Is it just my imagination or is Blu Ray Disc technology dying? Now that it has won over HD-DVD one would have expected a major take-off. I haven't noticed any. Players are still expensive, blank discs excessively so, recorded material does not seem to be lording it over normal DVDs, BD burners still expensive, people seem to be downloading movies more and more (mostly pirated? yet of remarkably good quality on screens under 40" at under 4GB for a 2-hour movie). Perhaps Michael is right, yet again? Electronic delivery is the near future, despite of quality that is quite lousy compared to BD quality, clearly so on a 50" or larger screen. After all, audio CDs also seem to be dying, as the masses seem quite happy with mediocre MP3. Saw an interview with the inventor of MP3. He was absolutely astounded that MP3 has gone so mass-market, given that he had designed the quality at a level that would be web friendly, not as something approaching HiFi. It also seems that currently there is more MP3 music in use than all other forms put together. Pity for those who are keen on the best quality that current technology can deliver, be it audio or video. Views?

The hard drive has killed blue ray for data storage as surely as solid state memory will destroy the winchester disk within the next decade!

Get a few external SATA drives and stop worrying. I now send HD's to my clients if a job won't fit on a DVD. Dead easy and they even return them.

I'm also disappointed in the speed of uptake of the Blu-ray format. One blank 25GB disc is still considerably more expensive than three 8.5GB dual layer DVD discs, which in turn are considerably more expensive than 6 single layer DVD blanks.

When I recently bought a 50" plasma HD display, I enquired about a Blu-ray player whilst I was in the store. I was amazed to discover that none of the blu-ray players on offer were region-free. That means, if they were not region-free for blu-ray discs, they were also not region-free for standard DVD movies.

Is someone crazy here? I have a stack of DVDs from many regions. The first DVDs I bought many years ago are all Region 1. I have many operas and ballets encoded as Region 2. The first operas on blu-ray are likely to be productions from the Metropolitan Opera Company, encoded in Region 1.

Which sane person thinks that region coding is a good idea? In Australia it was established long ago that this is an anti-competitive practice.

I've been recording on CDs and DVDs for the past 10 years. I've not yet come across any that are unreadable that I also know were recorded properly in the first instance. I know that many people claim that they have had experiences of optical media failure, but I would question whether or not they are really sure that such images were once readable, and whether or not they really tried to read such images on other systems and DVD readers, or indeed whether or not such failed discs had been stored properly, away from harmful chemicals such as label adhesives, sudden changes in temperature and humidity, and strong sunlight.

However, apart from its archival use, blu-ray is also the medium for HD movies. I've been buying audio CDs and DVD movies for much longer than 10 years, yet have never come across one that used to play but now doesn't. However, I have come across faulty recordings which I returned to the store within a few days of purchase.

You asked me this somewhere else and I forgot to answer.

The discs were recorded properly. Readable on both the original DVD drive and a second. (Although both were in the same machine.) In the case of the failures they were unreadable even in the original drive. I'm not sure I've ever had a DVD+-R die but I have had a lot of double layer discs give up the ghost. Storage and labeling should have been fine.

This is just a personal opinion but apart from data storage and backup uses, from my amateur consumer point of view, upgrading movie-watching equipment is low on my priority list. I was a late adopter of DVDs and only did so when my local video rental place stopped stocking VHS tapes. By the time I bought a DVD player, they were selling for $50. The picture was much better than that of VHS tapes, of course, but to my mind not an important improvement. In contrast, I was an early adopter of VHS equipment because being able to record TV programs to later watch at my leisure was an important improvement to my life. Along that line of thinking, the improvement of HD over SD is real and obvious to the eye, but the picture quality on my 12-year old Panasonic GAOO when watching a rented DVD is still plenty good enough for me. And the move to 16:9 from 4:3 isn't something I was clamoring for either.

I suspect that wanting/needing large screens and the newest toys may be something that is losing its allure, or maybe it's just that it is NOT that important to as many people as it used to be. I don't claim to know or to represent the views of anyone else, I merely find myself questioning the necessity of upgrading more and more. For example. my D-SLRs are 8 and 10 mpix, respectively, and I have no urge (or need) to spend money for newer bodies.

I understand the need and (or) the desire to improve technology, but I also understand the feeling of consumer resentment at being forced to adopt yet another new generation of toys that I didn't really ask for, let alone need.

Very strange! If only I could be so lucky winning the lottery .

