Blu-ray Disc And HD DVD War
Dear Gary:
Referring to your response to Kevin Brown’s letter in issue 113: What difference does it make if YOU didn’t know Terry Paullin was using the 720p output on the Toshiba? How many other early adopters were, have been, or are now? Why is any praise due a company that puts a player on the market with ANY faulty outputs? Somebody is bound to need that output, never mind how good the one they can’t use is!
I’ve spent multiple six figures on my theatre equipment. I’ve a wonderful home theatre with spectacular projection on an 87-inch wide screen using DVD scaled to 1080p in a dedicated room. That’s fine for me, thank you very much. Afford it or not, I’ll never purchase two different formats—transports or discs—just to have all the high-def material. I suspect that long before this all gets sorted out, I’ll be able to download the films I want from the Internet, and the HD DVD/Blu-ray Disc squabble will be an historic disaster, just as 45 rpm was for RCA and Beta was for Sony—along with a host of other bad corporate decisions that hoped to take center stage while still on life support.
The point is that no new format can hope to succeed if it debuts with one leg in a cast—on crutches at that! The whole format “war” is
really a war amongst the corporate entities that couldn’t get their s—t together enough to give us one spectacularly good format.
And they should hope the consumer would support their wars? No, thank you!
Why do these companies think we, I, spend the money we do to watch movies in our homes? We do it so we can enjoy a good movie as it was designed to be experienced. Who cares what the format is or whether or not the last bit of resolution has been achieved. We want to enjoy film as an art/entertainment form—for the pleasure of it. That means we care less about the social status or architecture of the gallery in which the painting is displayed than that the painting itself is up for view, accessible, and well lit in a quiet space where we can focus on the content, not the frame.
BTW, the Internet Widescreen Review Newsletters are excellent. Each article has truly illuminated something for me. I now am beginning to understand how I can achieve a thrilling CinemaScope experience in my own home theatre, for example. Please keep the newsletters up—and keep the journal focused, as you generally do, on the industry and its effort to make film viewing in our homes not only possible but as good or better than in the average movie theatre.
Robert G. Ware, California
Editor-In-Chief and Publisher Gary Reber Comments:
When I pointed out the poor performance of the Toshiba HD DVD players, I felt that Terry should have checked that output option against the 1080i output so that his due criticism of the 720p downconversion, as we reported in the magazine’s review, was poorly and unacceptably executed. This would have alerted our readers that the 1080i output can produce a decent, though not “the best that it can be” image. Still, there is no excuse for poor 720p performance!
agree with you that the industry and end users would have been far greater served if there were no format war. As the purpose of business is to make money, there was no agreeable compromise suitable to the warring parties. This has always been the nature of competition, not only in the consumer electronics field but in all other fields as well. It is what it is, and there is nothing we can much do about it except, as you suggest, deny our support and withhold our dollars.
Thank you for the compliment on our digital-delivered newsletter, the result of hard work by Danny Richelieu, Managing Editor, and our dedicated staff.
You can E-mail Widescreen Review @ mailto:editorgary@widescreenreview.com