Here's a longer version of what we're running in the paper.
The idea of creating a home theater takes a big leap forward with the introduction of
high-definition movie disc players this year. But because of a lingering war over what format
the discs use, it's not worth diving into the market yet.
The simple advice is to stay on the sidelines and hope for the war to end soon so you don't
run the risk of buying something that will be a dead end. But the reality is more complex than
that, and you may be forced to take sides even if you really don't want to.
Until this year, buying a DVD player was simpler since DVDs came in only one format (that
was not the best high-definition). But now, the battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs at the
dawn of high-definition video players is just like the VHS-Betamax war in the early days of
the VCR. If you're buying a PlayStation 3, you're already voting for Blu-ray. If you're buying
a Toshiba laptop, you're likely going to be voting for HD-DVD, though Toshiba has models with
regular DVDs.
And nobody knows yet which format is likely to prevail and become widespread. The makers of the next-generation successor to the DVD couldn't agree on a common format, and that is creating a dilemma for consumers. Toshiba and its allies created the HD-DVD player, while Sony and its friends backed Blu-ray.
Both take advantage of blue lasers, which can be used to create discs that can store much more data than DVDs. The blue lasers can record more data because they can be focused more finely than the red lasers used in DVD players.
Blu-ray discs store as much as 50 gigabytes, while HD-DVD discs store as much as 30. In the future, the Blu-ray number may grow to 200, while the HD-DVD number could possibly cap at 45 gigabytes. DVDs typically store 4.7 gigabytes or 8.5 gigabytes.
There are more hotly debated details that have to do with quality. Some Blu-ray discs used a poorer encoding technology early on and so they don't look as good. HD-DVD transfers data at a slower rate, but that may not be noticeable to most people. Over time I expect the movie-quality debate to equalize to a tie. The discs for the new machines range from $19 to $40, though some are being discounted.
Both kinds of the newer discs are much more interactive than DVDs. You can see videos such as a director's comments running in small windows at the same time you're watching a movie. The studios can create little games, such as targeting bad guys in a movie with a remote control. You can bookmark a scene that you want to come back to, and you can also search through the movie for scenes that are tagged with keywords such as "falling scene.'' "Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift'' shows off HD-DVD interactivity in the form of storyboards and director comments on how he shot certain scenes, while "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen'' shows off Blu-ray interactivity in the form of target practice with the remote control.
"We're just beginning to tap the potential of the interactivity,'' says Ron Schwartz, an executive vice president at Blu-ray supporter and film studio Lions Gate Entertainment.
The HD-DVD players are more closely tied to the original DVD technology. You can take a hybrid disc (HD-DVD on one side, DVD other the other) and play it in an old DVD player. You can't do that with Blu-ray, although you can put DVDs into a Blu-ray machine. Hence, if you have a library of DVDs, you can keep them and play them with the new players on either side. This may not tell us much at all, but an analysis by Cymfony, a market analyst firm, found that there were more positive discussions about HD-DVD than Blu-ray on blog and media sites in the past couple of months.
Do you want HD movies? On bigger sets, yes. On smaller screens, I think regular DVDs look pretty good. I watched HD-DVD movies on a Toshiba Qosmio G-35 AV650 ($2,499) with a 17-inch screen. I also looked at Blu-ray on an upcoming Dell laptop. With the small screen sizes, the picture looks nice but not good enough to be a big deal. I can't even tell these high-def images from normal DVD images with such small screens. The real reason to get a writeable next-generation HD player on a laptop is for easy archiving of your hard drive data.
The HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs have enough capacity to store full HD movies, and they display the movies in the best format, 1080p, meaning there are 1,080 lines of vertical resolution in every picture frame. Because there are so many lines, you get much more detail, so you can see the pores on an actor's face in a close-up.
As I noted in my last column on HDTVs, the larger the screen, the more you will appreciate movies in the 1080p format. But it's worth noting that many TVs on the market at reasonable prices only display movies in 720p resolution, which isn't as good.
