Blu-ray Adoption Soft, More Still Own HD DVD 685
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the this-is-still-going dept.
from the this-is-still-going dept.
MojoKid writes "A new study by Harris Interactive notes that currently,
one in ten Americans (10%) own an HD DVD player, while just 7% own a Blu-ray player. Crazy, right?
More Americans own HD DVD right now than the 'winning' format, Blu-ray. If you think about it, that statistic isn't that shocking. When HD DVD was around, it was far and away the 'budget' format for high-def. The players were cheaper, the films were cheaper. In other words, it was a format more ready to thrive in a down economy. Blu-ray was always viewed as a niche format for those absorbed in A/V, not the common man's format. The survey also found that on average, consumers purchased approximately six standard format DVDs in the last six months, compared with one in HD DVD format."
Flawed interpretation of the study (Score:5, Informative)
I work in he rental industry (Score:5, Informative)
Re:But... (Score:3, Informative)
Wii does not play DVD-Video (Score:3, Informative)
I own 3 computers with DVD players and a Wii (which uses DVDs).
Wii doesn't come with DVD-Video player software. Its game discs aren't even DVD-ROM; like GameCube discs [debugmo.de], Wii discs have a different file system (not UDF), a physical sector format with slightly different anti-direct-current scrambling, and six pinholes punched in their lead-in. There is homebrew software to play DVD-Video on a Wii, but it probably infringes the MPEG-2 and Dolby Digital patents and the major movie studios' anti-circumvention rights (under the U.S. DMCA and foreign counterparts). More importantly, the Wii disc drive is designed for random access, not streaming a two-hour cut scene.
Disingenous, at best (Score:4, Informative)
So, if you combine the PS3 owners with the regular Blu-Ray owners, 16% of those surveyed owned a Blu-Ray player.
Here is the logical response you probably have now: "But, every HD-DVD owner (including addon) bought it to watch Blu-Rays, while many PS3 owners probably bought it just to play games."
That's taken care of by the survey too. Out of all, PS3 owners 25% buy all their movies in Blu-Ray and another. 32% buy "most" of their movies in Blu-Ray. So 57% are regular Blu-Ray buyers now, and many PS3 owners are waiting for prices to come down.
HD-DVD owners? Stores gave the players away. They were cheaper than other upscaling players at some point. The addon for the 360 was $20 at my local stores with 5 free movies. Many HD-DVD owners probably bought closeout gear at low prices.
So while the percentages may technically be right, with the fire sale that followed HD-DVDs failure, it's not terribly suprising. And the 7% is it at least 12% for Blu-Ray buyers, since over half of all PS3 owners buy movies.
Re:I work in he rental industry (Score:4, Informative)
What you guys can do to help increase your rentals of Blu ray? Put up two tv's that are the exact same tvs. Put up a blu ray player. Put up a regular dvd palyer. Play the same movie (different formats appropriately) and have them play at the same exact time. Now that you convinced your customers which is better (and it is fairly dramatic) enjoy your rentals.
Also - don't be afraid to put up old movies. Top Gun looks great in blu ray.
For added fun sell blu ray players on the cheap or help customers find great deals online "Want to rent blu ray? Not sure what to look for? Let us help you."
Bring this suggestion to your boss and if your boss is smart your boss will use this idea. Considering video rental stores are lagging in sales this is a cheap way to increase them. This will also make the boss happy with you. Do it a couple of months before your annual review and get a better raise?
Re:It was budget because it was failing! (Score:5, Informative)
"The primary advantage of this format is a low manufacturing cost. Since HD-DVD media is so technically similar to standard DVD media (it uses the same layer thicknesses as DVD, made of similar materials), the discs can be produced with only a slight modification to existing manufacturing lines. "
"This technology comes with a significant price. Manufacturing Blu-Ray discs requires significant costs in updating DVD fabrication equipment, and would be a sharp manufacturer cost increase over HD-DVD."
