home theatre system

[Bluepete]

Originally Posted by HooliganDan

I have to step in here. Can I ask if your TV supports 1080P? If not then that is where it goes wrong. 1080P on my TV looks simply stunning and about 10 times better than any DVD. Even upscaling a DVD to 1080P is kind of a farce as you cannot upscale resolution that does not exisit to begin with. DVD's native res is 480P, BluRay and HDDVD native is 1920x1080 (1080P). Anyway, I digress.

That maybe it, it does upsacle to 1080i.

Originally Posted by BluePete

That maybe it, it does upsacle to 1080i.

Sorry to sounds like a jobsworth Mr Pete. My LCD TV supports 1080i and when I play HD stuff it looks okay. Not great but okay. When I got my 1080P TV my gawd what a difference. I think a lot of peeps don't really understand what the difference between 1080i and 1080P is. For example, my TV has a maximum resolution of 1366x756 meaning it can display a true 720p signal. It can also upscale to 1080i (HDV 1440x1080) but you lose a lot of quality due to the interlaced rather than progressive scan. 1080P is a 1920x1080 signal which will clearly be a very sharp signal and detail like you would have not seen before.

More on wikipedia here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1080i

Thread hijack/end

Originally Posted by Luckypants

Well you will have to sacrifice a high definition DVD player then, but as Pete says an upscaling DVD player will make your standard CD's look better than currently.

Not necessarily.

In order to play standard definition video (of any kind) on a high definition TV, you need an upscaler. Now ALL high definition TVs have upscalers built in, so that they can display standard definition video. Upscaling DVD players also have an upscaling chip in them. If the upscaling chip in the DVD player is better than the one in the TV, then you might see an improvement. If the chip in the TV is better than the one in the DVD player then you wont.

The bottom line is that you don't really need an upscaling DVD player as the TV already has an upscaler.

my tv supports 1080i and 1080p

Originally Posted by colinsv25

my tv supports 1080i and 1080p

Good TV then. Most of the current TV's less than ?700 won't support 1080P. And there is a HUGE difference between 1080i and P.

Just a note regarding the downloading of HD content; I think we are at least 10-15 years away from that. I mean a standard DVD is 4.7GB, as most are now dual layer that's 9.4GB just for one movie in standard DVD form. Now even the fastest internet connections couldn't do that all that quickly. I mean who actually gets a speed of much more than 1-2MB/s? Not many I'll bet and at what cost? Now if you think that a High Def movie could be anything from 20-40GB you see the problem. Our current copper-DSL technology just could not deliver any kind of speed to make HD online content really viable. Then you have the capacity at the exchange to think about and of course contention ratios. And if we're talking about ripping up the ancient copper lines and replacing them ALL with fibre we're talking serious money (billions) and also time. Think of how many roads would need to be ripped up, and I'm sure we'd ll have something to say about that! Perhaps a new wireless system is what is needed, currently you can get 3G broadband but it's limited to around a 2mb max speed and realistic download speeds of about 500kb/s (at best). Some companies do have Dedicated internet lines (Leased Lines) of upto 100MB but these cost about ?5k a month and an install cost of upto ?30k. Ouch. Long story short, I think optical media will be here for sometime. Perhaps a more realistic media format would be some new form of high capacity flash card? Who knows. Anyway, sorry to waffle.

Of course if we could find a new compression algorithm then maybe anything is possible, but I think we'd need quantum mechanics to make a big enough difference!

but wots best though blu-ray or hd, i dont think i fancy this up scallin melarky dont sound good enough for the money IMHO

Originally Posted by colinsv25

but wots best though blu-ray or hd, i dont think i fancy this up scallin melarky dont sound good enough for the money IMHO

In terms of picture quality, there's not really a lot in it. The problem is that there's a format war going on, so you're stuffed if you buy the loser. A lot of people are waiting it out, rather than invest in something that's going to be redundant. At the moment, it's looking increasingly like blu-ray is winning, which is why hd-dvd players are being sold so cheaply.

Originally Posted by colinsv25

but wots best though blu-ray or hd, i dont think i fancy this up scallin melarky dont sound good enough for the money IMHO

I would put my money on Blu Ray and I already have. For several reasons.

1. Pretty much all the Studios have pulled out of supporting exclusively (or at all) HD DVD.

2. Blu Ray currently has about a 70% market share.

3. See 1 and 2.

One of the main selling points for HD DVD was that it was cheaper to manufacturer and so, cheaper to buy. Check out any online store and you'll find the difference in price between the 2 formats negligable(sp). Although you wil notice when buying a HD DVD player now you can get 5- 7 movies free. Tere's a good reason for that, they aren't selling them!

Blu Ray has a larger capacity on disc, has a thicker layer of preotection over it to resist scratches etc. and Sony have ther backing from almost every major studio that is out there. In all honesty I think HD-DVD will be gone within 2 years. PS3 has done a great job of shoe-horning it into many homes. Had the Xbox360 come with HD-DVD built in, Toshiba (the creators of HD DVD) could be in a much better position but at the expense of Xbox sales of course.