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TheBigFatJ on 14 November 2007
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whatever said:
TheBigFatJ said:
Here's a really good article about the format war:

http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/news/show/Joshua_Zyber/Commentary:_Living_in_Fear_of_the_Niche/1154

There aren't many strong reasons to care about who wins or whether either format will be alive in five years. A very small percentage of people will know the difference between DVD and high def formats, and most people think DVDs are high def. Just like most people care only about the size of their screen, not the contrast ratio, resolution, or content.

Hell, for a lot of people cable produces sufficient quality for television viewing, even though their quality is significantly lower than OTA broadcasts.



I think a major issue here is that before getting a new HDTV, most people had yet to experience even 480p. So now they get a new HDTV and hook up the old progressive scan DVD player and suddenly they now see 16:9 at 480p and are blown away compared to the old 4:3 at 480i.

Its hard to convince people that just made that jump that they need to make another jump to 1080p when the price is so high.


It's even worse than you believe. 

Read the article, look at his comments about his friends and their new plasma TV.  Most people connect that fancy progressive scan DVD player to that fancy TV via composite cables at 480i. This is much worse than using component cables at 480i.

Even more significant than quibbles about the sharpness and color detail of the image, which I'd consider fairly obvious but not as obvious as a really bad aspect ratio, the author fixes their aspect ratio problem. And they don't notice a difference!

Consider the consequences of this.  The quality of the TV and the image are completely insignificant to the average person.  They care far more about the size of the TV.  So their ability to detect differences is about as subtle as a hammer hit to the skull.  These are just regular people, and they probably don't notice the difference between standard definition and high definition broadcast TV, much less notice the difference between DVD and high def formats (since DVD is significantly better, in almost every case, than standard def TV broadcast).

So they don't notice the difference between the DVDs and HD-DVDs or BDs, then how in the hell are you going to convince them to pay 2-3x as much for each movie, even if they own a player?  If this format war drops the value of standard def DVDs, that alone is a huge win for most people and that alone will keep adoption down. 

Technical minded people can't understand why people stick with Cable TV (significantly lower picture quality vs OTA and Satelite).  Or why they don't care that they don't have HD content.  Or why they think regular DVDs are high definition.  Or why they can't tell the difference between the Xbox 360 and the Wii graphically.  Technical minded people don't realize that others don't know anything about it and don't care to know.  They just want the TV (or game system) to work and to be big.  Loud sound is impressive.  Good sound and surround sound are quibbles. 

You want to convince these people that they need to buy an HDMI 1.3 receiver so they can listen to uncompressed TrueHD audio?