Why Has Blu-ray Failed To Catch Hold? 1162
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the paying-for-plastic dept.
from the paying-for-plastic dept.
Velcroman1 writes "My VCR is stashed in a closet, right next to a couple of CD-ROM players, a laser disc player, and other forgotten electronics. Is my Blu-ray player about to join them? Blu-ray really hasn't caught on — and probably never will. 'I'm surprised DVDs have continued to hang on,' said King, referring to the fact that player sales of over 20 million units in the US last year were pretty much evenly split between DVD and Blu-ray models. Blu-ray discs and players are clearly superior to DVDs, offering more features and a better picture overall. So why haven't shoppers been impressed?"
Price! (Score:5, Interesting)
Because "regular price" for many blu-ray movie is $29.99 compaired to $17.99 for a DVD. The only times I buy blu-ray over DVD are for action movies that I really enjoyed (and that the improved picture quality is actually noticeable) or deep discount sales when I can get them for under $15.
It's caught on with me (Score:5, Interesting)
My biggest problem with blu-ray early on was that the first generation of players was awful. They were slow as Christmas (WAY slower than the first generation of DVD players) for one thing. Newer players are considerably faster and come with a lot more features. Unfortunately, it doesn't help that blu-ray discs still come with forced trailers (way more common with blu-rays than with DVD's) from most studios (Universal and a few others being notable exceptions).
Too good (Score:5, Interesting)
I have many BluRay Discs since... (Score:5, Interesting)
...I have a home theater but there are several reasons why people aren't interested.
(1)If you don't have a home theater and a giant screen to display movies on, you probably couldn't care less about the difference in quality between DVD and BluRay (plus, I've seen some crap BluRay transfers that were no improvement over DVD.)
(2)Until mini-vans start coming with BluRay players by default, my wife will continue to buy DVDs to zombify the kids on car trips.
(3)My personal hatred of BluRay - Taking several minutes to startup due to the DRM and HDCP handshaking, key updating, communication, et cetera.
It is utterly ridiculous that putting a DVD in my Sony BluRay player versus a BluRay means a playback difference of 3 minutes (and I have a fast BluRay player.) Note that some BluRay Discs do not exhibit this behavior but all are still sloooooow compared to DVD.
Re:Not bothered (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly. I don't even bother to put on my glasses for SD TV. Why would I spend money on a TV with a better picture I can't even see without the glasses I don't want to wear?
So ... who read the article? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not bothered (Score:5, Interesting)
You can easily buy _cheap_ multi-region DVD players.
It's still not easy to find cheap multi zone Blu-ray players.
I know some guy who buys lots of original stuff (especially shelves of anime) and he lives in NZ.
The trouble is most english sub-titled bluray anime releases are in the wrong zone for NZ blu-ray players!
So he had to go to a different country to buy a bluray player and take it back... I told him he shouldn't support such idiocy, but he just had to buy one.
Who gets hurt by this bullshit? Good customers like him. Those people downloading MKVs aren't hurt
Re:Not bothered (Score:2, Interesting)
I suspect most people aren't that bothered by picture quality.
Have you ever looked carefully at the average american TV screen? Not brand new, but after its been covered with a thick patina of household dust, yellow condensed tobacco smoke, maybe some embedded pet hair? Dried on biological fluids (I'm thinking dog spit and spilled drinks here, although I suppose /.ers have applied other liquids)? Especially in the static-y CRT era?
Thats just "basic" hygine which is none the less beyond the median of the population as seen on peopleofwalmart.com. How many TVs mounted over fireplaces covered with soot? Or the interior decorator of the house requires it "just so" which unfortunately puts half the screen in direct sunlight and the other in shadow?
The "average american" could not care less about picture quality as a technical item. The "keep up with the joneses" crowd does so when buying giant TVs and perhaps disk players, because those come in big cardboard boxes, but you can't conspicuously consume by buying a cheap little disk at the bottom of the shopping bag, so they don't.
Its very much like trying to sell "high def" audio to a nation of 128K mp3 players and earbud listeners.
Re:Not bothered (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, and given the angular resolution of most people's eyes, honestly unless you have a very large big-screen TV and plan to sit very close to it, most people won't notice the difference at all. The human eye can differentiate to around 1 minute of arc, which at 14 feet (the width of my living room) translates to 1.24 millimeters, or about 20 pixels/inch. An HDTV has a resolution of 1920 pixels wide; at 20 pixels/inch this yields 96 inches--which means for a TV set smaller than 8 feet wide, the pixels don't contribute anything when I'm sitting 14 feet away, unless I have exceptionally good eyes. (I don't.) Even at 480i, with 720 pixels horizontally, at 14 feet distance, a 42inch monitor will have roughly 20 pixels/inch, which is right at the hairy edge of many people's perceptions.
Now if you stand right in front of the monitor (or have a 23" computer monitor with a resolution of 1920 by 1080), you can see the pixels. But you're not staring at the thing from 14 feet away.
So it's not just a matter of the average person not caring. The extra pixels are also being wasted on most people.