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My Blu-Ray + HD DVD impressions so far

Posted by 4season on July 16, 2007 at 12:04:33:
Am I having too much fun with these video goodies or what?

My setup, all purchased within the past few days or months:
Sharp LC-32GP1U 1080p 32" LCD (see link below)
Toshiba HD-A20 HD DVD player, latest firmware
Sony Playstation 3, latest firmware

To date, I've spent much more time viewing HD DVDs than Blu-Ray disks, and the HD DVD quality has felt consistently high in terms of features and overall production quality. It took me awhile to get used to HD DVD's popup menus, but they seem polished and I'm starting to like them. The bonus features are really taking some getting used to: Rather than simple video clips or commentary soundtracks, some of the HD DVDs have the feature sprinkled throughout the movie: With this feature switched on, you watch the movie as normal, and every so often a small icon appears on the screen. That's your cue to press a button on the remote to view a bonus feature, usually a second small video window. If there's a way to expand that window, I haven't found it. And there doesn't seem to be a way to simply view all of the bonus features without the repeated button-pushing. Disks like "40 Year Old Virgin" and "Charlie & The Chocolate Factory" incorporate an awful lot of extras. It's all very neat, but it can be tedious, and so far I haven't had the patience to actually sit through a whole movie's worth of extras. If there's some trick to viewing all of the bonus content without the repeated button-pushing, please let me know.

The Playstation 3's heavy duty computing power has been a mixed blessing: Good it takes only about 25 seconds to play a movie from the time I switch the console on, and it just plain feels responsive overall. Less wonderful in that the same processing power makes it run hot, and much noisier than the Toshiba.

On my little setup, Blu-Ray looks as good as HD DVD: Wonderful. Default PS/3 audio settings seem to lack a certain sparkle and richness, so I enabled the higher 2-channel PCM sampling rates, and that seemed to set things right. Even through the Sharp TV's built in speakers, music sounded richer and weightier with the higher sampling rates enabled.

I was watching "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" on Blu-Ray last night and found it was sort of a pain. Like HD DVD, Blu-Ray has popup menus. But with this particular movie, the popup menus don't stay popped up between features, and the popup menus themselves have an extra layer or two of depth, so several button-presses are required to view each featurette. The actual bonus content seemed pretty weak.

Standard DVD playback: I compared the two players with 1080p upscaling, and also running at 480i and letting the TV do the scaling. Video looked good to me in all instances, but I felt that letting the players do the scaling gave me some added clarity.

So far, I'm liking Blu-Ray and HD DVD about equally well. The HD titles I've viewed seem more polished and "next generation" to me, but the actual video seems great either way. Both formats need to refine their fancy menu schemes in order to reduce the amount of button pushing. And the remote controls for both players are mediocre: Too many buttons, cramped layout, and no illumination guarantee that you will be fumbling around in the dark when viewing bonus content. The Toshiba's remote is easily replaced by a universal unit (which I've done). The Playstation's is trickier because it's Bluetooth, but Nyko offers an infrared remote which I may try later.