Is Blu-ray Doomed?

Let me manipulate a line from Frank Zappa. "Blue-ray is not dead, it just smells funny".

Having owned a 42" Vizio 1080p and a Panasonic DVD/VHS player that can copy in either direction and converts DVDs up to 1080p for almost a year, I doubt I will go out and buy a Blue-ray player until this player quits working.

Sure, HD is awesome as long as I don't have to see too much face imperfections, but the investment by the consumer needs to be in the TV first. With the broadcast stations going digital soon, people will have to spend their hard earned cash somewhere else before they go out and buy a Blue-ray disc player. Blue-ray will boom in 2009 after everyone has made the change over to watch digital via a new TV or converter box.

Who knows? Maybe Santa will drop a PS3 under my tree this year! Make sure it is one of the models that plays PS2 and PS1 discs too, would you big fella?!?

Quote from Afterdawn;

The manufacturer Pioneer has confirmed that its upcoming 16-layer Blu-ray discs will play back on most current standalone Blu-ray players including the Sony PlayStation 3.

The discs boast an impressive 400GB capacity and are finally headed into production by 2010 after being introduced earlier this year by Pioneer. The company also added that it will begin manufacturing 40-layer 1TB discs in 2013.

I just recently got a Blu-ray player. It came free with my 50 inch plasma. :) Had I not gotten one, I would still be using my DVD player until it died. However, you can't argue with free... I do agree the TV has to come first, then the player.

When I bought my HDTV, I could have paid $400 for a Blu-ray player. Instead I spent $80 and bought an upscanning DVD player. Looks as good as my brother-in-law's expensive Blu-ray.

I've heard about the blu-ray technology from ps3.As for me I won't replace my ordinary DVD-player with a new Blu-ray one because I can't recognise the difference in picture quality between them. The only way for me to have a Blu-ray player is to buy a PS3.

Already owning a good quality 50" HDTV, an up converting DVD player, and a collection of more than 300 DVD's, I doubt an "upgrade" to Blue-Ray is in the future. I think a big problem is, that there is not a big enough increase in picture quality to spur the masses into buying or upgrading.BIG difference between VHS and DVD. BIG difference between standard broadcast and digital HD broadcast. Up converted DVD vs Blue-Ray...not so much.

We have 4 dvd players, two of which are multi-discs, around our house, along with numerous standard dvds. It does not seem to make sense to buy a single disc blue-ray player, and then only be able to play blue-ray discs in one location, or one at a time. Maybe when the cost of both the player and discs comes down to very reasonable prices, would it make sense to upgrade everything.

I was a huge skeptic of the whole HD DVD / Blu-Ray fiasco and preferred my DVDs to either of them. However, my partner brought home a Blu-Ray player just before Christmas and curiousity got the better of me. I now LOVE Blu-Ray. Am not a fan of the price of the discs, but that's what sales and internet search engines are for and I've done fairly well so far.

The picture quailty is excellent, the sound is crisp and the extras are quite interesting on the newer releases. It was definitely a Blu-Ray Christmas this year.

We generously received a 42-inch plasma HDTV for Christmas. I contemplated getting a Blu-Ray player but just couldn't get past the fact that I already own most of my favourite movies on DVD. I really didn't want to start again, paying big bucks for movies I already own. Your article got me thinking and researching HD upconverting DVD players. Although skeptical about their performance, I took the plunge and "splurged" $67.78 for a Citizen upconverting DVD player and an HDMI cable. All I can say is...wow. What a difference from my "normal" non-upconverting DVD player (Panasonic). I think it would be quite hard to tell the difference between Blu-Ray and upconverted DVD. For my purposes, I'm extremely happy. Both for the beautiful picture and clarity of The Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers that I'm watching as I write this, and for the fact I've saved myself about 200 bucks.

Thanks for the tip Bob!

Some of all the above!

I bought a Sony upconverting dvd player to go with my Bravia for 50 bucks from Dell. HUGE difference for most movies {my edition of Blade Runner looks AWFUL} .
And the thing is there are only a few movies I want to watch more than once.

AND along with streaming/download for movies, rides the fact that solid state storage costs are coming down to match.
Within five years costs for solid state read only will probably obsolete rotating read only... if you even care to hold your movies in your hand.
After that it's all a matter of what technology packs the most bits in the least INTERNAL space.

End of the format wars! Hopefully forever.

I have a ceiling mounted projector shooting on a 120" screen, having HD makes a big difference on the colors and sharpness of the movies. Upscaling a regular format DVD is alright to I have look through the internet for information on how to convert the standard DVD to Blue Ray if possible or how does the older movies are re-formated to Blue Ray? Is it something only movie studio can perform?

EDITOR'S NOTE: I think you could rip a DVD, then burn to a Blu-Ray disc, but it wouldn't change the video quality.

Not planning on switching to Blu-Ray. I myself do not have a Blu-Ray Player yet but I have seen more than enough examples of what it can do to video in comparison to standard DVD players.

