Forum - View topicSurvey: Blu-Ray and High Def
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Josh7289
Posts: 1252 |
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Blu-ray's not dead, especially not for anime.
Obviously as this poll shows, Blu-ray player- and 1080p TV-owning people represent the largest group of hardcore anime fans. And hardcore anime fans are the only ones still buying DVDs, so a niche media format (Blu-ray) for a niche group of fans (us) is perfect. |
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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AV cables won't carry an HD signal at all. They cap out at 480i. Component cables max out at 1080i, with HDMI going clear to 1080p. HDMI also has the advantage of being a fully digital cable, which means the signal isn't required to go through a conversion process, unlike component and composite. But there are differences in HDMI cables, as some cheaper models will not work with as well with 120HZ signals, or carry 24FPS signals. I think Bluray will be around for a while, but I don't think it will have the staying power that DVD, or even VHS had. It simply has too much competition. DVD pretty much just had VHS, in which there was a very noticeable difference. Bluray has upconverted DVD, digital HD downloads and streaming, and not to mention HD on Demand and service likes Netflix and Blockbuser Online, as well as TiVo and other DVR services. And in many of these cases, the advantages of bluray just aren't as clear. And yes, a lot of people still prefer physical media. But let's not forget that CD's were that way just a couple years ago. Now iTunes is the largest music retailer in the world. It's not too much of a stretch of the imagination to see it happening with films and TV, though not necessarily through iTunes. In fact, a lot of B&M stores, including Walmart and Best Buy, have been scaling back their movie and music collections because of the increasing move towards to digital content. |
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Tenchi
 Posts: 4473 Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer. |
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I still buy CD's too. I don't even have an iPod, and I'm not making plans for getting one either, unless Apple made a combo iPod/CD player.
Nobody can deny that iTunes and other digital music services have taken a sizable bite out of the CD market, but I still think the death of the CD format has been greatly exaggerated, since some people will always want to own a physical copy of their music. |
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ikillchicken
 Posts: 7272 Location: Vancouver |
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Yes. I do have a HDTV with 1080p, HDMI connection, the whole package. I'm not saying there isn't a difference. It's just not that major. It's certainly not worth getting everything on. The increase in quality doesn't justify the increase in price. |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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That would kind of defeat the purpose of an iPod. |
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littlegreenwolf
 Posts: 4796 Location: Seattle, WA |
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I don't see why. Tenchi is apparently looking for a portable music player that plays cds and mp3s in one. I don't see what's so wrong with it, though I can't imagine that big of a market now a-days, but I myself have bought a cd/cassette/radio player plenty of times, in fact recently. Going by your logic combining all that would defeat the purpose of a CD player, yet I still find plenty of uses for it. Especially when itunes is too much of a bother to load the and upload a new bloody playlist, leaving it faster to just burn a disc. I still buy plenty of albums on CD anyway. Hard copies are more trustworthy, and I'll never tire of album art. |
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configspace
Posts: 3717 |
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It depends on what you're watching. Most OTA HD broadcasts are actually 720p so that still requires a 125% upscale. Most older movies on BD are upscales, with some better than others, likewise with US anime BDs at this point. The only BDs I know of produced in native HD are Origins, Sky Crawlers, and FFVII: ACC. Although I guess that's like half of the US anime BDs out. For me, with most recent movies there's a HUGE difference between a DVD upscaled to 1080p (horribly nasty) and native BD. In fact, DVDs look much better on good CRTs than LCDs -- large but exact 1:1 pixels vs a blurry set of N:1 pixels. If only there were multi-native resolution digital displays... Now as far as "is it worth the price?" I sort of agree with you. 100% more (twice the price), no. 50% more, maybe.. 25% more, definitely. |
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Xanas
Posts: 2058 |
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I said maybe and for some strange reason felt the need to go out and get a PS3 today so I could get the Valkyria Chronicles game.
I regret it a little, because of course I didn't read on it and find out that Sony is a bunch of morons who can't include a 10$ HDMI cable in the box of a 500$ ps3. I couldn't believe it came with AV when that doesn't provide the quality to even make it close to 720p capable. I had to go back to walmart, which has 30$ HDMI cables because I didn't want to wait longer for a cable from newegg for 10$. Very irritated with that I was, but I'm mostly over it now. Valkyria seems like a pretty neat game. I really admire the artwork in it and the gameplay is pretty good too. Darke's Fortune didn't seem half bad either from the little bit I messed around with it today. All this said, I'm probably not going to take blu-ray seriously until I get a PC BD drive, which I may do around October. I'll also have to get AnyDVD HD because I refuse not to be able to backup media I purchase and also because it's incredibly more convenient for me not to have to switch between discs. |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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The whole point of having an MP3 player is not having to carry around and swap out a stack of removable media when you're on the go. If you've got CDs you want to listen to when you're out somewhere, it's a trivial matter to make MP3s from them and put them on the player... and that only needs to be done once.
No, a CD/radio/cassette player is different; those are quite useful for dealing with two different kinds of removable media and listening to the radio. It's just MP3 players with internal flash or hard drive storage for music that really wouldn't benefit that much from the ability to directly play a removable media that can have its contents copied to its internal storage by other means anyway. I'm sure some people would like such a thing regardless, but I very much doubt that there'd be enough of them to make it a viable product.
