Blu-Ray Worth It?

I love my Panasonic 50" Plasma with a PS 3. The PS 3 has like 8 processors that makes even old stuff like Hogan's Hero's look better. Plasma color is unbeatable IMO. The Plasma downside is the energy/heat, but as I really only watch on those long dark winter evenings, the added heat is not wasted.

Ever see the Planet Earth series from The Discovery Channel? Absolutely stunning, a must see. I watched it both on BD and regular, and Ray Charles could tell the difference. Once you go Blu Ray, you never go back

traderfjp wrote:Part of that is the LCD display. SXRD technology offeres a more pleasant picture with no eye strain.

How convenient!

Buy the BR DVD player and then find out you need to upgrade the TV....again...

I'll hang on to my CRTs for now.

BD is probably going to end up alongside BetaMax, I'd also suggest it will be the last of the optical medias that will have any market penetration.

For the moment I'd stick with DVD, get a good upscaling DVD player. The benefit is cheap discs and huge selection, plus if you already have a large DVD collection...

http://www.amazon.com/tag/hd%20dvd/foru ... tagsDetail

Devil, nope, ours is CRT "regular format". http://www.shopping.com/xPF-Sony-KP-53HS30. We picked the thing up at Sears for $800 about 5 yrs ago. It was a return, but came with full warrenty. We have a hi def reciever for it and get local stations over the air.

The Samsung DLP is wide format.

Ed.A wrote:Personally speaking, I don't like it, no sirI don't. My brother has BR and a 52" HD Plasma. Simply put, Blue Ray hurts my eyes. I started watching Rambo 4 and I could not take it. Eveything is so razor sharp it's doesn't seem natural to me, I mean even in real life there are soft tones and hues that balance out, not BR. But hey, that's just me, I guess I get to stay cheap, I like standard DVD on mine.

One of the problems with it may be the fact that the tv is not calibrated correctly. All to often people never calibrate the television sets once they bring them home. The tv set's are usually set up bright for placement in a will lite room with windows allowing a lot of light in them. But at night when there is no extra sunlight for the tv to over come is when the picture becomes to bright and hurts people's eyes. Also on any tv set smaller then a projection screen it is recommended for a light to be placed behind the set to ease eye strain.

eelhc wrote: With any set calibration is key. Buy the digital video essentials and/or Avia guide to home theatre DVDs and calibrate your set as soon as you get it.

I agree 100%

eelhc wrote:But it's all relative. Since you don't have a 1080p TV set yet... I would put the $$$s allocated for a Blue Ray player on a better 1080p TV set. Blue Ray DVD players have not bottomed in price but I think we're almost there on HDTV sets.

One of the biggest problems you see people having is they have an old analog television set that doesn't have the ability to even take full advantage of what dvd has to offer (480p) and by them going to a blu-ray player their still not seeing the whole greatness that high definition has to offer.

Edit: People also don't understand that they are not getting the full picture even on some HDTV set's when they have the dvd player or cable box connected to the tv set with just the yellow and red cable's. You need to have component cables or better in order to display those resolutions.


The Sony PS3 is the best Blu-ray player out there hands down and no one has yet to release a player and knock them off. It is the one player that has it's firm ware constantly up dated to take advantage of the newer features found in some of the newer blu-ray disc's.

Devil505 wrote:Edit: Also, do any any cable companies put out a 1080i video signal? (any benefit for having a 1080i display for watching cable?)

Most of the Blu-ray disc's offer a better picture then what you can get from the cable companies hd channels. That is all due to compression and how it's encoded, Direct TV's HD channels are mostly in Mpeg4 which is better then the cable companies Mpeg2 but not as good as some blu-rays Vc-1 (sp?)


You can't get a 1080i picture or even a dvd's 480p picture without having a tv that has the ability to display those resolutions. Analog tv set's can not do it, they only display 480i.

One thing most sets come though with (that I've seen) is a factory preset for "Vivid" picture, which is fine for bright store showrooms but is too saturated & sharp for realistic home use. I reset my Sony for a normal pic but my daughter, who has the same set, likes it Vivid! (I keep telling her that people's faces don't glow like a pumpkin in real life but.....will she listen to her father??

