Quote:
Sir Terrence wrote:
 I own both formats, and I think picture quality on both formats is a wash. If you were to look at a compulation of professional reviews on all titles for both formats, blu-ray wins overall, but not by much. When it comes to audio quality on both, its no contest, blu-ray wins hands down because of the its extensive use of uncompressed PCM versus Dolby Digital plus for a majority of HD DVD titles.
On movies released in both formats, I have done some comparisons between these titles. I have found no difference in most cases, and what differences I did find were just that, differences and not anything that would add to a better or superior opinion. |
I'd have to disagree. Overal ratings for picture quality put HD as the winner and BR for audio.
As to for audio, only about a 1/3 of the tracks on BR use PCM, 1/3 use DD, and 1/3 use DTS HD MA.
There seems to be the speculation that PCM is better since there is nothing that needs to be decompressed at all. But first this wastes double the space and secondly lossless means there was no quality loss.
And to show how much pre-conceived notions that PCM was better plays apart in favortism even in reveiws you can see how titles with PCM were automatically marked higher. When it was later pointed out that these PCM titles at 16 bits actuaclly have a lesser quality then the TrueHD tracks at 24 bits you can already see the recent review ratings starting to change. So the quality is less and costs twice the amount of space.
The same would go for the lower rate DD on BR vs the higher rated DD+ on HD. As for the DTS HD MA that is on almost 1/3rd of all titles ::shrugs:: thats anyones guess since there is not a single player released by Blu-ray that can fully decode DTS HD MA only lesser versions of it.
Considering that picture and audio may lean of favor one side slightly; both are very similar in most cases. The added features available on the HD DVD definetly put it over the top and are not matched by Blu-ray. Full interactive menu systems IME, U-control, picture and picture, the ability to play combo discs in a regular dvd player, twin discs in either a dvd player or a HD player, internet interactivity that allows me to connect to the web an have even more content all for about 1/3 what I paid for my Pannasonic Blu-ray player.
Blu-ray brags about disc space advantages but 70% of all movies released are actually on 25g discs which is less space then HD DVD. Add into that the use of MPEG-2 and PCM which both use more space then more advanced codecs, you wind up with alot of 90 minute movies with less extras then the dvd version.
Being as most BR players currently released will not be compatiable and will need to be replaced in order to be fully functional once profile 2.0 comes out, I would definetely not say this is worth $500-$1,000 over the $300 HD DVD players now available.