Thoughts on the HD wars

tech: Thoughts on the HD wars

July 2 2008 | WilHarris

This week on ChannelFlip I’ve been looking at cheap Blu-ray players. Well, when I say cheap, I mean under £300 - which is cheap compared to the prices the players were at last year, up nearer four figures.

I was lucky enough to be able to go down to Dolby HQ in London and use their testing set up. The demo room there really is a geek’s dream - apart from the 50″ 1080p screen, they’ve got every games console around (including the Gamecube, for retro lovers).

The thing that really struck me was how HD comes into its own when you get fantastically mastered source material and a huge screen. I have to say that, viewing on a 32″ screen, it’s sometimes been difficult for me to tell the difference between 720p material and upscaled DVDs. But when you’re viewing in 1080p on a 50″ screen, you can really see the detail.

I actually found in testing that, in many cases, it’s animation that really looks the best in HD. Cars, the Pixar classic, looks so vibrant and deep that it really blew me away. Certainly a better experience than watching in a cinema - I guess it’s the digital-film-to-digital-disc workflow. The same is true of Beowulf, which looked insane. The scene where Angelina Jolie’s character emerges, naked, from the water is - shall we say - one of the best.

So I wasn’t neccessarily an HD believer prior to the test, and I’m not sure I’m entirely won over now - as far as I can tell, if you have a TV less than 37″ it’s going to be hard to justify the outlay at this point. But with a big TV you can certainly tell the difference.

With the PlayStation 3 also packing Blu-ray as an added extra, my week’s movie viewing does make me a little more disposed to that platform. I really think that the Xbox 360 needs a built-in HD drive this year to compete. But that’s a different story!

comments

Jim

July 4th, 2008 - 1:10pm

I still an HD sceptic at the moment. Like you said, the difference between 1080p and 720p on smaller TV’s is minimal and chances are, if you have a larger TV you will be sitting in larger room and be further away, negating the benefit of the higher res.

Looking and “HD” stills compared to standard def there is a clear difference in detail and quality but in a moving image with motion blur, again, I really can’t see much difference.

I will be forced at some point to buy an HD television, but at the moment, I am quite happy with my Widescreen CRT.

Jim

July 4th, 2008 - 1:14pm

How do you edit comments? I wish I would remember to proof read my comments before I embarrass myself with loads of errors!

Jim

July 4th, 2008 - 1:19pm

…And talking about widescreen CRT’s. Why does Apple market the ‘Apple TV’ as for your widescreen TV? I have a “widescreen” telly but not the necessary inputs to connect the apple device. It should more accurately be described as “flat panel” or even “HD”. It just annoys me!

Norbit

July 4th, 2008 - 4:36pm

There is a chart here that tells you the optimum viewing distances for different screens and resolutions;

http://s3.carltonbale.com/resolution_chart.html

I have a 32″ screen but I’m only about 7′ away from it so there is a large improvement over SD, if you are over 10′ away from it you wont notice much difference however.

If you get the right sized screen for your viewing set up you will definitely see considerable improvement over SD.

To get the full benefit of 1080p on a 50″ screen you should be between 6′ and 9′ away from it which I think is pretty much normal for a living room. In order to not be able to tell the difference between HD and SD on a 50″ screen you would need to be over 15′ away which is pretty ridiculous.

Brisbane Grant

July 5th, 2008 - 1:37pm

It’s amazing how many people have opinions about HD and they’ve never actually seen a BD on a large 1080p television. IF you’re interested in quality of picture and sound (and many people aren’t), BD is 4x better than the best HD terrestrial television and 10x better than (say iTunes) downloads. And for HD DVD fans, BD’s minimum data rate was the same as HD DVDs maximum data rate (= quality). Now lets look at sound. PCM uncompressed surround is the only audio you want. You won’t always get it on a disc (like DTS on DVDs), but many of them have it. And this is where Wil missed the main point of the Sharp player - it will put this out on 5.1 analogue outputs, saving you buying a new receiver. The Sony won’t do that, although it will play BD5 and BD9 discs (see wikipedia), which the Sharp won’t. So, get a copy of ‘Sunshine’, play it through the HDMI of your 46″+ 1080p television, with all the ‘helpers’ turned off and all the sharpening turned on, because BD doesn’t need any help, it’s a lot sharper than ANY television can display. It will take your breath away! By the way, sit as close as you like. My rule of thumb is 2m. If the screen doesn’t take up your whole field of vision, it’s either too small or you are too far away. Enjoy!

Tony

July 5th, 2008 - 4:10pm

“By the way, sit as close as you like”, try telling that to my ma =D

High Definition physical media has arrived too late imho! DVD’s are too cheap and prevalent. IPTV and the like is the way forward!

Norbit

July 5th, 2008 - 4:47pm

“IPTV and the like is the way forward!”

Not gonna happen imo. Not only because of getting people to move away from physical media. MP3’s and HD movies arent similar in any way and it amuses me when I hear people say MP3 took off so this will as well. There is a world of difference between downloading a low quality MP3 to listen to on the move and downloading a film 1000 times larger to watch in HD.

There is also the little matter that Al Gore apparently didn’t design the Internets properly so IP’s are capping downloads all over the place and that’s probably only going to get worse.

Its a straight forward choice between buying a HD movie on Amazon and having it arrive on a disk the next the next day or spending a day or so downloading it in worse quality. One way is really easy and leaves you with a hard copy you can view on any compatible player while the other buggers your entire Internet connection by using all the bandwidth and leaves you with a copy protected file on a hard drive with severely limited usability.

There is also the leap in technology needed. Its going to be a damn sight simpler for the average household to simply swap the DVD player under their TV for a Blu-ray one than it will be to rig up a home network for streaming HD movies and then trying to teach grandma how to use it lol

Movie downloads will be a relatively minor success but they will not replace physical media. Every single argument I have seen for why it will falls apart under examination.

Schmung

July 5th, 2008 - 10:39pm

I think that it’s going to be a niche thing for a long old while yet. DVD is good enough for most people and unless you’re someone who spends hours agonising over the copper content over your audio interconnects then HD is not that relevant.

I think a lot of it is due to the divide in infrastructure either side of the pond. US ISPs have a far better load of cable to work with that we do in the UK. We can’t change what we’ve got easily because of the nature of the country.

As for broadcast HD and the telly industry - well, suffice to say that the approach thus far resembles a bunch of headless chickens in posh suits. They’ve no idea of how things are going to turn out, advertisers are panicking and so it seems is everyone else.

Jim

July 7th, 2008 - 9:41am

I have to be honest in that I am one of theose people that doesn’t care too much about picture or sound quality. As long as I can see what’s going on in the film and hear the crash bangs and wallops, thats fine for me. Whether the audio is compressed or not makes absolutely no difference to me as my surround system isn’t good enough (nor are my ears for that matter) to highlight the difference. I feel exactly the same about “hifi”. I am a musician, so I care far more about the music than I do about the percieved quality of the sound.

Jim

July 7th, 2008 - 9:52am

@Brisbane Grant

A serious question

If a Blu-ray film is playing at the native resolution of a 1080p TV, how can it be sharper than any TV can display?

Jim

July 7th, 2008 - 10:23am

Re last comment. Is it to do with the contrast ratio?