HD-DVD players debuted at $499 in April from Toshiba, while the first Blu-ray machine came out from Samsung in June at $1,000. The price gap is closing, and the PlayStation 3 is a big boost for Blu-ray.
If you have an Xbox 360 game console, you can get an add-on HD-DVD movie player for just $199. I used this to watch Tom Cruise bounce off a car in "Mission Impossible III" on a 42-inch Philips electronics Ambilight TV. The picture was nice. The first box from Microsoft failed, but that was because they sent me a test unit instead of a finished machine by mistake. The real machine works fine. It's easy to jump around between scenes because the videos of each scene show up as a picture-in-picture at the bottom of the screen. You can even do this while the movie is playing.
Some emissarries from the Xbox group visited us on Friday, lugging a 46-inch Sony Bravia LCD TV. They showed how Mi-III looked in 1080p and 720p on the TV using the HD-DVD add-on accessory. They also showed the same scene in the same movie with the Blu-ray version on the PS 3. Aaron Greenberg, group product manager for the Xbox 360, tried to argue that the HD-DVD version showed more details and that the Blu-ray version look too dark in certain areas in a freeze frame. But everyone in the room acknowledged that they couldn't tell the difference between the two. In fact, I even had trouble distinguishing the DVD version from the 1080p HD-DVD version. That's pretty subtle, and probably not worth spending a ton of money on.
HD-DVD evangelist Kevin Collins at Microsoft says the numbers show that HD-DVD has more momentum this season (with more than 1.5 million movies shipped), but that may not matter much
in the long run as Blu-ray momentum grows with PlayStation 3 sales.
With HD-DVD, you're expected to be able to make a personal copy of your discs. The exact details of how you can do this are not available yet.
Also, the anti-piracy provisions are worth paying attention to. If you're interested in that, do an Internet search on HDCP, or high-bandwidth digital copy protection, to get an explanation of why this prevents you from playing unauthorized discs, among other things. Why care? Your new player may not work well with your old TV, even if it is an HD set.
For now, there are more than 100 movie discs out for each format. In the long run, HD-DVD faces big problems. It stores less data, and only three of eight major studios have agreed to release movies on it. Blu-ray stores more data, and seven of eight studios support it. As a result, the odds are good that your favorite movies will likely be on Blu-ray. It's likely that pirates will have a much harder time pirating either kind of disc.
Blu-ray players debuted in June at a $1,000 price. Suggested retail prices for machines listed at www.blu-raydisc.com/players now sell for $750 to $1,500. But the cheaper way to get Blu-ray is to buy a $500 or $600 PlayStation 3. Right, with a big PS 3 shortage, that's easier said than done. I watched "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby," on the PS 3. Again, nice picture.
The way for this war to end is either through one side winning, which isn't a certainty yet, or the creation of combination players which can play both kinds of discs.
Combo drives ended the format war with the recordable DVD drives used in computers. By next year, one chip industry chief executive told me, combo HD-DVD and Blu-ray players with cheaper electronics could be on the market.
But there are skeptics. ""The idea of a combo player is a false hope,'' says Brian Zucker, technology strategist at Dell, a big supporter of Blu-ray.
It won't be hard to come up with video chips that can process both Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats, but the combo players might have to use two different optical block assemblies, or multiple drives, making them expensive, says Stan Glasgow, head of Sony Electronics in the United States. Only VidaBox (www.vidabox.com) has announced a combo machine at a ballpark of $6,000 at this point. Steven Cheung, co-founder of VidaBox in Garden City, N.Y., says that it's more expensive than buying two separate players, but his target of extreme consumers will appreciate the convenience of having one box.
One of these days, you may be able to download HD movies to huge hard disks on your computers so that you don't need the HD storage discs at all. We aren't there yet. But that may kill off the disc as a means of storage for everything except backup purposes.
Lastly, as I learned with last week's HDTV story, a lot of readers know a lot more about the HD wars than I do. Please weigh in with your comments. As for me, I'll wait as I'm hoping not to get stuck with the Betamax of this generation.
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