High-Def DVD

Gettin' All TechWonky Wit It

Excuse me for a moment while I veer away from progressive politics for a few moments (Mrs. F, feel free to skip to the next post)...

You may have heard that the first hi-definition DVDs are coming to market this spring in two different formats that will be slugging it out in the marketplace--just like VHS and Betamax did all those years ago--to see which will be the dominant format. One's called simply HD DVD (here's the entry at Wikipedia), which created by Toshiba and is backed by the Paramount, Universal, and Warner Brothers movie studios. The other is the oddly named Blu-Ray (again, full explanation from Wikipedia), which is created by Sony and will be supported by Sony's movie studios as well as 20th Century Fox and Disney, as well as bet hedgers Paramount and Warner (leaving Universal as the only sole HD DVD movie studio distributor at this time).

So, really, it's looking like Blu-Ray's got quite the headstart as it has larger support (including Apple) out of the gate and it provides more information storage--though most likely at a higher price. This differentiation is exemplified by the pricing of the initial high-definition DVD players that will be released, as noted in this article in Newsweek regarding player announcements made at the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas:

Toshiba announced it would ship the first HD DVD players in March, priced at just $499. By contrast, the earliest delivery date for a Blu-ray player is sometime this summer, at a price of $1,800. Sony believes it can overcome its rivals' head start by rolling out Blu-ray in the hotly anticipated PlayStation 3, due later this year.

Yowsah, that's a bit of a difference in price.

Now, I'm not going to go into all the arcane technical details of this corporate cock fight, but I wanted to point out another tidbit I ran across from the Dark Horizons movie rumor site (run by Garth Franklin down in Australia). He notes a new wrinkle for early adopters in this new technology--in particular, those of you who don't have a digital high definition connection on you HD television (i.e., DVI or HDMI). I'll let Mr. Franklin take it from here:

As we know, the studios this year are all set to start releasing film titles in both formats of the new high definition DVD disc (HD-DVD and Blu-ray). Standard DVDs output a picture that's 720 horizontal by 480 vertical lines of resolution (720 x 480), whilst both new high-def formats will deliver a picture at a 1920 x 1080 resolution - meaning a huge difference in the quality and detail rendered.

Now practically all digital televisions (plasma/LCD) released before about mid-2005 use 'analog inputs'. For those who've had to plug in their equipment themselves it means you've used either a combination of red-white-yellow cords or red-green-blue cords to get a picture from your DVD player to the television. The latest model digital televisions use a direct single cord interface known as HDMI and or DVI.

What this agreement means is that those with the latest digital TV's (the ones with HDMI or 'DVI with HDCP' interfaces) will get the full 1920 x 1080 resolution experience when they play their HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs. However those early adopters with the older sets will be forced to watch a downconverted 960 x 540 signal. Meaning that whilst the picture will be a very minor improvement over regular DVDs, the picture itself will only have 1/4 the resolution of the new high-definition format. This effectively renders both next-generation DVD formats useless for hundreds of thousands of television sets, and is a slap in the face to the early adopters - the very group that's supposed to drive the next format.

[...]

I myself got a new TV last year, at the time no HDMI-equipped sets were on the market where I live. So if you're in the same position I am (I'm someone who has been very keen on adopting the hi-def DVD format), should you just give up on the next-gen DVD format? Here's where the news gets brighter. As part of the deal, studios will be required to disclose on a movie's packaging whether the image will be down-converted (called by the moniker 'ICT' or 'Image Constraint Token') - in other words clear labelling will identify if this nasty trick is being employed (thus boycotts will likely follow).

Luckily, I've been writing content for the Amazon A/V department this last year, and knew to look for a DVI/HDMI connection when we bought our mid-range high-def LCD TV this last fall (the 27-inch Syntax Olevia LT27HVX, which I also use as my computer monitor at home). But I just wanted to bounce this tip to anyone out there who might be considering a high-def LCD or plasma TV purchase (the two weeks before the Super Bowl are always big sale times) to make sure to look for a set that has either DVI or HDMI connections. (I've noticed that the majority of major sets, especially in the 27-inch region and above, are coming standard with these connections; but it's still another piece of the puzzle to keep an eye out for.)