Toshiba also got the jump on sony and released it's first players months earlier allowing it to get production ramped up. It's true that when HD-DVD started to lose they chopped at the price, but it was already significantly lower than Bluray.
Re:I work in he rental industry (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Blu-Ray needs piracy (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I work in he rental industry (Score:4, Informative)
At 720p you can barely tell a difference. At 1080p the difference is more noticeable.
However, the difference between Blue-Ray and DVD isn't just in the picture, it's in the sound. If you have a true HT setup (I have a 7.1 home theater room with a 1080p projector), and the difference between a DVD and a Blue-Ray is noticeable in the picture quality, but especially in the sound quality.
Re:It's all about the names (Score:3, Informative)
I gotta say, as bad as the fiasco was, it was one of the few things Best Buy did right - I bought a HD DVD player that Christmas, and when the format was discontinued, Best Buy actually sent me a $50 gift card 'for my disappointment in the situation', unsolicited.
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:3, Informative)
Enjoy your 480p content then. Doesn't matter what resolution your monitor can handle, you need to pair it with a suitable source. DVD looks pretty bad on a monitor, unless you're 10' away from it. And what's the point of that? And did your roomate have his TV calibrated properly? Too much sharpness and edge enhancement will add halos, it's possible that you were seeing that. 300 had a strange look & feel, could be that as well. Go check out A Bug's Life, hell even the older Bond films on BD and you should be very impressed.
My couch is about 9' away from my new 52" LCD and everything I've watched on BD looks amazing. Definitely better than up-scaling regular DVDs.
Re:Don't buy into that lie (Score:1, Informative)
I have no opinion on HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray, but your analogy with Apple is ridiculous. The PS3 is a full-featured Blu-Ray player. Thus, it should be counted as one. The iPhone does not run OS X. Thus, Apple should not count iPhone sales in its OS X market share stats. There's really no logical basis for your analogy.
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:5, Informative)
It's amazing. Sony are so bad at format wars that, even when they win, they lose.
This quote from the article doesn't tell the whole story, though:
"A new study by Harris Interactive notes that currently, one in ten Americans (10%) own an HD DVD player, while just 7% own a Blu-ray player. Crazy, right?"
If you look at the chart, they've separated out the PS3 owners from the Blu-Ray player owners. Combine the 7% Blu-Ray owners with the 9% PS3 owners, and that's 16%. I'm sure that most PS3 owners didn't feel the need to buy a separate Blu-Ray player.
Re:I work in he rental industry (Score:3, Informative)
720p and 1080i at 13 feet from the 42" tv is NOT VISIBLE.
Yes it isi very visible at the correct viewing distance, but most people dont do that. Most homes are set up wrong and they sit an insane distance from the set..
42" 1080p set? get your face 6-8 feet from it.
Want a chart? then here...
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadgethd.com/media/2006/12/resolution_chart.jpg [blogcdn.com]
Get your face closer to the set, having it 15 feet away above the stupid fake fireplace is not where it belongs.
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:5, Informative)
So you're judging your opinions of HD on one of the few movies that was done almost entirely in front of blue/green screens, the exception being the scene involving the Persian horseback messenger coming across the hills. Mind you 300 was about 90% blue screen and 10% green screen. I'd venture to say that unless you were seeing this effect the entire movie, then your complaint isn't nearly as problematic as you make it out to be.
Re:I work in he rental industry (Score:3, Informative)
Because it's a demonstration meant to market a product, not be scienctific and fair.
Re:Artifacts in a theater near you? (Score:3, Informative)
The definition was so good that I could see the seperations around the actors and knew exactly when they were in front of a green screen and no on set. Totally ruined the visuals
Movie theaters nowadays use a 1080p or bigger format with an even higher bitrate than Blu-ray Disc. Had you seen the film in a movie theater, might you have noticed the same compositing failures?
Not just movies today - movies on film are analog, so they get scratches and such, but they have a much higher effective resolution than 1920x1080.