I understand what you mean, but Blu-ray is part of a major transition from very low 'standard definition' (640x480) to much better 'high definition' (1920x1080). Large screen, full HD plasma sets sell like hot cakes in Australia. The prices are very competitive and the retailers' profit margins are very low, but they still make decent profits because of the huge volume of sales.

It therefore might be puzzling why blu-ray recorders and players, both stand-alone and for the computer, are not more popular. I don't think it's because the consumer resents being forced to adopt yet another generation of toys. I think it's because the manufacturers and promoters of this new technology are not doing their job well. They are throwing too many hurdles, doubts and difficulties in the path of the consumer.

The blank BD-R discs are far too expensive compared with DVD-R. The first blu-ray recorders for the computer were not able to play blu-ray movies. The software had to catch up. Currently in Australia there's only one make of Blu-ray player that claims to be region free (marketed by Kogan). It's new on the market and at this stage it's not clear whether it automatically plays any disc from any region, or whether one has to enter secret codes through the remote.

It's already been established in Australia (by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in accordance with the Trade practices Act) that region coding is an anti-competitive measure which can not lawfully be upheld. For this reason, major electronics companies such as Pioneer have been selling DVD players that don't even have to be modified to play a disc from any region. Nor do they require a secret code to be entered to change the region. They automatically play a disc from any region. This is what I'm used to. Do you think I would be interested in going backwards and buying new technology which is incapable of playing half my existing collection of DVD movies and musicals?

C'mon Ray admit it. You're defending Blue Ray just because its your namesake.

You mean because it's a technology I developed in my backyard in my spare time when I was feeling a bit blue?

I find it a bit paradoxical that the increasing pixel count of all digital cameras, including the popular P&S, seems to be much appreciated by the public at large and especially by most readers of this forum, yet increases in video resolution and quality seem to be moving as slow as molasses.

I once bought a standard resolution videocam, but after the initial novelty had worn off I stopped using it because the technical quality was pretty awful compared with a still camera and awful even compared with a good quality 'standard definition' broadcast. I find it difficult to ignore the technical quality of video whilst simultaneously obsessing about the technical quality of still images.

I wondered years ago why Canon did not produce a DSLR with video capability since most P&S cameras have always had this feature. Now that Canon have at last got around to providing a video capability in the 5D2 (and Nikon too) it's disappointing that both companies have not provided full manual control in video mode, including choice of ISO and aperture.

I'm genuinely impressed with the quality of Blu-ray on a large plasma screen. I've recently been watching some of the "Planet Earth" wildlife series from the BBC (narrated by David Attenborough). The footage recorded with professional HD videocams is stunning. Unfortunately, not all of it was recorded in high definition, but it's all on Blu-ray, a 5-disc set that cost only US$12 per disc. Amazing value!

Perhaps part of the problem is, you do need a large screen to fully appreciate high definition video. I would say 50" diagonal is a minimum.

That is one of my problems. The room in which we watch TV is not large enough for a 50" screen. Having to buy a larger house to accomodate it would seriously increase the cost of HD for me.

Your room is not big enough to hang a 50" picture? These plasma screens can be fixed to the wall. They are only 2 or 3 inches thick. My 50" plasma replaced a bulky 33" CRT TV. The room now looks bigger.

With 1080 HD I find that a "correct" viewing distance is around 2x the screen size. The numbers also agree if you consider human vision as good for one arc-minute (to use per pixel). So you can easily fit a 50" screen in a common-sized room and still sit 100" away. Of course, this will be too close for SD. With BD it's very pleasant and sharp, a nice cinema experience.

Thanks, that's interesting. Having never really watched one for any length of time, it never occurred to me that the higher quality HD image would be easier to "get close to", relative to what I can tolerate with SD. It's a shame that hanging around shopping centres is so annoying or I'd go to a store and watch one for a while.

Our room is large enough to contain the thin screen, but the layout does not currently permit being 3 yards away (roughly 100 inches) to watch. If anything, we've been considering getting a smaller TV because of our viewing distance. Since I seem to be turning into a late adopter, by the time I will seriously contemplate spending money on this stuff, it will be so inexpensive that the decision will make itself.

My apologies for the digression, I am not addressing the original question.

Such recommended sizes are not inflexible. A viewing distance of about double the diagonal seems reasonable and might apply also to any print you have on the wall.

Since your room seems rather small, a 42" plasma screen might be more appropriate, in which case a viewing distance of just 7ft would be about right. Don't tell me your room is so small you can't get as far away as 7ft from a wall. So you really have no excuse, Robert .

