Last week, I had a PlayStation 3 in my home, but I didn't get around to playing any games on the thing. Instead, I was using it to watch movies--this was my months-delayed introduction to Blu-Ray, one of two would-be high-definition replacements for the DVD.
As I wrote in yesterday's column, while each movie I watched looked impressively sharp, the future for Blu-Ray as a whole is a lot less clear. Neither it nor HD DVD, its competitor, is offering consumers any great reason to risk buying into what could turn into the Betamax of this decade.
In Help File, I explore a strange--seemingly meaningless but gratuitously annoying--error message that at least 10 different readers have complained about after installing Internet Explorer 7.
I'll be online at 2 p.m. ET today to talk about those two issues, and anything else tech-related that's on your mind. Submit a question or comment here.
Blu-Ray Blues
I hadn't meant to wait this long to try out Blu-Ray--the first player, Samsung's BD-P1000, arrived this summer. But when I asked Samsung's publicists if they could loan me one to try out, I was told that no review units were available. After experiencing no better luck with a couple of other manufacturers, I set the whole topic aside until the PlayStation 3 arrived; after Mike Musgrove had written his evaluation, I knew I could use the PS3 to conduct my long-delayed Blu-Ray evaluation.
That long wait did, however, help me out in one way: Instead of citing estimates or forecasts of how many movies would be available in Blu-Ray by the end of the year, I could go with actual numbers. (If you're interested in seeing how the selection of discs for each format has increased over time, visit The DVD Wars, which tracks sales on Amazon.com.)
I also was spared from having to report promises of future hardware--back in January, companies at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas told me that they'd have Blu-Ray recorders on the market by now. As you can see, that category of hardware remains in the vaporware category.
Lest it seem like I'm beating up on Blu-Ray here, I'm not a fan of HD DVD either. I think the competing format has some distinctive features that could have made it a much more attractive technology--the big one being combo discs that can be used in regular DVD players--but the companies behind it seem determined to let them go to waste. (Here's my earlier review of HD DVD.)
What I hate most about this whole format war is how the companies on either side of it try to advertise their cause. Over and over, I've been told that the best reason to buy one format and not the other is because of the companies supporting it. Forget features, quality or convenience--this pitch boils down to something like, "Do you really want to wake up one day and find that nobody makes any hardware or software anymore for your sad little forgotten format anymore?"
Thanks for the pep talk, guys! It's like negative campaign ads in politics, except here nobody even pretends to represent any sort of higher principle.
Deleted Scenes
Two other topics that I didn't get to in my review because I ran out of space:
* The PS3's HDMI connection--a copy-controlled, digital cable--at first would not work with one of the two televisions we tried, a 47-inch Westinghouse LCD. The picture and sound would only play for 2 seconds at a time, followed by 2 seconds of nothing, followed by video and audio flashing back on. This can happen when a video source and a video display fail to complete the "handshaking" process necessary to determine that the video display will obey whatever copying restrictions are enforced by the video source. (Other reviewers have seen a similar problem.)
We finally got the PS3 to play nicely with the Westinghouse HDTV by following a complicated reset procedure--then, once I had the PS3 back on my home network, I discovered that it was missing a firmware update, which I can only hope fixed this problem. (I left this out because this isn't a Blu-Ray-specific problem; any HDMI device can exhibit these issues if something goes wrong.)
* Not only are there not that many movies available in Blu-Ray, most of them are titles that I don't want to watch in any format--for example, "The Benchwarmers," "Stealth," "Gone in 60 Seconds," and "Click." Why can't the movie studios focus on getting their best content in what's supposed to be their best format, instead of grabbing whatever's due for home release? I'm not even talking about stuff like the Star Wars Trilogy (if George Lucas takes as much time to ship a Blu-Ray edition as he did with the DVD release, we won't see it anytime in this decade, and possibly not in the next); how about simply movies that actually lasted more than a few weeks in the theaters?
(While I'm on this subject, whoever's responsible for the design of most of the movie-studio sites listing their Blu-Ray and HD DVD titles needs to be taken to the woodshed. These pages are uniformly horrible to browse--first you have to sit through the stupid animated intro, then you have to wait for some worthless, bandwidth-hogging Flash interface to load before you can get to anything useful. See, for instance (if you dare), the sites for Paramount, Warner Video and Sony Pictures.
Click here to read complete article, (Source: playstation - Google News)
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