Blu-ray Shifts Promo Plans

Members of the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) were not declaring victory in the war of the HD disc formats at International CES, but their actions seemed to be speaking louder than their words.

Since Warner Bros.' surprise announcement that it will exclusively back Blu-ray Disc later this year, leaders of some of the BDA's largest manufacturers and studios said they have agreed to shift gears in their joint promotional and marketing efforts from a Blu-ray vs. HD DVD approach to one that will promote the advantages of Blu-ray over standard definition DVDs.

"Hopefully, we can start focusing our energy away from fighting about which format is the better format and now start focusing on consumer education," said Steve Beeks, Lionsgate president/COO. "The choice is clear - consumers need to upgrade from standard def to high def, and perhaps we can start to see packaged media sales start to grow again."

[WilliamRLBaker]

Yeah I've seen the promo's for Blu rays supposed Advancement over SD DVDs...like one is of the knights tale and its the scene where the girl and the dude are in the chapel there like fighting and the sd is all blurry infact so blurry you cannot tell who is who, and what people look like and yet ive seen the SD version of the movie on an 50 inch tv and its not that blurry....Reason why? because the blu ray promo discs purposely blurr the sd version of the movie to make them seem worse the original knights tale movie does not look that blurry on the 50 inch tv i saw infact I got the hh greg guy to take hook up the blu ray player to one of their SD digital tube tvs and it looked the same!!

1 disagree with a fact:) I actually did get the guy at HHGReg hook the blu ray player with the PROMO disc in the drive to an SDTV digital tube tv (30 inch) the knights tale clip looked JUST As blurry on the 30 inch SDTV digital tv then it did on the HDTV 50 inch lol.

[coolfool]

I don't know much about purposeful blurring on promo disks but one thing I did see that I thought made blu-ray a little redundant was the abilities of a good up-scaler.

I compared the picture of an upscaled dvd (mine) to a blu-ray version (my friends)of the same movie and although I thought the blu-ray version was better I didn't think the improvement was that amazing. Put it this way, I think the marketing people are going to have a tough job convincing people that blu-ray is significantly better.

From a consumer point of view, am I going to buy a blu-ray movie for £17 or am I going to get the same thing for £5 and just upscale it? Until blu-ray movies are cheaper and have other feature incentives I would always go for the £5 dvd.

[ravinash]

True, but most of the new players that can do upscaling for DVD are BlueRay players anyway.
The idea is most people looking to get a new player will either have an old machine that can't upscale or not have a machine at all.

[SL1M DADDY]

No, they don't actually degrade the picture quality of an SD format, they simply show it in 480, the standard def of the average TV in a greater number of households than HDTVs. If they used an upscale DVD player and an HDTV in 1080p you would see less of a difference that much I can say but even then, the difference between BD and SD DVDs is enough for me to make the switch. The color, clarity and sound are far better IMHO. Get that folks? IMHO.

[mighty_douche]

"blu ray promo discs purposely blurr the sd version of the movie to make them seem worse"

lol..... oh dear....

[athlon770]

you said, "the original knights tale movie does not look that blurry on the 50 inch tv i saw infact I got the hh greg guy to take hook up the blu ray player to one of their SD digital tube tvs and it looked the same!!"

So you had the guy hook up a high definition movie player to a standard definition TV and was suprised to find it looked the same as a standard DVD playing on a standard TV?

Are you for real?

Or are you just trying to confuse the person who has not made the jump into HD yet?

And for your information, all DVD's are not created equal. One DVD movie upscaled to a HDTV will look great, while another will look horrible. Also, there is a little thing called video transfer. Older movies will not look 'improved' because they were not recorded in High Def. originaly.

[Bathyj]

If you cant see the difference between DVD (SD) and BR (HD) then you probably cant see the difference between Halo 2 and Halo 3. Right Bill?

[Qbanj69]

Post of the year!

[LastDance]

Upscaled movies arent too impressive but native blu ray blows anything out the water hands down..esp Ghost rider and spiderman i was watching them in the shop..i was like HOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLY SHIAT. So crisp n clear.

Native = big difference well worth it.
Upscaled(blu ray) = Not worth $40au.

[Adamalicious]

While Blu-Ray is certainly a cut above I've been pleasantly surprised at how great DVDs can look when played on the PS3 with upscaling. In particular we rented Pirates 2 on DVD because the BRDs were all rented and it looked very nice.