Is blu-ray all you expected it to be?

I would say that yes it was everything I expected it to be with no surprises really. I'm frankly shocked at how many people on here and in real life claim to not be able to tell the difference between a DVD and a Bluray, or SD vs HD. It's night and day for me.
 
jaybee said:
I would say that yes it was everything I expected it to be with no surprises really. I'm frankly shocked at how many people on here and in real life claim to not be able to tell the difference between a DVD and a Bluray, or SD vs HD. It's night and day for me.
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It's blatantly obvious. Even the dross on Sky HD is infinitely better than SD or DVD.
 
my dad upgraded to one a few months ago, hes not bothered about buying blu rays, but he has actually been quite happy with the quality of the up-scaling on his old dvds.
 
Also, many people who go on about a great picture on their tv are proabbly looking at a vile, over sharpened, over contrasty vivid picture.

Unfortuantely these people have never seen a good and well setup picture in their lives.
 
Pretty pleased with it so far. Modern films such as avatar, the dark knight look stunning. I like a lot of older films. Some dont convert well, but i recently bought apocalypse now on blu ray. A fantastic conversion, picture is amazing and sound as well.
 
Starship Troopers is still one of my favourites for Picture and just sheer awesome film making.

The detail and effects in it are brilliant and the violence is epic. A must have!
 
Blu ray/HD-DVD is a huge jump in visual and sound quality imo, even the poorer HD transfers look much better than DVD imo, and the good transfers are jaw droppingly crisp and have that almost 3 dimensional look due to the increased depth of field (non 3d discs, haven't sampled 3D as yet), having a big screen definitely helps to reveal the extra detail but even on smaller screens (sub 50") the difference in most cases is still very evident to me.
 
On my Plasma TVs it makes a huge difference, especially as they are all over 50" the difference between a Blu Ray and SD is very evident. Even on SkyHD the difference between the HD and SD channels is quite clear.
 
Vonhelmet said:
Not quality wise, no, but it doesn't deteriorate in the same way!
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Actually it's much more practical to archive film than a digital copy. While there's not really anything with properties equal to Kodachrome any more you can still expect well over a hundred years from film stock under proper storage. And even then it would still be playable, just with some of the dyes starting to fade (Kodachrome would last 150 years before suffering 20% loss in the yellow, which was the weakest dye).

Can you say that of any digital format? You need secure backups of secure backups of secure backups. Things break. Then you have to consider how the industry is evolving. Can you easily recover data from a system that's 20 years old? How about 30? Do you think you'll be able to in 20 years time?

I mean, this isn't really relevant to the home user. But interesting none the less :p
 
PermaBanned said:
Actually it's much more practical to archive film than a digital copy. While there's not really anything with properties equal to Kodachrome any more you can still expect well over a hundred years from film stock under proper storage. And even then it would still be playable, just with some of the dyes starting to fade (Kodachrome would last 150 years before suffering 20% loss in the yellow, which was the weakest dye).

Can you say that of any digital format? You need secure backups of secure backups of secure backups. Things break. Then you have to consider how the industry is evolving. Can you easily recover data from a system that's 20 years old? How about 30? Do you think you'll be able to in 20 years time?
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Well, it's swings and roundabouts. Digital copies will always be playable in the quality they were originally created in, assuming that we keep hold of the appropriate codecs. As you've said, film copies will deteriorate at some point, so while they may start out in higher quality they will ultimately fade away. And how long will film stock last when it's actually in use? Film stock gets damaged through use, while digital copies don't, assuming your disc drive/hard disk isn't full of sand.

PermaBanned said:
I mean, this isn't really relevant to the home user. But interesting none the less :p
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Well, yeah, for the home user 35mm is pretty much not on the table!
 
Apart from some old TV shows, I find it difficult to watch anything below 720p, the difference is very obvious to my eyes, especially on my monitor (less so on my TV).

Assuming your TV, media player, HD media and viewing positioin are configured correctly, I think the main reason why people don't notice a difference is because they aren't doing a direct side by side camparison. It's one of those things where you can't trust your memory, you need to do a proper side by side comparision (a bit like when people claim the difference between an SSD and HDD isn't that great ... untill you go back to using a HDD). Seriously, try comparing them side by side, there will be no going back.
 
Sometimes on the HD channels you get old films, westerns and such that appear to have been remastered in to a HD format and they look great.

Personally I have to have at least 720p on digital stuff or I can't stand it, I don't watch a lot of blurays because I haven't been impressed with many films lately and i find it incredibly tedious to change discs for TV series which I thought would have been solved by now.
 
PermaBanned said:
Actually it's much more practical to archive film than a digital copy. While there's not really anything with properties equal to Kodachrome any more you can still expect well over a hundred years from film stock under proper storage. And even then it would still be playable, just with some of the dyes starting to fade (Kodachrome would last 150 years before suffering 20% loss in the yellow, which was the weakest dye).

Can you say that of any digital format? You need secure backups of secure backups of secure backups. Things break. Then you have to consider how the industry is evolving. Can you easily recover data from a system that's 20 years old? How about 30? Do you think you'll be able to in 20 years time?

I mean, this isn't really relevant to the home user. But interesting none the less :p
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I'm not sure of your point. You still have to have the equipment to play back and master from 35mm (or any) film in the same way you do with digital formats? If necessary with digital, masters can be updated and moved to a new format if required without loss assuming lossless masters.

Also you talk about backups, how do you back up 35mm film?

I totally understand 35mm is great but your arguments for it vs digital are not.

But my answer to the original post:

Yes and no. Yes in that when done well it's utterly fantastic, this goes for brand new blockbusters right down to silly little things like Poirot being remastered from 16mm film and it looking so much better than it ever did on DVD. No in that some studios just don't care enough to put the investment in to get the best out of the format. They're happy to release discs using masters originally taken for DVD which aren't up to spec for Blu-Ray. Then there's that annoying BD-Java stuff, the main issue for me is wanting to turn off a disc and have it start in exactly the same position as I left it. It's very rare to find a BR disc that will do that.
 
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