Two more Blu-ray vs HD DVD comparisons
by Matt Burns 
posted Aug 2nd 2006 at 10:44AM
Yesterdays HD DVD vs Blu-ray title bout went great -- for HD DVD that is. HighDefDigest happened to host two more similar head-to-head comparisons yesterday that we thought you might want to take a look at. Interestingly enough, both of the other titles, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Rumor Has It, suffer from a similar issue of bad cropping, a tad darker, and a bit more grain. We are starting to question however if this is from the titles themselves or the Samsung Blu-ray player. It will be impossible to tell until the Panasonic or Pioneer Blu-ray players are released. But no matter how you spin it, the Toshiba HD-A1 HD DVD player gives you a better picture then Samsung's BDP-1000 Blu-ray player right now.
Filed under: Programming, Reviews
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Rick @ Aug 3rd 2006 7:41PM
I have both the BluRay and the Toshiba HD players running thru a DVDO VP30 to a Sony "Ruby", as well as a Panny s97 from before. I was somewhat disappointed with the Samsung player compared with upconverted DVD, but now that I've compared the same movies thru all three, the difference is pretty stiking. DVD still looks pretty good, in fact, the better mastered DVDs look as good as some of the HD that comes off of DirecTV's low bit rate channels. BluRay, looks better than DVD, hands down, as good as most of the content off DirecTV and OTA. HD DVD looks fantastic, in A/B comparisons you can definately tell the difference between HD DVD and BluRay.
I also have a 5 year old CRT HDTV and with that as the display it's pretty difficult to tell the difference. It can't resolve the full 1920X1080 image, more like 1400X900, plus its a 5 year old CRT so the image has softened a bit anyway. You can still tell a significant difference between either and DVD though.
I'm returning the BluRay player, not because of the format, I think one of the subsequent players will probably make it a wash with HD DVD. Toshiba just created a better Gen1 player, and it seems content is somewhat more available on HD DVD today. Having said all that, I'll probably get one of the new BluRay players once they come out, as long as the PQ gets fixed. I don't think there is a whit of difference in either formats potential, I'd guess a well designed player will fundementally output the same PQ on the same movie regardless, assuming both are using one of the modern compression schemes.
I just can't justify $500 more for BluRay, if PQ was the same then I could justify it, but its not. Give it a few months and maybe that changes.