Avinash_Tyagi said: Mummelmann said: PS: HDTV sales have completely erupted in parts of europe. In the nordic countries, 50 % of all TV's will be HDTV's by 2010. Please don't tell me that no one buys HDTV's just because you can't afford one (me neither, yet)... They don't buy them for HD they buy them because they are flat

 So the fact that the image quality is a lot better has nothing to do with it? Okay... Since you seem to have a sound knowledge of the hi-fi biz. Maybe they should just stick to the first color TV's then, they were very small. It doesn't matter since picture counts for nothing. This is like saying that people got CD players only because it looked cool, and that capacity/sound quality/practicality had nothing to do with it. No, just no.

 Really will only play a factor when people are required to update to HD which won't be for a while now, and most people still won't know what they are doing, they'll just go along with what they are required to do, any tech which requires educating the consumer is in trouble

I quoted the first part truth: yes DVDs will continue to dominate for a long time. And for reasons mentioned above (people don't know DVD isn't high def, don't know what Blu Ray or HD-DVD is, don't want to pay more for media, etc) DVD will continue to dominate.

However, the second part -- "older movies just don't benefit from HD" is completely untrue. Many older movies were recorded on 35mm film, which resolves a *lot* more detail than 1980x1080.

In terms of resolution, 35mm is vastly superior to 1080p. It is possible to transfer a movie well from its original format to HD discs. However, the results will depend a lot on its original production values as well as the quality of the transfer itself. It's possible to use bad film or record under terrible lighting conditions, of course. HD isn't very high resolution compared to 35mm film, though.

A review of casa blanca from 1942:

http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/498/casablanca.html

The reviewer gave the video quality 5-stars -- sure, it's not widescreen, but it was a good transfer from the source film and it was a high production value movie. There isn't a technical reason why older movies don't have fantastic results on 1080p, especially since 1080p is such low resolution compared to the source.

They gave 4.5 stars to The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).  It's even in color!

Well according to the news station HD TV has nearly 40% penetration in the United states.

Mummelmann said: Avinash_Tyagi said: Mummelmann said: PS: HDTV sales have completely erupted in parts of europe. In the nordic countries, 50 % of all TV's will be HDTV's by 2010. Please don't tell me that no one buys HDTV's just because you can't afford one (me neither, yet)... They don't buy them for HD they buy them because they are flat  So the fact that the image quality is a lot better has nothing to do with it? Okay... Since you seem to have a sound knowledge of the hi-fi biz. Maybe they should just stick to the first color TV's then, they were very small. It doesn't matter since picture counts for nothing. This is like saying that people got CD players only because it looked cool, and that capacity/sound quality/practicality had nothing to do with it. No, just no.

You really think most consumers understand the difference between 720 and 1080 or i and p? Nope, they buy a flatscreen because it looks nice and the picture looks nice, anything else is irelevant to them, they don't buy it because its HD, most don't even know that they need to buy HD service or get an HD player 

Avinash_Tyagi said: Mummelmann said: Avinash_Tyagi said: Mummelmann said: PS: HDTV sales have completely erupted in parts of europe. In the nordic countries, 50 % of all TV's will be HDTV's by 2010. Please don't tell me that no one buys HDTV's just because you can't afford one (me neither, yet)... They don't buy them for HD they buy them because they are flat So the fact that the image quality is a lot better has nothing to do with it? Okay... Since you seem to have a sound knowledge of the hi-fi biz. Maybe they should just stick to the first color TV's then, they were very small. It doesn't matter since picture counts for nothing. This is like saying that people got CD players only because it looked cool, and that capacity/sound quality/practicality had nothing to do with it. No, just no. You really think most consumers understand the difference between 720 and 1080 or i and p? Nope, they buy a flatscreen because it looks nice and the picture looks nice, anything else is irelevant to them, they don't buy it because its HD, most don't even know that they need to buy HD service or get an HD player

 Exactly. Which was my point. They DO care about how the picture looks. You just bit your own arse and choked a bit.

Generally, you're incorrect. Most people don't even realize their image is stretched. They don't care about the color range of a TV set, nor do they care about the resolution. What they primarily buy a new set for is size of the screen and because they're svelte. High definition doesn't mean much to most people, although they'd be happy if they had widescreen content they seem to not know the difference between widescreen content and just plain stretched content. Read the following commentary:

http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/1154

Excerpted:

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Recently, my wife and I were visiting some friends who'd bought a new plasma TV and were eager to show it off to us. Their 10 year-old son insisted that we watch 'Pirates of the Caribbean' on DVD with them. The set was a fairly large screen, certainly bigger than anything they'd ever owned before. However, they had not done anything that could remotely be called "calibration" with it. The brightness level was cranked up so high that there was no such thing as the color black on screen, just a milky gray. They'd only had the set for a few months and already developed burn-in marks from the letterbox bars on DVDs, and for some reason the picture pulsed every so often, filling the whole screen with nasty pixelation artifacts. As if that weren't enough, they had their DVD player connected by Composite Video cable, and set for 4:3 aspect ratio mode, so the 2.35:1 movie image on 'Pirates' was squished down into a tiny strip in the middle of the screen.

As a dyed-in-the-wool videophile, I naturally found the whole situation appalling, but as the movie started my wife gave me a dirty look that said, "Not one word. Keep your mouth shut and pretend to enjoy yourself!" Of course, she was right. Our friends were so proud of their new purchase that it would have been unbearably rude of me to criticize. After the seemingly-endless movie, I politely asked to use the DVD player remote for a minute to "tweak" a setting for them, during which I mercifully fixed the aspect ratio setting to 16:9 mode. I quickly checked a scene to verify that the change took, only to be greeted with the response that, "We don't see any difference." Indeed, they never noticed that there was any problem before, and were perfectly happy with the squished, stretched, and obviously distorted picture they'd been watching.

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Believe it or not, this is the common case.

I don't think BluRay *winning* will have a huge impact - MS could easily bring out a BluRay player for the 360.

But BluRay losing would have a huge impact, as that may make the PS3 feel sort of obsolete.

...

A key sticking point for me is still the price of the discs. I now own around 50 DVDs, and bought a few over Xmas. Pretty much every movie I bought recently came in around $10AU (3 for $25, etc..).

JB HiFi now stock HD-DVD + BluRay movies. No one really looks at them - a tiny corner of the store. A HD-DVD move costs around $40 here - if it wasn't for the free offers, I wouldn't even consider them.

If I had a HD-DVD/BluRay player, I would buy a couple of movies - just for the tech/example. But there is no way I would switch from primarily buying DVDs - there just isn't a point. The ratio might end up 10:1, or 6:1 or something.

Having a upsampling DVD player + nice HD (50'') set - my "old" DVDs still look pretty damned good on it. The difference isn't worth $30 / movie to me - not even close.

People at first may have bought the LCD TV because they are flat but now the HD wars is all over the news people are quickly getting informed about these two formats. Cable vs DirectTV has been running on ads about HD like mad lately. So anyone who watches some TV should  know something about HD by now.