Putting the contents of some CDs through iTunes once is more of a bother than carting around a stack of CDs and swapping them out all the time? Ooookay... And so I'm not completely off-topic with this post, I do actually have a Blu-Ray relevant question. If I hook a Blu-Ray player up to my TV using component video cables, I am aware that this will result in a lesser picture than with HDMI, but how much better than DVD would it be? I have an LCD TV capable of 720p that was made before HDMI, and would like to know if it's really worth getting a Blu-Ray player now or waiting until I replace the TV (which I don't intend to do in the foreseeable future). <edit>Oh, two questions, actually. The other one was about multi-region players. As The Powers That Be saw fit to put Australia in a different region from the US again, and not everything I'm going to want to watch will be released locally, I'm going to want something that'll play anything from anywhere. How much luck am I going to have with that?</edit> |
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littlegreenwolf
Posts: 4796 Location: Seattle, WA |
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Eh, I just bought one because it was smaller than a CD player. And as I state below, it's not so trivial to some people.
You may not think a CD player with oh, a gig or so of space for mp3s would bennift from it, but myself? I'd personally love it on my cd/cassete/radio player in my studio workplace, and where ever else I may take that thing. You like taking your ipod to the beach/pool?
I'm assuming you've used itunes before. If so, I'm also guessing maybe you're lucky and it actually works for you most of the time, but for me, on a Windows OS, first it takes at least 5 minutes to load (I really don't understand why it takes forever, I have plenty of ram, and about everything else) and then it has serious problems with my mp3 library. On bad days, which is just about every time, it tells me it can't find the location to practically every MP3 out of the 40 something gigs of music I have, and asks me to manually point to the location for each and every bloody mp3 it can't find. This is just bad programing, and when I can't get it to go back to how it used to be the only option is to just reinstall itunes, and that with my mp3 library can take hours because then you also have to reupload everything to your ipod. On top of that on a GOOD day there's the who knows how long it takes to sync to the ipod. I can either go through all that hassle, or I can just pull up another multimedia program, in this case we'll go with Windows Media player which opens instantly, load the playlist I want to burn, and viola! New playlist burnt to a cd in less than 4 minutes! And yeah, loose cds you have to sort through in a car to play vs and ipod in a car seem a heck of a lot safer to me. Dunno how you do it, but I consider going through the ipod in the car the equivalent of texting while driving. I'm not even going into how much of a damn hassle it is to get my ipod hooked up to my car stereo. Much easier just to make a burnt disc before leaving for work/school every morning. I bought a 60 gig ipod when it was brand new about 5 years ago, paying about 400 bucks for it. I rarely use it even now, and now it seems to be dying (at least the screen pixels) with some nasty black pixel BS spreading across it. Out of all my techno geeking, the ipod has to be the biggest wastes of money I have ever spent. I'm not buying another i-anything for a very long time, and only if someone I personally spends a long time convincing me so. And oh, don't even get me started on my parents with their damn ipod shuffles. They've had those things for 2 years now, and still need me to come over to their house when they need to upload a single song to the thing. |
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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Fear not, hope is at hand. I strongly recommend you give Sharepod a try. When helping family members use their Apple products, it has spared me from much aggravation. |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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Ah, I see. You're approaching this hypothetical hybrid device as a CD player with storage for a handful of MP3s bolted on, whereas I'm thinking of it more as an MP3 player with a CD player bolted on.
Okay, you have to be doing something wrong for it to be behaving like that. Do you have "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" checked in your options, or are you the type that prefers to manually sort your music into folders? If the latter, I suspect that's the cause of at least part of the problem. Also, why is it reuploading everything to your iPod every time? Do you have it set to automatically sync your iPod to your music collection for some reason? In all the years I've been using iTunes, I've never had those kinds of problems. Not even when I've been using the Windows version.
You really shouldn't be doing either while the car's actually in motion with you at the wheel. But if you really must, then I'd consider it better to sort out playlists before heading out and selecting a different one while you're stopped at the lights or something. And just skipping a song doesn't require any greater concentration on an iPod than it does on a CD player.
I think that one's more your parents than Apple... my parents don't need any assistance to put music on their iPods. Anyway, this is getting too off-topic, and whatever I say I doubt I'll be changing your mind about Apple here, so this'll be the last I say on the subject in this thread. So how about them Blu-Rays? |
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hikaru004
 Posts: 2306 |
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I'm waiting for the price to go down before buying a BD player.
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fuuma_monou
 Posts: 1821 Location: Quezon City, Philippines |
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Ditto. PS3 is still cheaper than most stand-alone Blu-ray players, with a better features to price ratio, to boot. Problem is I don't like the PS3's design. The Xbox 360 is much sexier, though it does have the perennial RRoD problem. Maybe Sony will make a slim PSthree later. |
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walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
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That'd be nice. Bundle it with a regular remote (it doesn't have to be fancy, just with your basic Play, Pause, Stop, Menu, FF/Skip, RW/Skip-Back, and Directional) and maybe at least some component cables. I'd like to buy a PS3 eventually since it does have the gaming feature, and it's been consistently rated a good or the best BD player. |
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