BluRay is pretty bogus. Let me explain why.
1. BD and it's HD is pitched by advertisers as 5x the definition of standard definition.
Yet at least 18% of HD TV owners can't tell when an HD signal is broadcast or not, they believe they are watching HD all the time.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/154428/HDTV.html?tk=rss_news
BD/HD which is pitched as 5x the SD has a major issue. It's sold with TINY HDTVs. HDTVs in 40 inches are not large enough to benefit from HD. Even 46 inches isn't much, yet most affordable HDTVs are in that range 32-46 inches. Those are sets from R8999 to R30000. That's pretty expensive.
You need to sit at least within 3 screen heights
Who does the sales pitch and makes the choice of the HD screen, what does this have to do with BD? BD is the media, you are on HD TV's again. AND Again, And Again. You are just repeating yourself al lover again. The third thread in so many days.
http://www.tvtechnology.com/article/12836
to benefit from the 5x SD resolution of HD, if one takes into the resolving power of a normal 20/20 vision eye. This graph further illustrates this
http://chinese.engadgethd.com/2006/12/09/1080p-charted-viewing-distance-to-screen-size/
The benefits LAUDED by BD/HD pundits at this day and age are fully appreciated when one uses a display that is large enough. For most modern rooms that is a huge display,
I'll take my living room as an example, the distance from my wall (TV) to my main couch is 6 meters or 19.69 feet. If you look at the graph on
http://chinese.engadgethd.com/2006/12/09/1080p-charted-viewing-distance-to-screen-size/
You will see that I will need a 1080P TV screen size of 100" diagonally to START TO APPRECIATE the beauty of 1080P.
You talk cr@p again! Just move the seat to suit. You can see the difference, some just see better than others. There are 100's of posters here that already bought into HD and their feedback is totally different than yours. Make me wonder if you even own or have seen HD in action. The same was the time when DSTV HD transmission on the HD channel during the olympic's, Everyone saw a difference but YOU AFAIK.
Do it yourselves, check out how big your room is and see if the R9000 42 inch TV is enough to appreciate 1080P as per that graph (further backed up scientifically by
http://www.tvtechnology.com/article/12836 - have a read it's an interesting article with references to the physiology of the human eye.)
WHAT A LOT OF HOG WASH. You can clearly see a difference in the display shops Makro, HiFi Corp between SD and HD and even HD and "HD" Who are you trying to convince but yourself.
A 100 inch plasma set will cost what - R250,000??? Whooopppeee for R250,000
I can enjoy full HD and really get the advantage of Bluray.
In fact we could take the BD advertisers to the ASA and win. They advertise full HD but for tiny rooms on these affordable sets. To really benefit you need a much larger set typically 50-60 inches for most people - 3m-3.5m away from TV viewing.
So do it, lets see how far you can get. I bet you you will not get far with the money you do not have! LOL
So the advertisers are pushing BD disks and cheap, tiny HDTVs (and R25K can mean cheap) all the while boasting 5x the resolution of HD and immense improvements, charging R3500 for the cheapest BD player (which is region locked by the way, takes almost a minute to load the disk because of the DRM and accepts only HDCP connections).
Again to protect DMR's content for a valid and good reason. There are BD player far cheaper than that now and you know it.
2. Then there is the BS of the BD content protection and mandatory analog down sampling. I own a 720P award winning for best picture for that year, plasma set from a few years ago, which is not HDCP certified. I am unable to view HD content at 720P from Bluray disks because of stupid content protection blocking. Not that I would actually be able to discern the extra pixels if I sat the full 6m away.
So what are you crying about then, Its your eyes that need a doctor, not ours.
Again the HDCP and downsampling is specific for content protection. That means stopping people using media that they did not pay for, like downloading from the internet. You should have known before you wasted your money what you are buying. Some advice, Sell all those stuff you bought, pay your debts and with whats left see if you can afford something decent. If not tuff luck!
Other people with full HD rear projection sets, full HD projectors or even 720p projectors and earlier LCD HD sets with improper HDCP implementations are in the same boat.
They can go out and buy the HDFury dongle and view full HD over component cables that way but that's extra cost and something not officially supported by the BD consortium.
3. BD has terrible DRM. You are unable to format shift. Which is terribly bogus.
What's more you cannot BACKUP. Something the COPYRIGHT law gives you explicit permission to do IN SOUTH AFRICA and THE UNITED STATES (and elsewhere).
So all you want to do is copy the material? Where do you do backups ? On TBP? You also retrieve "backups" from there I presume!
So if you have young children - and they touch that highly dense Bluray disk, R300+ down the toilet.
BS!
4. Region Coding. OMG! Haven't they learned yet. We want to see films from around the world. I don't want to see stupid Hollywood schlock from Korea but I frequently enjoy and buy movies from France, Spain, Poland, England, Russia, Japan, Korea, Australia, Canada, Austria, Holland, Norway, Romania, Czech Rep, Brazil and many other places. I enjoy world cinema, I enjoy Cannes/Venice/Rome/etc winners and runner-ups, I enjoy anime, I enjoy foreign language stuff and even the occasional J-idol video.
Sadly the industry has given me the middle finger. While everyone but 2 of my DVD players are able to watch all regions (or came from the factory that way) the 2 which can't do it is one of my laptops and the stupid Samsung BD player. Neither can I watch BDs outside of Region B. Most of my DVD movies are Region 1, many are Region 2 Japan,
many are Region 3 and some Region 4 - but I am now locked out from a great variety of stuff I wouldn't mind watching in BD but I can't. I will need to import a region free BD player from HKFlix or buy a US or Japanese BD player.
The last 3 gripes are pretty specific, but are valid. They restrict choice and many other valuable things - freedom especially. Point 1 is paramount and is the main reason why BD is not really HD as you need binoculars or be Mr Rockefeller to really enjoy full HD.