Blu ray

The closest that digital gets to 35mm film is a 4k image in the horizontal, and BD doesn't touch that, so I doubt that there would be a problem if the original film was cleaned and then digitized well.
 
I bought a blu-ray player last week and tested it out for a few minutes on the GI Joe movie (don't ask, I couldn't find any decent movies to test it out on) and tbh I wasn't blown away.
The blu-ray player I bought (a Samsung BDP-1600) is well rated from the reviews I've seen. The TV is a Samsung also, a 1080P DLP large screen TV. I've got an HDMI cable linking the two.

the wife says she can't really see the difference.

what's up with that? maybe I need to rent a different kind of movie to really see the difference. the local blockbuster has a crap selection, at least in stock when I was there.
 
:lol: feck off, my eyes are fine. once I have my glasses on. I'm thinking it's the movie. I'm hoping it is, otherwise I've wasted $150.
 
Well its a new movie therefore it should look half decent, but its not just picture quality its sound too. Go watch Dark Knight on blu-ray and tell me it doesnt look brilliant, if you played dvd side by side the differance in quality is amazing, honestly I find it hard to watch a film on anything but blu-ray (bar the cinema ofcourse) simply because I find the screen quality distracting.
 
When I got my HD tv (a 42 panasonic) I bought a few Bluerays, the ones that looked the most impressive were things like 300, Beowulf or anything by pixar.

Also Band of Brothers is great looking.

And as had been said, if you cant tell the difference betwwen standard and hi def then something is wrong with either your setup or your eyes!
 
duffer said:
When I got my HD tv (a 42 panasonic) I bought a few Bluerays, the ones that looked the most impressive were things like 300, Beowulf or anything by pixar.

Also Band of Brothers is great looking.

And as had been said, if you cant tell the difference betwwen standard and hi def then something is wrong with either your setup or your eyes!
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have to try some of the Pixar ones. the kids will be happy with that too.
tbh I've only installed on Friday evening and apart from the 5 mins or so of the GI Joe dvd I've played all non bluray dvds on it as that's what the gang wanted to watch.
I'll mess around with it later tonight to see if I've missed something on my telly settings.
 
I've got a Sony BDP S350 and the difference between an upscaled newish DVD and bluray is easily noticeable. And I don't even have a 1080p tv yet so have to watch 720p. If you don't see the difference between DVD and bluray then don't buy bluray as its not for you.

Edit: as for the Pixar argument, not sure how relevant that is since Pixar do stunning pictures anyway.
 
utdalltheway said:
I bought a blu-ray player last week and tested it out for a few minutes on the GI Joe movie (don't ask, I couldn't find any decent movies to test it out on) and tbh I wasn't blown away.
The blu-ray player I bought (a Samsung BDP-1600) is well rated from the reviews I've seen. The TV is a Samsung also, a 1080P DLP large screen TV. I've got an HDMI cable linking the two.

the wife says she can't really see the difference.

what's up with that? maybe I need to rent a different kind of movie to really see the difference. the local blockbuster has a crap selection, at least in stock when I was there.
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Your old DVD player might have been up scaling to some degree, which will lessen the wow factor when switching to 1080p
 
It's a pretty poor film, but If you watch The chronicles of narnia: Prince Caspian on Blu-ray then I think you will notice the difference. The scenes when they are on the beach when they first visit narnia look stunning in blu ray.
 
mjs020294 said:
Your old DVD player might have been up scaling to some degree, which will lessen the wow factor when switching to 1080p
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This is true, the TV and the dvd player may have been doing a pretty good upscaling job. Having said that, you should still see some difference.
 
yeah, I'd bought an upscaling dvd player a few years back so between that and the movie that may be lessening the wow factor.
 
Dumpstar said:
I've got a Sony BDP S350 and the difference between an upscaled newish DVD and bluray is easily noticeable. And I don't even have a 1080p tv yet so have to watch 720p. If you don't see the difference between DVD and bluray then don't buy bluray as its not for you.
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A lot depends on the TV and DVD compatibility. An upscaled 480p DVD could look better on a 720p TV than a down scaled Bluray. There are also up scalers available that will take a standard definition TV signal and do a damned good job of up scaling them to HD.
 
In regards to scaling, the work that Toshiba has been doing is the best that you will get. At the end of the day, interpolating is not giving you new data, it's only guessing what may have been there. On a camera, what's the highest quality, digital or optical zoom? And a downsample done right will always look better than any upsample.

Resolution is only half the story though, and many either ignore this or totally forget about it, and it's the bit rate. DVD has a maximum bitrate of 10Mbit/s, compared to around 50Mbit/s on Blu-ray. For the jokers that like HDDVD, it had a maximum bit rate around 30Mbit/s. DVD is also limited to the old MPEG-2 codec, and can not do lossless audio.
 
very good comparison there. I'll be back to the video shop to rent a better flick to give mine a better test.
 
Loving these blu ray things.

Monster's Inc does look incredible. I've seen a couple of older films and they look good. It all depends on the quality of the negative, restoration and transfer but if these are good then in 1080p it makes a big difference. DVDbeaver is another good review site.

The anti-scratch coating is a revelation. A game I bought had a little scuff on the surface. With DVD any attempts to clean the disc would usually create many surface scratches no matter how careful you were. But the Blu Ray disc wiped off without leaving a mark.
 
This is a good site for DVD to BD comparison shots: http://blubeaver.ca/

I don't have a Blu Ray player (actually, I don't have a TV either, so there'd be no point) but I ripped all my DVDs to my computer and kept them uncompressed in the same MPEG-2 format so they were the same quality as on the original disc. Since then I have replaced many with BD-rips I have "aquired" and even the 720 rips are noticably a big improvement on the DVD versions. No PAL audio speed-up and they are often actually smaller filesizes than the DVDs.
 
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