pinguhk

this is not a HD DVD player, it can not play HD DVDs
itis a DVD player that upconverts to 1080P which is full HD (fake full HD)
it would not look good on a 50" LCD or plasma, but it will be OK for 32" under.

Busta

It's going to be hell downloading blue-ray media... not that I condone that type of behavior

alex123

Winner will be determined by porn industry, just like VHS vs. BetaMAx. Sony was against porn on their Beta and we all know what happened. Hopefully Sony won?t make same mistake again

So GO PS3

C's Bimmer

Not true. I have the 60" SXRD and it looks sick! Please note that I don't wear glasses or have contacts. Perfect 20/20 vision. This DVD player rocks. It's on par with the others and is less than half the cost. Go with this player while the others are working out their differences.

UUronL

Uhhh - No? Not exactly anyway.

The lasers are identical... the optics differ. The track pitch and numerical aperture of Blu-Ray necessitate this difference. While many state that Blu-Ray extracts the same amount of data from a slower spinning disc (due to the larger NA), and therefore permits the higher bit-rate is kind of incorrect. At 1x rotational speed, there is almost zero difference between the two formats in the rate of data transferred from the disc... the read speed. The tricky part here is understanding that the meters/sec figure for HD-DVD is an average... and that 1x for one spec is not the same speed as 1x for another spec. With HD-DVD, it's a stated 6.61 m/s but it actually spins faster than this when reading the edges, and slower when reading the center in order to account for the uniform data packing. Blu-Ray spins at a constant speed. Data is packed more densely in the inner disc where rotation is slower in terms of m/s, and packed more sparsely at the outer edges. This permits the use of a constant rotational speed. Blu-Ray is 36Mbps, as is HD-DVD at 1x. Confusing things further, Blu-Ray stipulated 1.5x read speed for BD-ROM movies to provide a higher 54Mbps rate. This means the disc is spinning at about 7.5 m/s for movies... faster than HD-DVD. With that extra push, the spec can support a stated max video bitrate of 40Mbps. This and this alone is relevant to the argument that one can achieve a higher bit rate.

For quite a number of reasons, I don't think we're going to see any practical difference in the quality of titles due to the differences here. There are even many industry realities that will make it highly unlikely that we will see many (or any) uber high bit-rate transfers... and at such high bit rates, that little extra isn't going to make a large difference (I have been doing encoding for 10 years). In the end, the quality should be the same. Besides, video gets encoded as VBR (variable bit rate). The maximum data rates are used very seldom, if at all, and then "max" is never -the max-. You always need padding because well, you need error correction of some kind.

If anything, variable rotation is technically superior to constant rotation for variable rate content. This is because a variable format could be massaged to support a much higher burst rate in a more efficient manner. The vast majority of movie scenes require a small fraction of the bit rate available for the format. These scenes can be encoded in the center of the disc where slower rates naturally occur. Then the scenes requiring high burst rates can be packed into the areas that are read off faster near the edges. This mode of operation more closely mimicks the nature of the encoded media and would be far more efficient. However, I doubt it is possible to treat the disc access in so random a fashion... perhaps in future formats multiple pickups can be used to achieve this? Or, as I said before, we don't need another optical format? Hard drives do this sort of thing really well - as do flash.


Blu-Ray will be able to scale to faster read and write speeds. However, even at the limits of HD-DVD I don't see a lack of resources for entertainment media.


Back to the issue at hand though... they're both plenty fast enough for movies. The scaling difference is more an issue for data archiving and retrieval than for entertainment. Max supported video resolutions in the current specs won't really benefit from the slightly wider data path. Once you increase those resolutions beyond 1080p, you have to add extensions to the specs, or create new ones altogether. That means the manufacturers get to double dip - they can each stipulate faster rotational speeds to extract more data than we'll likely ever see used for home entertainment purposes.

C's Bimmer

LOL! UUronL - You are sick! I love it. How can anyone challenge such an elaborate and lengthy response. You kill me man.

UUronL

I actually removed a few paragraphs!


Actually, I'm sure Justin could challenge... given that he was part of a Blu-Ray dev team. My layman's understanding is probably nowhere near his level of knowledge.

pinguhk

It looks like a trend for Sony, what ever they design it always losses, looks like same gose with blue ray.
will as for PS3 not much had picked up in HK still not many people are buying them.

pinguhk

right i see, then I have to look into it.
My frend told me to wait abit cos this is the 1st 1 out and there will be more and cost less too.
I will see if china has 1 out and then compare.
China 1s are about half the price of the same thing.

pinguhk

well sayed cool
this has got to be the longest post ever right?
I must give you for posting this.
but if you port like that all the time you will never catch me up, just kidding.