Adam the max resolution of a NTSC DVD is 720X480 which is about what a NTSC SD TV can produce. A DVD encoded using 3:2 Pulldown has distinct advantage when displayed on progressive TV like HD because the deinterlacing is not a destructive process. The entire frame can be reassembled into a progressive frame:

3:2 Pulldown

A VHS tape, mini-DV cam, broadcast does etc do not use 3:2 Pulldown but a standard interlaced video, note the comb lines on the light:





To make this display properly on a progressive screen like a computer monitor or HD set the interlacing has to be removed. There's various methods to achieve this but they are all destructive processes hence the reason a a standard interlaced DVD will not look as good as one using 3:2 Pulldown.

Richard S. wrote:Adam the max resolution of a NTSC DVD is 720X480 which is about what a NTSC SD TV can produce. A DVD encoded using 3:2 Pulldown has distinct advantage when displayed on progressive TV like HD because the deinterlacing is not a destructive process. The entire frame can be reassembled into a progressive frame:

Yea!! (what HE said)

Devil505 wrote:One thing most sets come though with (that I've seen) is a factory preset for "Vivid" picture, which is fine for bright store showrooms but is too saturated & sharp for realistic home use. I reset my Sony for a normal pic but my daughter, who has the same set, likes it Vivid! (I keep telling her that people's faces don't glow like a pumpkin in real life but.....will she listen to her father??

Exactly!!! And the brightness is turned up so high that the lamp life on a RPTV is likely to be 1/2 the rated hours. HDTVs provide better resolutions but the cost is color fidelity and contrast. Factory calibration is also suspect... I actually took 2 Sony sets back to Circuit City because I could never get the skin tones right. Granted my expectations were high since I was upgrading from a Sony XBR tube set.... and I've still yet to find a HDTV set that even comes close to the color fidelity and contrast ratios that even come close to the XBR tube (the Pioneer Elite Plasmas are close but those are several mortgage payments).

Richard S. wrote:Adam the max resolution of a NTSC DVD is 720X480 which is about what a NTSC SD TV can produce. A DVD encoded using 3:2 Pulldown has distinct advantage when displayed on progressive TV like HD because the deinterlacing is not a destructive process. The entire frame can be reassembled into a progressive frame:

My only point being it cannot be reassembled into a progressive frame on an analog tv set that does not have the ability to produce such a picture. Plus if the tv is capable of producing such a picture that a lot of people are missed in formed of how to display such a picture do to them using the stock yellow and red cables that usually come in the box and then not spending the money to buy the component cables needed to view the true best image that it's able to show.

Richard S. wrote:BD is probably going to end up alongside BetaMax

Richard, Would you expound on this, are we moving soon to an even better technology than BD?

coalmeister wrote:Richard, Would you expound on this, are we moving soon to an even better technology than BD?

I know what BR is (Blu-Ray)....What is BD?

BD is Blu-Ray Disk, Stupid isn't it?

coalmeister wrote:Richard, Would you expound on this, are we moving soon to an even better technology than BD?

Well actually Betamax was better format than VHS but like BR its a proprietary Sony product (and a few other firms). VHS overtook betamax because it was more widely distributed, one thing that is often quoted for it being successful is porn. Sony wouldn't license the betamax format to any distributors that wanted to use it for porn so they used VHS.

BR is just another in-between format that will die IMO. Small Flash media or direct downloads via the internet will be next. Neither is capable now because flash is expensive and the internet doesn't have the bandwidth. In any event in ten years all your movies will probably be on demand and the days of owning a physical storage medium will probably be gone.

BR sales are lackluster to say the least. The cost of the plyers have to drop quite a bit and the discs themselves have to drop. It's also fighting a still very large DVD sales and the huge library of titles available on DVD.

coalmeister wrote:BD is Blu-Ray Disk, Stupid isn't it?

I'm mixing up my acronyms, BD is the protection on BR.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD%2B