Blu-Ray and HD-DVD

[BiG D]

You said:

I cannot understand why nobody has made something that uses a small chip instead of a disk...

As of right now, that's mostly because of cost.

CDs were expensive when they were new, yes, but their storage capacity was incredible when compared to the low cost floppy discs. This alone made them worth adopting. The upcoming optical technologies have the same sort of advantage. The storage capacity of the flash cards is nowhere close at this point.

 

[Tetsuo_Shima]

Weren't optical disks also rather expensive in their birth?

Yep, they were, but chips have hardly just been born. The Atari I had in the mid 1980s used carts, 20 years is quite enough time for anything to drop in price

 

[HotStuff]

The atari 2600 Tetsuo you are referring two. Boy, could programmers program efficiently in these days! Game roms were only 4K in size thats 0.004MB. They managed to upgrade to 8K after a couple of years.

I have an emulator on my PC with all Atairi 2600 games. Is interesting playing them from a historical point of view - seeing what could be managed with such small memory rom chips.

Oops going off topic here.

 

[Pestcontrol]

It's still possible to pack things tightly but there's simply no need in most cases. It's quite expensive in terms of the resources (time) you have to spend on making something that packed, and limits your functionality and content. See http://www.theproduct.de/ if you want to be impressed.

Every now and then you hear hoaxes about uber compression supposedly being able to compress a full movie to under a megabyte or something similar, but that's quite simply impossible.

 

[Tetsuo_Shima]

HD-DVD Player for the X360 - reviewed

Well, according to the Gamespot team, if you're into movies and you have a 360, the external HD-DVD player is a nice addon. Personally, I'd really like to get one of these but there are a couple things holding me back. One is the need for another free power socket :/ Ive already got an adapter into an adapter into an extension and I really don't want to make things any more dangerous. Another drawback is that once I see an HD-DVD, whenever I watch my extensive collection of regular DVDs, Im going to pick up on the discrepancies. The last thing is that I don't really fancy paying 20 quid a pop per movie, nor do I wish to update my entire collection. Maybe eventually.

 

[DeZmond]

Also bearing in mind that older titles and tv shows will show no improvement whatsoever in HD vs standard def. Although, to be fair, some new films out in HD look fantastically good. The good thing is that once these players become widespread eventually all DVD's will end up switching to one format or the other, and be roughly the same price as a DVD title now - I'd expect standard def DVD to drop in price even further.

 

[HotStuff]

I would go one step further and say that Standard def actually looks worse on a HD tv than on a CRT tv. This is expecially true for TV's 42" and above. The need for HD is clear as the technology now exists for big screen TV's that wasn't there in the past, where 625 lines was enough for screens upto 36". Big screens NEED more lines or else the picture starts to look badly degraded.

Once Sky transmit more channels on HD, rather than part time HD channels they have at the moment and HD DVD's films start to become plentiful and decently priced then it will be worthwhile upgrading. I would say in about 2-3 years time.

Upgrading at the moment would not be sensible for the simple reason that most of the stuff you will be watching will still be the standard 625 lines.

 

[TacticalNinja]

Yep.. everything hotstuff said, superb!

May i throw this little ditty into the discussion?

Could i make a disk out of playdo and make it run on these high tech machina?? Untill we can do this, we are still very much un-civilized!

Whats the view on this subject between u guys?

 

[Pestcontrol]

Some cheaper 720p hdtv's actually downsample SD to 360 lines... for the rest, yeah, 1080 line screens are too big to display SD sharply, or you need to view them from across the room.

I think hotstuff may be right with is 2-3 year upgrade prediction. By then cable decoders will actually work properly and direct tivo style hd harddisk recorders will be affordable and functional. If you have cash it does pay to be an early adopter though.

 

[TacticalNinja]

BTW random question, but since you guys are all the on technology side, what T.V's can not be used with a Nintendo Wii... HD Plasma... what??

Tact

 

[thatbloke]

to my knowledge there have been no reports of TVs being incompatible with the Wii. Why would they???

 

[Pestcontrol]

Look at the inputs your TV has and the outputs the wii has. It'll definitely work for standard definition, i don't know what the wii has to offer for HD.

 

[Tetsuo_Shima]

The Wii cannot display in HD - however, my mate tells me that through some fancy means of communication the Wii does present an extremely sharp and detailed picture.