bye bye HD DVD

Same death as Beta VCR. A better system but more advertising weight on the lower quality machines.

"Better" in the case of Beta is debateable, I still remember when movies came on one VHS or two Beta tapes, that right there is enough to push me to VHS.

The ironic thing is that in this recent case "Beta" won, BD is the more expensive proprietary Sony standard, with higher storage capacity, but in terms of picture quality and other features I can't tell the difference and doubt most consumers will either.

Whats better about HD-DVD?? Blue ray is higher capacity. Thats better in my book although I really don't care about either format except for data storage. DVD is plenty high resolution for me.

HD DVD may be a bit cheaper, though I can't see that it's dramatically so. The similarities far outweigh the differences. It came down to: In order not to repeat the Beta/VHS fiasco, one had to win, and early

Blu-ray sounds cooler. :).

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There were never any two-tape Beta movies. BII was introduced before recorded movies became common (as far as I remember).

Blue-ray won among the studios for two reasons -- it had greater capacity, and it could NOT be manufactured on DVD equipment. The latter meant that it would take longer -- perhaps much longer -- before pirated BD disks appeared.

Exactly. I was rooting for HD-DVD all along, but at some point it became clear that something had to give, I'm just glad somebody won so I can eventually think about buying HD, I was holding out before not wanting to be screwed. As you say, the formats are so similar that I don't really care one way or another so long as there aren't multiple competing standards.

Video West in Woodinville had loads of them in the early 80s. I was a little kid, but I clearly remember the glass cases they kept the then expensive rental videos in, one VHS tape beside two Beta tapes and when you'd ask for a movie, they asked whether you wanted VHS or Beta.

BII was a case of too little, too late, VHS already had a foothold, and the equipment was cheaper, partly due to being less sophisticated, but partly also due to not having to pay royalties to Sony.

I must not be a tv addict like most everyone else. I really don't care if they stopped producing all HD tv equipment tomorrow. I do have a LCD projector I use for movies sometimes but even that is only 800x600. Honestly, I think a good quality hi-fi VCR produces an acceptable picture. I'm more picky about the sound quality than the picture and stereo VHS has quite good sound.

Mike

I quit watching TV years ago, but I do have a 56" widescreen HD rear projection set that I got for free and I watch a lot of movies. Having used DVD for years, VHS looks awful to me, I have a nice high end Sony VCR, but the resolution and dynamic range of the format are just not adequate. HD compared to standard DVD is a much more marginal improvement, it's night and day on a plasma or LCD panel which has to scale lower resolutions, but on a CRT projector I can see much less difference.

The sound of a good hi-fi VHS deck is good, but it lacks 5.1 surround.

HD DVD can't be manufactured on normal DVD equipment either.

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I've never seen any VHS machine with what could remotely be called a "good" picture -- even by the standards of 30 years ago. (I'm ignoring S-VHS.)

Beta had slightly wider video bandwidth (just enough to be acceptable -- about 3MHz), considerably less line jitter, and better color -- both in terms of bandwidth and phase accuracy. Sony would not license its polarity inversion technology, and JVC was forced to use a more-complex quadrature system that really screwed up the color signal.

Beta was a brilliant compromise of cost versus quality. VHS was utter crap from the word go.

I don't see where Beta was significantly more complex. It did wrap the tape around the drum -- which was a bit more complex than JVC's (very) partial wrap.

This is starting to sound like an audiophile argument. I have a couple of high end Sony VHS VCRs, one of which I just hooked up for the first time in years last night and on the Sony 27" CRT the picture quality surprised me, certainly better than I remember. It's no DVD, but on a moderate size SD CRT it looks very good to me, and I'm much more picky than the average consumer. Look at all the Emerson, Funai, Orion, etc junk you see in typical houses, most people just don't care.

Yes.

My view of VHS is that it is _inherently_ bad -- that it is an unduly compromised system. If the Sony unit had a "decent" picture, it would have been because Sony paid close attention to things other manufacturers did not.

VHS looks like crap on my 32" LCD HDTV. Even 2 hour recordings on a stand alone DVDr look grainy. Standard cable shows lots of mpeg compression artifacts while sat shows the least.

Everything that isn't the native resolution will look bad on an LCD TV, it's the nature of the beast. SD content looks far better on an analog CRT, it isn't until you get good HD content that the LCD pulls ahead under many circumstances.

This is simply not true. Properly converted signals look quite good on high quality LCD sets as they do on other technologies. Lousy conversions, overcompressed video, or low resolution noisy sources look bad on any technology. Analog CRTs often look "better" with lousy sources because they do not reveal as much detail and soften the crap.

Lousy LCDs look lousy on even good HD sources, as do lousy examples of other technologies. Some sets are more forgiving of certain types of signals than others, but it has more to do with the signal processing, calibration of the display, and the source than the technology of the display.

Leonard

Well what James said holds true to LCD computer monitors also. If you set the resolution to a non native resolution there are obvious artifacts where the picture is not as clear. Anothe example, my friend has a very nice 32" Samsung LCD TV which cost about $1500. It has a great picture for HD content and DVDs but standard input of any kind, be it TV, video games etc look much less clear than on a standard good quality CRT TV. He actually bought the tv to play games and doesn't use it for that because the quality is so much worse except with newewer consoles which support HD.

Mike

I work in the industry, we have a LOT of LCD, DLP, plasma, CRT, you name it sets of brands ranging from low end junk to high end stuff, and a lot of different SD and HD sources. I have yet to see an LCD, DLP, or to a slightly lesser extent, plasma set that looked as good displaying SD content as an SD CRT. When you scale video on a display that has rigidly defined pixels, you WILL get artifacts. Some scaling looks much better than others, but it still looks scaled. A good plasma set displaying high quality HD content at the native resolution looks stunning, but display SD content that looks fine on an SD display and it looks awful. The same effect can be clearly seen with an LCD computer monitor, set it to a non-native resolution and it looks bad to horrible depending on the quality of the monitor, but run it at the native res and it looks razor sharp.

Whatever the reason behind it, in the real world, typical SD content looks bad on flat panel HD sets, it looks significantly better on an LCD SD set than LCD HD set, but it looks best on a CRT. Whether that's because the CRT doesn't reveal as much detail or not is irrelevant, it looks better.

The CRT is capable of doing a better job of scaling the image since it can change the actual number of scan lines, and has no discrete grid in the horizontal direction - as long as the shadowmask or aperture grille pitch is sufficiently finer than the raster/pixel pitch.

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