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Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD


DTLongo

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The Professor is right, haha. I work at BestBuy, and while the Blu-Ray demo itself looks really nice, the actual trailers look pretty "noisy". Makes me wonder if BestBuy is trying to promote Blu-ray over HD. I dunno, could be just a coincidence. But our Blu-Ray player is out front on a really nice 1080P LCD, while the HD player is at the back on a pretty low end hdtv. By the way, someone mentioned what a great job the HD player does on upconverting. Does anyone know if they do a better job than latest Sony upconvert players? Mine does a pretty good job, I've just never compared them side by side.

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And in just one more story from January 18 on SlashDot: The Dark Side of HDCP: Why Does My PS3 Keep Blinking?

Or should we call it: Step Right Up Folks! Have We Got a Deal For You!!

And folks, I am not trying to pick on Sony!

"High Definition Content Protection is supposed to make sure you're not playing pirated content, but sometimes your devices screw up the HDCP 'handshake' (over an HDMI cable) and nothing works. This happens with some regularity with the PS3, and Popular Mechanics investigated and found a quick and dirty workaround. From the article: 'We then checked with Leslie Chard, president of HDMI Licensing, which owns the rights to the standard, who told us that HDCP is one component of HDMI that has been plagued with interoperability issues. HDCP (high-bandwidth digital content protection) is designed to prevent the interception of data specifically copyrighted Hollywood movies between an output component and a display. As Steve Balough, the president of Digital Content Protection, the licensing company for HDCP explains, the two pieces of hardware must exchange a key, a sort of certificate of authenticity unique to each individual device, to verify a secure connection.' The problem isn't limited to the PS3 many HDTV cable boxes have the same problem. The fix there? Unplugging the power cable."

I couldn't make this stuff up! [:P]

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The Professor is right, haha. I work at BestBuy, and while the Blu-Ray demo itself looks really nice, the actual trailers look pretty "noisy". Makes me wonder if BestBuy is trying to promote Blu-ray over HD. I dunno, could be just a coincidence. But our Blu-Ray player is out front on a really nice 1080P LCD, while the HD player is at the back on a pretty low end hdtv. By the way, someone mentioned what a great job the HD player does on upconverting. Does anyone know if they do a better job than latest Sony upconvert players? Mine does a pretty good job, I've just never compared them side by side.

I was in Best Buy about a week ago and I saw the movie 'The Wild' playing on a 52" LCD 1080p television on a Blu-Ray disc. It grabbed my attention in a hurry! I then went on to ask how well that Blu-Ray disc would play on my 720p plasma... he said, in his opinion it would look even better to to the better blacks of a plasma. Well, back to the point, I then asked him where the HD DVD set-up was playing. He took me to a 32" or maybe it was a 37" LCD television, I am not even sure if it was a 1080p, and that is where they had the HD DVD system playing some boring-looking demo disc. Needless to say, I left the store wondering if Blu-Ray was far superior to the HD DVD. I certainly don't think I can take what I saw at Best Buy as conclusive evidence but seeing Blu-Ray sure made me want to step up to the plate and buy one! But, Blu-Ray cost the consumer about 2X what the HD DVD player costs... maybe that is Best Buy's incentive to push Blu-Ray?!?

D

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Again, NOT to try to bash Sony (as I actually like the Blu-Ray format), but I also question much of Sony's poor strategic planning and their own need to make such exaggerated market claims that have resulted in their bringing so much attention onto themselves...

But it is interesting to watch the world market reaction to the product availability versus what so many of the proponents of the products want to believe.

Rather than any of the formats dominating and presenting a compelling platform that drives development and thus becomes the foundation of a home system, instead I see them remaining as simple niche products, much like the earlier PS2 and other various video game systems have been. And as a result of their pricing, I see PS2 and Wii and the other more affordable systems remaining very viable for a long time - especially as the prices of the older systems may drop even further (although I rather expect a rebounding in their market value as the initial hype over the new formats subside) and their games are readily available for low prices.

In other words, the new platforms are just additional pricey options (albeit with nice graphics and nice physics engines), but they will not drive the market.

Take a look:

PS3 Sales Dropping in Japan



BetaNews January 19, 2007



There is increasing evidence worldwide that sales of
the PlayStation 3 are beginning to slow significantly. A firm says sales of the
console in Japan
this past week were the worst since launch.



Japanese research firm Media Create said the console sold 25,531 units
overall for the week ending January 14. This was far behind the Wii, which sold
about 93,708 consoles for the week. Still, that number was low too, and the
second worst week since launch.



Media Create's figures are created by extrapolating national
sales from surveying 3,000 retail stores across the country.





The Xbox 360, a perennial underperformer in Southeast
Asia, brought up the rear with only 9,035 units. Overall, some
128,274 units were sold, the company said in data released Friday.



Sony's insistence that it has shipped one
million consoles
has caused analysts to wonder why there is such a large
gap between the shipped number and sold console estimates from several analyst
firms. Several have noted that PS3s are in ample supply in some stores in Japan.



PlayStation 3 sales could also be hurt by the surprising success of the
Nintendo Wii. Research firm Enterbrain estimated that the console sold 1.14
million consoles through the first week of January, compared with just over
534,000 for the PS3.



Another sign of the consoles weakness: In Media Create's list of top-selling
games, the first PS3 title, Resistance: Fall of Man, does not appear
until number 40. "Wii Sports" took the #1 spot (it is not bundled in
the country, unlike in the U.S.).



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