| Site Visited | Hi-Def DVD | Blu-Ray or BD-ROM |
| C|NET | 30GB MSoft, Intel | 50GB SONY-made |
| Fine summary without taking sides. Great for papers, bad for decisions. | ||
| eCoustics | Third-party ease | No strong push… |
| Cites easier production of HD-DVD and no picture difference. | ||
| CD Freaks | Cost effective | Complex winner |
| Poll since March 2005 gives advantage to BD-ROM over equality. | ||
It makes sense now that PM would investigate the Upconverting DVD player from Philips ($80). For more than a year, we’ve been waiting for the next standard that promices to make us drool all over again. Within the articles in the Table above, some opinions state that a person’s entertainment nook develops over a time of ten years. Technology can’t come out too fast or too few will be able to buy into it.
The BD-ROM may not be enough of a technology jump also. Gaining an additional 20GB at best is not really worth a decade of collecting and barely warrants the cost hike that SONY and friends (lot’s of them) wil need to pass on to the consumer. Both the BD-ROM and HD-DVD devices will be reverse compatible and play our current DVD’s.
It also seems that DVD’s themselves were an industry compromise between two competing formats that aimed to expand on CD-ROM’s. That meeting-in-the-middle cannot be echoed here between HD and BD although both disks utilize blue lasers rather than today’s red lasers. So while the battle wages and the consumers are busy upgrading their TV’s to HD, it looks as though Upconverting through HDMI cables is your best bet.
The HDMI cables you can buy go from $30 to $250 and up! The signal is killer cool and spits out of the first upconverter for DVD’s: Philips DVP5960/37. It’s $80 price tag will boost your current movies to the quality found in a $500 HD-DVD player playing a Hi-Def version of your movie. Fun stuff – hope you learn from it.
| DINARIUS Bryan's old Digital Interest blog |
