Yes.

Next question.

Yes. Get some 1930's and early 40's flicks on bluray sourced from good prints and just look at them. Stuff shot in the 60's and 70's on cheap cameras are gonna look kinda crap no matter what format they're on. Stuff shot on really good equipment and converted from a really good print? Gorgeous.

BUT HOW DO YOU SEE ALL THE PIXELS

I love my Blu Ray player. Even though it is sitting in my mum's house not being used. My tv blew up so I have nothing to plug it into at my flat

Most definitely. Watching the HD-DVD of The Searchers was a totally different experience. I had at last watched one of my favourite films in a way that people would have enjoyed it in theatres.

Oh man, for an excellent example, check out the first few James Bond movies on Blu-ray. Dr. No looks like it was filmed last year, and is just a period piece set in the sixties. The picture is stunning.

...

Does anybody else refer to Blu-ray as "blurry"? Not in a derogatory way, just in a... "Why did you choose a name that sounds like blurry, you dumb marketing people?" way.

I guess by my logic, they should have called the technology "Sharp-ray" or something.

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyy, you're right. Maybe that's where I got it from?

Very well. I accept and honor your claim of coinage.

They named it that because of the blue laser, which you know, but what kinda baffled me were how many people thought HD-DVD didn't use a blue laser itself. It did. The bluray people just had better marketing, I guess. Aside from the storage capacity per layer and the neat scratch-resistant coating on blurays, HD DVD was a far superior format in pretty much every conceivable way. I still use mine. You can get the discs now for pennies.

Yeah, I started with HD-DVD (via xbox add-on) and wanted that format to win. It was completely region-free and was just as good as blurays in most instances despite the large capacity gap. What won the war was Sony's marketing (where they made sure that every store sold blurays and more of them than hd-dvd) and their stubborness (which was just that little bit greater than Toshiba's).

Ah, those were the days. I still remember hearing the news that Warner had gone bluray exclusive.

Region-locking is one of those things that really kills us in non-US markets. It was crap on DVD and it's crap on bluray (The Criterion Collection being the most noticeable example).

As far as I can recall, Toshiba was trying to make a deal with one of the Bluray only studios, can't remember which, and WB was in on it, but the deal fell through. Had it worked, it would have ended the war with HD-DVD the winner as they would have had Universal, Paramount, WB and this other one. The studios wanted the format war to end, so WB (who up to this point had been releasing on both formats) threw in the towel and went bluray only. It was a lot closer than most people tend to think (and little to do with charts or which one was the superior format).

Adding more to that, I remember that porn stars were upset about HD video due to their being less able to hide their various physical imperfections / scars. They were worried it would make them look ugly.

And yeah, MS was gonna put HD DVD into the 360, but they were somehow 'convinced' to use DVD instead and release the HD-DVD drive as an add-on. They claimed it would make the 360 units cheaper to produce, tho I still don't see how it couldn't have been competitive with the then $600 PS3. Anyway, they said that both formats would eventually be killed off by streaming video, and that they'd rather go after that market instead of optical discs. Probably a smart move in the long term.

Speaking of classics on Bluray, Citizen Kane finally came out in september. When all this HD stuff first hit the stores, I figured that the first films they'd put on the format would have been A) really awesome looking stuff to impress you with the HD awesomeness B) the most popular films from the last 20 or so years and C) stuff like Kane, On the Waterfront, West Side Story, Wizard of OZ...  older films that were considered important, timeless classics that would have gotten nice boxed sets and shit.

Instead they released mainly crap comedies and B-grade action flicks, and when they did release something like The Matrix, they'd release it in a $100 set months before they'd release the individual movies. The studios are the real reason the two formats didn't catch on quicker than they did. They were releasing utter crap for the first couple of years. I mean, hey, Kane is only widely considered one of the greatest films of all time. Let's just put that one off for five years. The early adopters of this technology are going to be the sort of people who watch "Hitch" and "50 First Dates", not people who actually give a shit about film.

EDIT: Before typing this up, I actually checked to see if Kane was out on Bluray yet and just now learned it had been released. Where were the ads? Where was the announcements on all the various film sites and blogs and what-not? The Kino guys were practically cramming Metropolis up my urethra with web ads, press releases and huge articles in newspapers and magazines and shit. Film blogs made a couple of posts a month about it. I saw a couple of TV ads for it before it came out. They even had a theatrical trailer for it that played in theaters. Kane got none of that at all from Warner Bros. What the hell?

Last edited by Squiggly_P (2011-10-15 00:57:03)