible job. If it doesn't upconvert, it's not doubling the pixel, it's not interpolating it... it's just sending everything at the native resolution and letting the TV do with it as it pleases. You know what would look better than an upconverted DVD on an HDTV? A DVD on a screen at its native resolution, like an old CRT computer monitor or something. The extra resolution of blu-ray is good, but a good portion of the benefit is just the ridiculous bitrate they can throw at encoding stuff. DVD was pretty good for the resolution, but some things could really push it... and not everybody did a good job encoding the video. You could notice an improvement in many cases watching a blu-ray over dvd on a standard definition TV if you have a decent eye.
Blu Ray finally won me over late last year. I got a player for Christmas and have found it enjoyable even on my old TV. With 3D I remain almost completely ambivalent. I don't care, and I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
And when the TV "does what it pleases" what do you think it's doing? Most often it's exactly what I showed. I suppose I could have been more clear and instead of putting "Regular DVD Player" I could have written "What the HDTV does to the SD signal sent by the non-upconverting DVD player" but I figured that would be tough to fit on the line. Cramming all that extra text in there makes it more technically correct, I suppose, but it doesn't change the basic example. It would STILL be 'red red blue.' (And if I am wrong and you think it DOES change the answer, then please tell me what the middle-pixel should be in that example. You said I was wrong but neglected to tell me what the right answer would be. If I'm wrong I'll admit it, but you still haven't given an alternative for me to consider.)
There are lots of interpolation schemes... Some are better than others. Some take into account more than the immediate pixels. Some do a really good job at upscaling SD content, some do not.
It's important to understand that for Blu-ray, the larger the TV and the higher the resolution, the more obvious a difference. On a 60" 1080p television I would venture to say that anyone would be able to see a vast improvement in Blu-ray versus a DVD playback. On a 42" 720p television, the difference is still quite apparent but more subtle. On a 32" 720p set, you might be hard-pressed to tell the difference in a lot of cases.
I hate how just to watch a tv show these days you have to be a fucking digital video technician or somesuch. Wanky "my screen/dick is bigger than yours" bullshit.
Fine. I haven't really given it much thought to be honest. I was talking about shows from the '70s, '80s, and '90s not looking good. The ones shot/edited on video. So you're telling me things I already know about pre-1970 series.
Here's why you're wrong. You declared that 'upconverting' improves the picture. It doesn't. Scaling the image is a necessary evil of having fixed resolution displays. By trying to add detail that isn't there, you're diluting the detail that is there. I like how you even used the word 'smoothness' to describe the upconverted picture. Personally I'd have gone with 'bluriness'. As for what I think the TV is doing when you give it the original resolution... well, unless it's a complete piece of shit, it's not doing the nearest neighbor type nonsense that you're describing. My five year old Sony scales stuff very well, actually, there's no big improvement that an upconverting DVD player could bring. And if you did buy a complete piece of shit, it's a little strange to be so concerned about video quality! But fundamentally it makes a lot more sense to have your TV scale the source resolution to its native resolution. Let's say 10 years from now you have, oh I don't know, an '1800p' television. You want to watch your DVDs in the best quality so you bust out your awesome 'upconverting' DVD player... which scales the content to 1080p, and then is again scaled by the TV to the final resolution of 1800p. Congratulations, you now have a worse image than if you had a DVD sending 480p to the television because you've introduced an extra resize to the process! Anyway, if your TV does suck at scaling, there's still not much of a point of buying a standalone upconverting DVD player. Just spend a little more, get a PS3, or a standalone Blu-ray that does a decent job of scaling, and voila! So yeah, Trekker4747's main points are valid. Upconverting DVD players are largely worthless, and the upconverting process does not improve an image.
I'd add here that there's also a matter of conditioning and experience. The longer you look at native HD content the more you'll see the difference in DVD if you go backwards. At my house, when we first got a 37in LCD HD panel and a blu-ray player, sure, some of the movies that benefit the very most looked very different. Such as Pixar animated films and their direct digital-master-to-digital transfer. With a lot of films the difference wasn't immediately obvious. That was a couple of years ago. Now, if we put on even the cleanest DVD transfer, the difference seems obvious. We notice all the little things we hadn't before because we had not been acclimated to expecting the nuances of a higher resolution original image. It still doesn't make a world of difference with some older films, unless they've had a very delicate re-scan from original film stock. But the thing is, as we move forward it can be taken for granted that most new films will benefit from it greatly merely because they're being filmed digitally and/or with higher quality film processing when analog film is used on purpose.