Blu- ray Sux!

I live in Australia so I have been waiting a long time to see blu- ray. Finally its been released here. So I went with some friends to a local TV shop to see a preview of Blu-ray movie compared to DVD. The 1080p Tv showed one side of the picture in HD 1080p and the other in Dvd, I was not impressed the picture was not that much beter than DVD. The only thing they did in the preview was just degrade the DVD picture to make it look crap against the HD. They also showed a movie fantastic Four on the Blu- ray, with a 1080P TV, I swear people thought it was a normal Dvd. When I looked closely I could say honestly the picture is just about 10% better than Dvd not any more. I also checked the blu- ray movie discs, obselete. I thought they would use gold on the reflective layer of the disc, but it looked like alluminum. If the data layer is just 0.1mm from the surface and they use alluminum its very likley to get oxidised compared to 0.6mm in hd-dvd and dvd, even if they use silver. I dont know maybe hd-dvd is better, but I have not seen that one yet.

 

yeah i saw a bluray movie at best buy and i said the same thing.

only thing its good for is more capacity (50 GB) on the disc for ps3.

 

I don't think you can judge a format from a few minutes of viewing a demo disc at your local tv store. I suggest finding a friend with a PS3 or a standalone and a decent HDTV and trying one of the recent releases with good marks for PQ such as Tears of the Sun, Kingdom of Heaven, X-Men - The Last Stand, Ice Age 2 or Superman Returns. It would also help if you had a good surround sound system to try the lossless audio on a couple of these discs.

Just a suggestion.

 

Watch Crank, The Wild and Kingdom of Heaven in blu-ray and come back here.

Some movie transfers are awesome, some are bad.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/

 

The Preview that I saw was on a pure 1080p Tv with digital connection. Besides previews always have better quality than movies, as they are introducing and advertising new technology it has to look good. I also watched a real movie fantastic four which is not that old, their is no reason for the picture to be inferior to the other maybe better quality movies.

 

I also watch BluRay (and HD-DVD) on a 1080p display with a purely digital HDMI connection and I still disagree with your assesment. I have to add that my Sony 1080p LCD was ISF calibrated so it has an advantage over the displays at your local TV store.

The BluRay demo that came out last year here in the states was a very poor hodgepodge of MPEG2 encoded clips. The only good clip was a short scene from the animated film Chicken Little. There is a general consensus that it looked markedly inferior compared to the VC-1 encoded HD-DVD demo especially when seen side-by-side at a retailer.

The age of the film has nothing to do with picture quality. A lot has to do with the codec used and the skill of the encoder. Here's an accurate review of the picture quality aspect of the BluRay release of Fantastic Four which I happen to agree with:

http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/fantasticfour.html

Just to prove my point that the age of the film has nothing to do with transfer quality, here's the PQ review of the 1981 film Superman II:

http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/supermanii.html

Read the other BluRay reviews on highdefdigest.com to separate the good from the bad.

 

Whats ISF calibrated?. The demo here was a mixture of nature scenes such as mountains and rivers, canyons, and also some high tech actions scenes from movies, I think one was from lethal weapon. Do you think that VC-1 encoding is better than mpeg-4 used in blu-ray?. What about the discs the data is only 0.1mm from the surface?

 

ISF is the Imaging Science Foundation. They oversee training and certification of professionals who come into your home and use a combination of specialized hardware and software to adjust your display settings for optimum viewing and dramatically improve picture quality. See dblbogey7's posts here:

http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/429199

Some BluRay discs already use VC1 and these are the ones that usually get good marks for picture quality. Examples are The Ant Bully, Corpse Bride, and Superman Returns. MPEG2 can look good too - see the reviews for Tears of the Sun and Ice Age The Meltdown. The AVC/MPEG4 releases are also good PQ-wise such as The Wild and X-Men The Last Stand.

All BluRay discs have some form of proprietary hard coating technology usually by Sony, Panasonic or TDK ("Durabis"). I've rented several BluRay (and even HD-DVD) discs from Netflix and despite obvious scratches and smudges they've played through without a hitch.

 

Blu-ray on my 1080p set looks great.