Blu-Ray

Anyone planning on becoming an early adopter of Blu-Ray?

Made that mistake with SACD. Never again.

Personally, I'll wait for somebody to come out with a Blu-Ray / HD-DVD combo player before I buy anything.

Jon.

My uncle bought a Betamax VCR n the 80s, bought many tapes and recorded countless more. By the 90s the Beta VCR was covered in dust and now there are boxes of beta tapes in the attic over there. I'm going to wait until one format is clearly the one in the majority, or there is a combo unit to play either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD.

No, I'm going to sit out this format war for the time being. Plus, I'm more interested in burning high-capacity discs as opposed to watching movies, and the burners aren't exactly reasonable right now.

Yes, because I'm a horrible tool and I'm going to pay $600 out ****** for the PS3, even though I know the Wii is going to be much more fun for much less money. I just have to have Tekken 6

I will probably purchase both the PS3 and the Wii (even though it has a stupid name). J and I will then spend a week or so discovering the subtle nuances of Vision Gran Turismo.

beta was superior to vhs in every way except price. so i can only assume that the cheaper technology will win out in the end.

in mexico we all had beta because sony was considered the best brand, and to have anything other than a sony vcr was lame. eventually everyone had to switch over.

I'm not sure which is more expensive, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how HD-DVD can beat Blu-Ray. It seems like Blu-Ray has a lock on 90% of the production companies, most with exclusive deals to make Blu-Ray the only HD version of their movies available. The only drawback to Blu-Ray was the sensitivity to scratching of the media, but they took care of that problem so well that it sounds like you could use a Blu-Ray disc as a coaster for ten years and still watch it.

Originally Posted by matadorpoeta

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beta was superior to vhs in every way except price. so i can only assume that the cheaper technology will win out in the end.

in mexico we all had beta because sony was considered the best brand, and to have anything other than a sony vcr was lame. eventually everyone had to switch over.

It actually had very little to do with price, and a lot to do with the fact that Sony wouldn't release the rights to BETAMAX to more than a handful of distributors. VHS was widely distributed and anyone could buy blank VHS tapes from any number of manufacturers, record their programming on it, and sell it as a product. (the Appreciation industry was a big beneficiary of this). Sony tried to have too much control over the medium and ended up losing the battle because their business model choked the format. That said, up until DV became popularized in the late 90's / early 2000's, almost all newscasts and TV shows were filmed solely on Beta. Many still are.

Originally Posted by hopkins_student

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I'm not sure which is more expensive, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how HD-DVD can beat Blu-Ray. It seems like Blu-Ray has a lock on 90% of the production companies, most with exclusive deals to make Blu-Ray the only HD version of their movies available. The only drawback to Blu-Ray was the sensitivity to scratching of the media, but they took care of that problem so well that it sounds like you could use a Blu-Ray disc as a coaster for ten years and still watch it.
Blu-Ray media will most likely be marginally more expensive, if nothing else, due to the fact that its storage capacity is much higher than HD-DVD. The players should be about the same price, because they both use the same hardware. The main difference is in the encoding/decoding end of the software.

Originally Posted by Tokyo Slim

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Blu-Ray media will most likely be marginally more expensive, if nothing else, due to the fact that its storage capacity is much higher than HD-DVD. The players should be about the same price, because they both use the same hardware. The main difference is in the encoding/decoding end of the software.

The reason why Blu-Ray costs more is because the hardware needed to make the discs is different than the hardware currently used to manufacture CD / DVD / HD-DVD's. Since Blu-Ray uses both a disk that starts "˜imprinting' closer to the edge of the disc and closer to the surface of the disc (yes, they solved the scratching problem using TDK's "˜Durabis' clear-coat technology), the current machines that manufacture DVD's don't have the ability to make a Blu-Ray disc, thus they would have to re-tool to make Blu-Ray's vs. HD-DVD, which requires no additional tooling and can be manufactured using the current DVD-manufacturing machines.

Personally, I think because of the size advantage, that is to say the amount of more data you can fit into a "˜standard' (single-layer) Blu-Ray disc vs. what you can fit into a "˜standard' HD-DVD, the costs even out.

Jon.

Originally Posted by imageWIS

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The reason why Blu-Ray costs more is because the hardware needed to make the discs is different than the hardware currently used to manufacture CD / DVD / HD-DVD’s. Since Blu-Ray uses both a disk that starts ‘imprinting’ closer to the edge of the disc and closer to the surface of the disc (yes, they solved the scratching problem using TDK’s ‘Durabis’ clear-coat technology), the current machines that manufacture DVD’s don’t have the ability to make a Blu-Ray disc, thus they would have to re-tool to make Blu-Ray’s vs. HD-DVD, which requires no additional tooling and can be manufactured using the current DVD-manufacturing machines. Jon.
This is somewhat innacurate Jon. The laser imprinters that HD-DVD uses to encode are different than the ones they use for regular DVD The manufacturing process is simpler to change over, because the burn format is the same, but it DOES use different laser hardware. They still needed to upgrade the equipment. Blu-Ray uses a completely new format, so needs a completely new manufacturing process. HOWEVER, Sony is pretty adamant that this isn't going to impact the price of the disks at all. I think they want to destroy HD-DVD, and they seem like they are willing to take a few losses to do it.

Originally Posted by Tokyo Slim

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That said, up until DV became popularized in the late 90's / early 2000's, almost all newscasts and TV shows were filmed solely on Beta. Many still are.


When I was producing TV commercials a few months ago, we backed up all work on Digi-Beta tapes that were sent to a library, as well as on hard drive. So Beta is still used, in a smaller capacity format.

Originally Posted by Tokyo Slim

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It actually had very little to do with price, and a lot to do with the fact that Sony wouldn't release the rights to BETAMAX to more than a handful of distributors. VHS was widely distributed and anyone could buy blank VHS tapes from any number of manufacturers, record their programming on it, and sell it as a product. (the Appreciation industry was a big beneficiary of this). Sony tried to have too much control over the medium and ended up losing the battle because their business model choked the format.
i'm not sure about this. we had access to every movie that was also available on vhs. i don't recall ever looking for a movie and then discovering it wasn't available on beta. that is, not until years later when vhs had won out.

That said, up until DV became popularized in the late 90's / early 2000's, almost all newscasts and TV shows were filmed solely on Beta. Many still are.

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almost all programming is currently on digi-beta, regardless of the format used to shoot the raw footage.