4 replies to this topic

[icehater]

I've got both a 1080P Blue ray player and a 1080P HD DVD player connected to a 1080P Panasonic Plasma. I have both because I have a virtually imacessible built in cabinet and it was worth it for me to spend $250 on a HD DVD player when I had my home theatre guy ove a year ago to put in a new receiver and connect a Russsound system for my back yard. I had no intention of waiting out the format war and going back into that cabinet.

There is nothing like a 1080P picture, that's for sure. The 720P and 1080I pictures are stunning but 1080P is so super razor sharp and so stunningly life-like. So that gets me down to the two players. There is very little difference in picture quality, if any at all. To my untrained eye the HD DVD pix looks ever so slightly better in HD and the Blue Ray looks ever so slightly better for SD discs but that might be because of the discs I was viewing on each more so than the players themselves. As far as I can tell sound quality is equal on both. Both HD DVD and Blue Ray take about 30-45 seconds for the tray door to open because both players are digital like a PC. My grudges against Blue Ray comes in the difficulty of getting the pop-up menu to work while you are in the movie itself and the extra long load times of Blue ray discs and the players refusal to play certain SD discs. The remote is also more complex. Regular DVD's load fairly quickly but the BD (blue ray dscs) take a long time and sometimes the player and the disc miss a beat and you seemingly wait forever for the two to synchronize and get the disc loaded. It's almost like waiting for your PC to boot. While it's loading you see this bar on the bottom continually reloading until the screen finally goes dark and you finally then get the intro to the movie. If you are getting this long delay it's better to open and then reclose the disc draw as this may make it bypass the initial loading glitch. By contrast the HD DVD loads both HD and SD discs quickly and then is user friendly as it duplicates the old DVD players (with enhancement features) we are so accustomed to. It also plays different formats (recorded DVD +/- discs in 4.7GB or 8.5GB) perfectly just aout every time. The Blue Ray player sometimes refuses to play these discs. I recently couldn't play a home movie on DVD on the Blue Ray player. I had to cut the power to the player as the whole system just froze up. I thought it was just my player so I had my friend play it on his and he had the same thing happen to him. Meanwhile the HD DVD player immediately accepted the disc and upconverted it to 1080P and a stunning picture.

I don't know how Blue Ray ever won this format war. I guess it's because it's discs are harder to copy and can hold more data. But from a user viewpoint we'd have all been a lot happier if HD DVd would have won. Unless you have an HD DVD player though you may never know that. I can see why Toshiba went down fighting so hard. They had the better player and everyone knew it.

Lesson for all of you who eventually buy Blue Ray players. Don't throw out your old DVD players. You may need them to play the discs that the Blue Ray player rejects.

[terryjohnson16]

You must have money like that in order to buy a blue-ray player and a HD-DVD player. Those thing cost almost $1G total or more.

[devilsfan0405]

Blu Ray players have come down a bit in price. They're still around $500, which is still a good amount of money for many people.

I have a PlayStation 3, which does come with a built-in Blu Ray player. However, I haven't used it yet. I still buy standard DVD's.

[icehater]

terryjohnson16, on Jun 30 2008, 11:38 PM, said:

You must have money like that in order to buy a blue-ray player and a HD-DVD player. Those thing cost almost $1G total or more.

The Blue ray player was on sale at Circuit City for $399 when I bought it (and I had a $50 Sony promo coupon) and I bought the HD DVD player at Amazon for $249. So both players cost me only $600. Amazon has since sent me a coupon for $50 off anything I buy there because HD DVD lost the format war. So I could even say I got both players for $550. Your grand each prices are way off - even by 18 months ago pricing. LG had a combo player of both formats but it got bad reviews and at $899 at that time it cost 50% more than what I paid for both players combined. By contrast high end progressive scan (480P) DVD players around 2000-2002 cost $400-500 (at that time) and some Denon and real high end players were over a grand for their progressive scan players at that time.

[isobar65]

devilsfan0405, on Jul 1 2008, 08:10 AM, said:

Blu Ray players have come down a bit in price. They're still around $500, which is still a good amount of money for many people.

I have a PlayStation 3, which does come with a built-in Blu Ray player. However, I haven't used it yet. I still buy standard DVD's.

Not only Blu Ray players are coming down in price, but so are the LCD & Plasma TV's. Alot of these electronic stores are having a hard time pushing the big screens out the door.