Video Asylum

Posted by oscar (A) on September 28, 2007 at 14:54:17

In Reply to: RE: Oscar, what personal experiences have led you to believe that the Toshiba players are "POS" ...? posted by Audiophilander on September 28, 2007 at 13:07:24

The more expensive the equipment the equipment, the bigger the profit margins are. Toshibas aren't likely to rake in the same margins as the higher priced blu-ray & dual format players so the installers have incentive to go with the latter. Price isn't such an issue for Consumers willing to pay top dollar for custom HT installations. You might notice the decision of that group probably took place before the Paramount decision and before Onyko/Integra HD DVD players entered the picture as "attractive HT installation material".

The convenient excuse installer have for using Blu-ray is Blu-Ray's higher storage and bandwidth, which in theory leads to better PQ/SQ for the "more discriminating" (er, higher paying) audience. If you "smack around" the "industry folks" on the AVS forum enough, you can get an admission that, yes, storage and bandwidth limitations play a role in how much content (e.g. lossless audio, IME, PIP, Seamless branching, extras) they can shoehorn onto the disk. And certainly I've gotten bloodied in return (e.g. when I question picture 'softness' on a bunch of HD movies, I need to consider how good the original masters were before taking my digs at HD movie content encodes.

But I still have the old ace in the hole: the combination of 5.1 24/96 lossless audio and high def probably isn't realistic with HD DVD. I've got this silly notion hi-rez, high def music videos have a future.

OTOH, I sometimes second-guess the BDAs move to insist all Blu-ray players support 1080p. So far, they haven't been able to compete pricewise with the cheaper 1080i HD DVD players. The Toshiba 1080p players are almost as expensive as the cheapest of the Blu-ray players.

Edits: 09/28/07