If you do consider a 42" screen, make sure it's full HD (1920x1080). Many smaller screens are sometimes described as being HD but in fact are not full HD.

Bingo. For anyone who wonders why Blu Ray isn't hot (and IMO isn't going to be), multiply the above by 100 million, and you have your answer.

Or take me -- a lifelong video/audiophile with shelves of Beta tapes, Beta Hi-Fi tapes, hundreds of LaserDiscs and hundreds of DVD's. After closely watching the corporate greedmongering during the Blu Ray/HD wars, I'm utterly ambivalent to Blu Ray. Not that I no longer lust after higher res, but the marketing macho has killed my enthusiasm to upgrade.

*shrug*

Eh.

The longevity and fragility of CDs/DVDs you write yourself is quite different from those mass produced from a master method, which is way more permanent.
I only buy good media and have had it fail on me and yes it did work and then it didn't. No labels, in good CD folders, avoid sunlight etc and I always treat CDs as carefully as I would vinyl. I've heard others complain, that even after folowing best practive guidelines, they too had optical media fail.
They do fail, even if it hasn't hapened to you. Yet.

Shame that nearly all broadcast TV [SD] will look dreadful on such a large screen.
I've yet to see a flat screen as good as my CRT in how the image looks [for normal viewing], so I'm not too fussed about buying one for the main TV.

I accept that that may be the case. I just find it very odd that despite my being a sucker for a bargain and buying all sorts of good value unfamiliar brands of both CD-R and DVD-R, I just don't have any that I've found to be unreadable after many years of storage.

However, initially I accumulated a lot of failed discs. I once had a pile of over 100 failed recordings sitting on a shelf, before I threw them out. I still occasionally get failed recordings, usually it seems, because I attempted to record at the maximum speed, which I think is not advisable.

The only reasons I can think of for my extraordinary luck, is that I've never bought recordable CDs or DVDs over the internet, but only from local 'bricks & mortar' retailers who presumably have a reputation to protect. I get the impression that on the internet there are a lot of 'fly by night' operators who are out to make a quick buck from batches of recordable media that they acquired very cheaply because the discs did not pass the QC tests in the factory.

Another consideration might be air quality. I live in a non-polluted environment with clean air. I've not seen any research on the effects of industrial pollution on optical media longevity, but it seems reasonable that the more sulphurous, acidic air and fog that often hangs over many cities could affect DVD longevity (as well as your own health, of course, which is surely even more important).

Ideally, you should adjust your viewing distance according to the quality of the source, and the same applies to a print on the wall. Broadcast quality in SD varies enormously. If you were able to adjust your viewing distance beforehand, in accordance with the quality of the broadcast, you would presumably not be aware that the quality had changed, just as you wouldn't see any image quality difference between an enlargement from a 35mm film and MF film from a sufficiently great distance.

I also had a very good quality CRT until recently (a Loewe Calida). I was concerned that even the best LCD TVs would not match the quality of a good CRT, especially with regard to contrast ratio. I thought that I might be satisfied with only the most expensive plasma set, such as one of the 9th generation Pioneer Kuro models. But the 11th generation Panasonic plasma sets have been getting very good reviews. They are considered to be very close to the Pioneer Kuros yet much less expensive. Since I'm not a perfectionist, I opted for the very slightly inferior product at the much better price .

It's possible that a new technology, cheaper and better, could supercede Blu-ray before its fully developed and before prices get a chance to come down. Are you aware of any such technology?

I've never bought online, still had failures.
Writing at slowest speed is recommended, but then you'd simply never do it as it takes so long. Which defeats the purpose.

Which is a completely different issue. Image quality and resolution are separate variables. Badly shot crap on HD is still badly shot crap.
Sorry, but that is a very dumb suggestion. I'm to move several sofas back and fore depending on which channel, media source I'm watching!? Not to mention this daft idea may not even be physically possible. I'm well aware of viewing distances/resolution stuff, but TV is broadcast is many different resolutions and will be unless then stop showing nonHD content - which is not likely for a very long time yet. So where do you sit? A long way away to make your big TV look small enough to not see the badly upscaled SD or position yourself to have a big image and only watch BluRay? Hey if I want to watch a film on a big screen, I go to the cinema.

I was looking at some very expensive kit the other day and the colours and gradation were not as good as my CRT.
In fact quite recently I was in a good high end hifi shop and asked about good tvs and they said nothing they sold was as nice as a CRT.

