Home Video Asylum

TVs, VCRs, DVD players, Home Theater systems and more.

that's not quite true

The 50GB Vs. 30GB is a red herring. The only reason Sony needs that much space is because they are using 10 year old encoding-MPEG4. VC-1 is far more efficient,and gives a better picture in less space

I think you mean MPEG2. Sony's initial encodings were not of high quality. However, the most recent MPEG2 encodings that are being done are much better. So much better, in fact, that some of the MPEG2 titles are considered reference (that's quite a turnaround).

And, like CE companies, Sony is not the only studio. FOX is doing their encodings in AVC and MPEG2, Warner Bros is using VC1 and MPEG2, Disney will be using AVC or VC1 for future titles, etc. And despite the better encodings that Sony is doing in MPEG2, they will switch to AVC or VC1 sometime in 2007.

-they got that *painfully* long King Kong on HD DVD, and still got a stellar picture. What do you want with the other 20GB? Fill it with junky extras?

How about uncompressed PCM or the new lossless audio codecs. Why not raise audio quality in movies to where it belongs -- on par with the picture quality. Oh wait, HD DVD is having some problems with encoding even the lossless audio codecs, which take up less space and bandwidth than uncompressed PCM, to allow for the highest quality of video as well. Extra features along with the movie? It's getting rough for HD DVD's bandwidth. Blu-ray beats it by >10Mb/s and that's going to come into play as the formats mature.

1)The picture has to be as good or better than my HD-A1. This rules out the Sammy.

Not by much. If you don't like the Samsung, there's the Panasonic, the Sony, the Pioneer and numerous others coming in 2007.

2)The player shouldn't cost 2X-3X the price of my HD-A1. This rules out the Panny, the (late)Pioneer, and the (very late)Sony. If I can find one *heavily* discounted(50%), I'll think about it.

That Toshiba is heavily subsidized, so you can't compare prices. Yes, your wallet can do a comparison, but that's on a different level. I believe the new Toshiba "high end" player, which has the features of the Blu-ray players, is around $1k.

Want an "inexpensive" Blu-ray player? Just get a Sony "subsidized" PS3 ($499 20GB, $599 60GB). It will continue to grow as a game machine and as a Blu-ray player: it does more than the Toshiba HD-A1 now and will do even more in the future.


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  • that's not quite true - Joe Murphy Jr 19:19:23 11/28/06 (0)


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