2008-02-23

Blu-ray rules

I've always been a fan of the Blu-ray format over HD-DVD, and as such I was delighted this week when Toshiba finally threw in the towel on the format war. This talk of Sony bribing Toshiba is silly, in my mind, since they were down to basically one remaining movie publisher using their format which can't be sufficient to maintain a disc format. Unless people were happy only buying Paramount movies (which I suppose some people might), there was no reason remaining to push HD-DVD. Sure, HD-DVD's initial players did come with some features that weren't yet available in BD profile 1.0, but those features were rarely used to my knowledge and with the notable exception of some Samsung (and possibly other) players, older BD players should continue to play new content without substantial problems. Aside from people who already have HDTVs in their homes and were suffering through upscaled DVDs most of the consumer population doesn't care about HD movies yet anyway. Personally, I have a nice 1080i TV with a decent 5.1 sound system and tower speakers all of which actually benefit from high definition movies' sound and video quality improvements over DVD. Should you care? Do you have an HDTV already? Do you notice that your HD shows look substantially better than your DVDs? Do you have good speakers (those little 2" cubes don't count)? Then you'd probably enjoy watching Blu-Ray high definition movies instead of regular old DVDs. And don't worry, your DVD collection will still work in a new Blu-Ray disc player.