Posted by Gunther Gloop on 09/23/06 23:53

I had my first demo of HDDVD today. Must say I liked what I saw, but it's
obvious to me that there's no way Joe-public is going to run out and buy
into it anytime soon.

We played Serenity, Unforgiven and Training Day on a projector at 720p.
Although colour/contrast/brightness seemed better on the HD, 'ordinary' dvd
stood up well. Obviously those settings are just adjustments to be made on
the dvd player or input settings on the pj -but just wanted to point this
out... the 'DVD' player was obviously at a disadvantage right away in that
regard.

HD was connected via HDMI. DVD was via component.

Clearly the picture _is_ better on the HD, but to be honest, it's like the
difference between a BMP image file (HD) and a high-quality jpeg ('standard
dvd')... it's obvious which one is better, but the differences can be quite
subtle.
Even paused images on both (we had both versions of Unforgiven and Training
Day to compare) showed the dvd had _almost_ as much detail on each pause. It
was surprising how little difference there was for the most part to be
honest -again, it is clear that other movies might have greater
differences -we just went with what we had.

The nicest thing about HDDVD for me was the 'on-the-fly' menus... while the
film is running, you can pull up the menu and change settings/jump to
scenes, etc. without pausing. -Kinda no difference in one way, but _nice_.
:)

Will I be upgrading? ...Not this year certainly. I'm looking forward to when
these new 3-in-1 dvds come out (with HDDVD/ Blu-Ray & DVD on 1 disc)...
hopefully they _will_ come out!
At that point I'm hoping we will all be buying the same discs, building up a
collection... then when the time comes in a year or two to replace a current
dvd player... and when the 'hd' hardware price has come down below
�180ish... slowly but surely people will buy into it.

It certainly won't be the quick success that dvd was... then again I seem to
recall DVD took a few years before it shot off too... 1998 - 2000 were
probably the 'glory years' for those that knew... ahh. :)

Still, with nothing really "totally" new, manufacturers have their work cut
out to get people to buy into HD. My advice would be to lace existing discs
with HD-content that will entice people in over time.

(Sorry if there are some mistakes above -had a few bottles tonight and might
not be typing straight. I can't remember the HDDVD model offhand, but I
think it was the Toshiba... without the firmware upgrade that fixes the
audio -so that's why I didn't mention it.) :)

-Kevin.


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