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:3, Informative)
I'd give it another go before I make my decision on one, very poor, film.
Additionally, I'd get your mate to check he hasn't turned the sharpness of the image on the tv way up as this can cause JPEG-esque blocky artifacts to appear.
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Don't buy into that lie (Score:1, Informative)
You can and should very much count the ps3 as a bluray player. The most obvious reason is that it is, indeed, a bluray player. Your friends have 2 bluray movies for their PS3s? Gee, wonder what they watch them on... Maybe... the PS3?
The next obvious reason is that a lot of people bought ps3s because they wanted a (wait for it) bluray player. The PS3 was targeted as a high-end movie/game player and that's why it was so expensive. Yet, it was still cheaper than the majority of the players at the time and allowed people to play video games. It's pretty clear it's a bluray player and people are obviously buying movies to play on the ps3.
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Clarification? (Score:3, Informative)
Not everyone who buys a PS3 does so because they want to play Blu Ray discs (In fact, one would assume that a minority do).
While I don't disagree with your statements, I'm curious why you would assume only a minority of PS3 owners are Blu-ray watchers. The PS3 was touted by review sites as the best Blu-ray player on the market for the money for quite a long time. This year old EngadgetHD [engadgethd.com] article says that 87% of PS3 owners watch blu-ray. I can't read the source of that info at work, 87% seems a tad high to me, but saying it's a minority sounds a little off.
Re:Blu-Ray needs piracy (Score:4, Informative)
Blue Ray players are very difficult to find in East Asia, while those "Blue Ray" bootlegs are *everywhere*...
Of course, those in the know are just downloading off emule or youku.com anyway, why waste $.75?
Re:Flawed interpretation of the study (Score:4, Informative)
The PS3 is, first and foremost, a Blu-Ray player. That's how it was designed, that's how it was marketed
Buh?? I call bullshit. The PS3 is a gaming platform that happens to double as a Blu-Ray player, just as the PS2 was a gaming platform that doubled as a DVD player. I've never seen any evidence that it was ever marketed as anything else, and I'd love to see support for such an outlandish claim.
Re:Artifacts in a theater near you? (Score:1, Informative)
IIRC, that study when published mentioned that film could contain enough detail for 750 pairs of alternating black/white lines, which means it actually has an effective resolution of about 1500 lines. Of course, everyone reporting on the story latched onto that 750 number and presented it as 750 lines of resolution, not double that, which is what the results of the study actually were.
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:2, Informative)
Getting a good calibration disc like AVIA or Digital Video Essentials will make a huge difference in the appearance of HD sources.
Absolutely. I've used my Avia disk to set the basic video settings on five TVs so far including my own RP CRT plus new LCDs and Plasmas recently bought by friends and family members.
It's really easy to do and everyone I've done it for has been stunned by the difference. Some of the factory settings on TVs are unspeakable too. My Hitachi RP CRT had the contrast set to 100, when the optimal value based on the Avia test pattern (which looked spectacular) was around 20. As a matter of fact, in that example, the factory settings would almost surely ruin the TV.
Speaking of calibration...I just don't get why all TVs have like five or more preset video settings when, generally speaking, there really is only one set of correct values. Then again, with 99% of the general public skewing all their 4:3 content to 16:9 and not seeing anything wrong with it (don't even get me started on that) I guess they feel people expect it and don't know any better.
Re:Artifacts in a theater near you? (Score:2, Informative)
70mm? Are you sure it's not 35mm film? To the best of my knowledge, there are only a very few movies on 70mm film because there aren't too many theatres with a 70mm projector.
(I own a movie theatre.)
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:3, Informative)
Multimedia/Games.
Settings that make movies or broadcast TV look good aren't that good for games, and vice versa. Or at least they didn't used to be. I have the "User" contrast and brightness down to about half on this screen I have this PS3 connected to, but It's calibrated for Linux (where I want the black in my terminal to be black) and not as much as for games and movies.