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Blu-ray player released today
Author: Ryan GarsidePublished: 17th October 2006
Unless you are Mr Moneybags then my advice is to steer clear of Blu-ray until it comes down in price.
Samsung has been the first to draw blood releasing its DMP-DB-P1000 Blu-ray disc player. If you don't already know the Blu-ray disc will play movies in high-def supposedly sporting better visuals and audio. This will only be useful to the 5% of the population who have invested in high-def televisions.
We've had a look at the quality of Blu-ray in the office today, watching the classic blockbuster 'Swat'. My first impression was pretty negative, it didn't appear to be much better than DVD and the disc seemed to take an age to load. On top of that we had various problems with sound, and issues with assigning a region. When we experimented by going back to watching a DVD though we could really see the difference, DVD's look smudged in comparison.
Obviously the early discs aren't going to be as good as second generation titles. On top of this there are only a handful of movie titles available; our visit to a local HMV store had us being lead into the dingy warehouse store room and shown a tiny collection of early release titles (Swat was the best believe it or not).
However, it would be harsh to judge the Blu-ray on this initial impression. Early teething problems are a guaranteed with almost every new technology. If better movies are introduced, using more sophisticated codecs that really take advantage of high-def screens, then this technology could possibly have a future.
For those who aren't interested in the impact Blu-ray will have on movies then a report over at Gamesindustry may be of interest. Head honcho at Sony, Phil Harrison, has said that the Sony games are already filling up the 25 GB sized discs:
"Already, at our launch titles, we're getting up close to the 25GB limit that we have on our Blu-Ray discs this year. Next year we'll raise that to 50GB, and I'd expect that we’ll be getting close to that in the fairly near future as well."
Do discs excite you? Tell us what you're think in the forums.
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Comments (27)
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on another note ill be getting a 360hd player when they come out, i am hoping the cheaper hd-dvd setup will prevail.
ps what price were blu-ray films? as i expect hd ones to be the same
Are Sony forcing standalone BR manufacturers to sell their products at a high price, in order to make the PS3 look more attractive? Surely there's not £1000's worth of electronics inside that case?! Or are the connections gold-plated, with diamond heatsinks on all the MOSFET's? :D
HD-DVD with h.264 = sexy! :D
P.S. since when is the common abbreviation for "For The Win" a swear word?
Honestly I cant see how they can be that wasteful. :? :? :?
Though, tbh, I'd actually prefer content with less compression so this might not be all bad.
i will wait until all the bugs are ironed out, i will buy it when it gets as cheap as when i started buying dvds.
So it is! :D
You can see whats being offered on HD DVD and BR by going to play.com. BR looks cheaper typically though most films are cack.
actually a lot cheaper than i expecterd the discs to be. not a great choice tho. should hopefully be a big push at xmas tho
Ice
The fact that a game takes up more space isn't always an indication of being 'wasteful.' What the heck do you even think is being 'wasted?' If the game costs the same amount whether its on DVD for the 360, or BluRay for PS3, they're not wasting your money. If it's just that they're 'not optimizing' or 'not compressing,' then they're SAVING time, if anything. So the only thing they might be 'wasting' is Gigabytes??!! Last I heard, GB's aren't a limited resource.
Did you complain when games moved from single floppy disk to multiple floppies to CD to DVD? Nooooo...as soon as you saw the games, you saw not only better picture, but more detailed games in terms of how big the game world was and how much you could do in it. You haven't seen PS3 games yet AFAIK...so you can't really say with any certainty that they look better on the 360 (unless your 'certainty' comes by way of the blinders you wear because you love the 360 so much and can't find any good in it's competitor?). There's more to a game's Gigabytes than just the looks anyway, so even if some games do look better on the 360, there just might be some other purpose to the 15 extra GB's on a PS3 disk.
No thanks. I'll stick with DVD for now. I'd be willing to bet that most people can't honestly tell the difference anyway.
-monkey
say you have Game X on 360, and PS3, on the 360 it takes up the full 9GB, compressed and all, and the 360 needs to access a GB of that compressed info, while PS3s version is uncompressed completely, and is using say 18 GB, so now ps3 needs to access the same info, but its now a 2GB chunk because of no compression (assuming an even compression % throughout, not bloody likely though) so that just doubled access time again, now its at 1:4. Of course this isn't including processing time to uncompress it on the 360.
[/rant]
Also, the point of uncompressed textures is to achieve a higher level of quality, AFAIK.
I just can't wait for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD to mature, get cheaper, and for one of the formats to win (or both be destroyed and replaced by something better and cheaper). Aren't we approaching about the 1 yr mark since HD-DVD came out in the US? And about 6 months for Blu-Ray? Both types of players are still just computers, still 15x (or more) the cost of a DVD player, and still working through all sorts of flaws. Get on with it already!
Anyways, I'm thinking HD-DVD will win for a number of reasons, but I'm certainly not buying into either until a winner is decided and prices are sane. But as far as I'm concerned, Sony's *really* blown the launch of this stuff (mind you, the HD-DVD camp is hardly better off, but slightly so - at least people can put HD and DVD together and figure out what it is, quite the contrary to Blu-Ray).
Two random games off my computer installed:
Unreal Tournament 2004 = 5.19gb
Call of Duty 2 = 3.46gb
So I must ask. What exactly are they trying to pull. :|
So in my view, it shows a problem with the Dev kit.
I'm quite sure developers could easily compress the data as with any other software and put it onto a standard DVD, but then where would be the point of that expensive BD?
I would perhaps even expect Sony to subsidise developers to put their games onto what is a more expensive medium early on, just so that the drive gets used. Otherwise developers would naturally squeeze everything onto DVD which is cheaper.
what they could do is put a piece of code in the ps3 so it will only read games off a bluray disk. they will say its to stop piracy but really it is to make developers use blu ray discs. not saying thats happening but it could
whether sony games on Blu-Ray disks today are just "uncompressed and bloated" doesn't mean that in 5 years there won't be compressed, efficient games filling up 35GB. It'll be a few years before game coding for the 360 and the PS3 is mature anyway...before they are using the full potential of either machine. Sure, both might look 'as good as can be' now with a game that fits on a DVD....but games get better with time, and probably end up having more features that take up more space. At that point, the question is, which would you rather have: A system that can only play games from DVD's, or a system that has the option of going to a higher capacity medium?