The clarity is good...perhaps a little TOO good. Every movie I have ever seen on a Blu-Ray Player and Hi-Def TV just looks TOO CLEAR. They don't even look like movies anymore. They just look like High-Production TV shows and there is almost no motion blur.

Had I been born into this kind of technology I may have been more open-minded. But, all that "clarity" just makes things look cheap now. When I watch a movie I want it to look like a movie. When I watch a TV show it can look like whatever.

HD-DVD should have won that battle but because of space and audio enhancements from Blu-Ray it lost. I'll stick with the standard.

I'm in the process of choosing between HD and upconverting or, HD and Blue Ray. Well, not really, it took about 5 minutes to decide what to do.

Let's compare prices of just switching my current collection of DVDs to Blue Ray. I have about 200 standard DVD disks. If I were to upgrade to Blue Ray the cost of those disks might total about $6,000 (200X$30 / if they're even available in Blue Ray).

Ok then no brainer. I'm sticking with standard and buying an upconverting player. Don't CEOs see these types of issues prior to investing $Ms on a new format.

Remember Beta vs VHS. Beta was actually a better format but because most people had VHS and there's a cost to convert from one version to the other, death to Beta. Bye bye Blue Ray.

I'm one of those people who waited for DVD to catch fire before replacing all of my VHS tapes (dozens) w/ DVDs. This was considered safe / logical, according to the promises that the DVD format was "here to stay". Now, I'm supposed to run out and re-purchase all of my movies (hundreds of them) on Blu-Ray? Forget it! I'm certain that even if I did lose my mind and buy BR discs (and player of course), it would soon become obsolete, leaving me w/ another gigantic collection of pretty, shiny coasters...

I read an article in Wired mag just before Xmas that the smartest marketing strategy for Blue-ray manufacturers would be to cut the prices on their players to 99.00 to sell them before they are obsolete. Given the price of the players and the discs, I think I will wait to find out what's next.

It is me or am I missing something here. Lots of people are saying I'm not upgrading to Blu-Ray because it's a waste of money replacing all my DVD's. Well hold on - you can still watch them on a Blu-Ray player and it upscales it! I bought one at Christmas for £150 and it's now down to £120 in certain shops.

We 3rd worlders just d/l aXXo rips - they're (usually) just 700 MB & fit a CD - that's the max quality we want to - what else can one expect for free (we did pay for the computer, the Internet connection and spent the time to d/l & burn it to disc).

Anyway, most of us just have a cheap PC-type sound systems so BD, HD or whatever is imperceptible to us.

I personally regularly d/l aXXo rips off BitTorrent using Peerharbor, a 3rd party BT d/l service which allows me to d/l completed BT highspeed over HTTP / FTP, which I do over free connections (hotels, McDonalds, Starbucks, other free wifi hotspots).

All I invested in was a new 1 TB internal SATA Seagate HDD enclosed in an eSATA box. I have 300 GB worth of movies alone.

Blu-ray will go the way of Beta-max if they don;t get that awful DRM code to become standard or stable.
Some people can watch certain titles and not others due to this and sometimes when the code is upgraded to the BD compatibility fails on a different title..
Just a whole pain in the but!
Everything is becoming so dependent on "upgrades" and "Updates" .. What happened to the days when you bought a device and it worked fine for years without a "update" until it died?

I have to strongly disagree with most of the comments here. The one exception being streaming - but that too is a reason to buy a blu-ray player with built in streaming. You CAN tell the difference between a blu-ray and up-converted DVD. A regular DVD is 480P that is 'blown-up' to look like 1080P. There is simply not as much information there. A blu-ray, while admittedly not living up to its promise of extras and popup menus and the like, look brighter, clearer (they are not too clear - get out of the age of film stock and get into the digital era)and they sound better. Watching a blu-ray is like watching a play performed in your house - it's amazing. For those who like motion blur and circles of confusion (I was a film/video production major right before the switch from film stock to video) then you should go back to watching your old VHS tapes. Time and technology march on. Streaming 1080P is a viable alternative but knowing this country, people like to hoard and my bet is on people wanting to brag about the huge collection they personally own.

Zeke - neo-videophile

This is the way I see it. When we went from VHS to DVD, there were SOLID reasons for doing so. Our old VHS tapes were wearing out, and it made sense to only have to replace it one more time (with dvd). Yes. The picture quality was much better, but even if the quality had been no better than VHS, DVD's made sense.

(A lot more material on one dvd, no more RR or FF, no fear of it wearing out through normal usage, and it even took up less space.) To say nothing of being able to play them on computers!

There is NO REASON to go out and buy our films (we have on DVD) yet again on Blu ray. (Especially since with a simple upgrader, we can get much better quality.) The difference between DVD and Blu ray may be there. But it's not enough to cause a format change. If you ignore blu ray, it will go away.

DVD is good enough for most people, and streaming and net flix are the future. Sorry blu ray. If you haven't grabbed much of the market after 5 years, it's not going to happen now. You didn't push the old dvd out, and streaming is the future. Can't say I'm upset.