Says the man who doesn't believe anything anyone else says!?! I find that very odd that you believe TV reviews and manufacturers claims of tv kit, yet poo poo everyone and everything regarding pixel peeping in cameras.

I think BD could very well die out in the near future as a STORAGE MEDIUM. Hard discs are simply so much more convenient for storing HD home videos and data back-ups. Until very recently it was difficult to get something that would play a wide variety of video codecs up to and including 1080 HD without a PC. Apple TV is still not advertised as fully capable of playing 1080 HD(?), but I have just acquired a Western Digital device (called WD TV) that does an excellent job, including 1080 HD. Previously I used a PS3 to stream from my PC. The WD TV streams directly from a tera-byte hard disc, no link to a PC. Yes, you can also have all your LLVJ on-line. I store everything on 2 hard discs and hopefully I'll never have simultaneous failures, though perhaps in theory possible (power failure during a back-up?). At this moment I am still backing up photos on DVDs until my supply finishes, and thereafter I'll just buy another tera-byte drive to achieve double back-ups. More than a year back I already stopped backing up home videos on DVDs. Just way too cumbersome at 12GB per hour for the highest quality HD.

It is also likely that BD could also soon be bypassed for MOVIE SALES. The public seems incredibly tolerant of mediocre video (and audio) quality. It appears that even some posters on this thread. I find it a bit absurd that people on this forum, many lapping up any write-up on 30+MP backs for stills, somehow try to justify sticking to SD! Satellite delivery of movies can also be excellent, though to date the quality is still considerably below BD. If broadband on our PCs gets to, say, 50Mb and above, apparently quite likely soon in many regions, then delivering a 10+GB (close to or equal to BD quality) per movie becomes feasible. Perhaps Apple TV will be the first to sell movies in 1080 HD soon?

Frankly, I feel that even if Sony now drops prices down to DVD levels (blanks, burners, movies) BD would still be eclipsed into nothingness within 2 to 3 years; too expensive for too long. Pity, because it really does deliver on its promises for HiFi in both audio and video.

Have you been drinking too much today, jjj? You're not making much sense. If you make the following statement, "Shame that nearly all broadcast TV [SD] will look dreadful on such a large screen", which is the statement I was addressing, it is reasonable to assume that you are referring to the resolution of the broadcast and not the accuracy of the color, the interest of the drama or the lighting techniques of the camera man.

Where do you sit? You sit at a distance sufficiently far from the set so that SD material does not look dreadful, yet close enough so that the higher quality of HD broadcasts can be appreciated. With a 50" screen, I would say about 12ft is a good compromise. Also, it seems to be the case that good HD sets do an excellent job of interpolating SD material. No jaggies, no motion blur, no ghosting, no flicker.



The phosphors in plasma sets are very similar to the phosphors in CRTs. Were you looking at LCD TVs? I believe they can sometimes be more expensive than plasma sets of the same size. I still use a Sony Triniton CRT monitor to process my images for printing. I believe old-fashioned CRT monitors can still be as good or better than much more expensive LCD monitors, but not regarding resolution. I'm not aware of any full HD CRT TVs. Do they exist?



What makes you think I believed them? I actually bought this Panasonic plasma set as a Christmas present for my partner who lives in her own house and whom I visit frequently. I wanted to check out the quality and try a few Blu-ray discs from my laptop. I knew if there were any slight deficiencies in image quality which disturbed me, my partner probably wouldn't notice them and would continue to be happy with the set.

It so happens that I'm very impressed with the image quality. The blacks are gorgeous and detailed, the colors vibrant yet subtle, and the resolution a huge step up from my old CRT TV. At its best, with material from a Blu-ray disc which delivers 1080p, the difference is equivalent to upgrading from a 3mp DSLR to an 18mp DSLR. My only disappointment with the set is that it doesn't lend itself to normal calibration procedures with my X-rite colorimeters and software.



That's because you don't have a 50" plasma .

Samir,
Just a few days ago I got an Australia Post junk mail brochure in my letter box advertising a WD 1TB My Book Essential Edition external hard drive for A$219. At current conversion rates that's US$153. I feel perhaps I should buy a couple, but I did once have the terrible experience of losing 300GB of data on a La Cie Big Disk. Fortunately all the data was still on DVD disks that I'd recorded on my laptop during photographic trips.



The potential of the Blu-ray format is 200GB. 5 double-sided, quadruple layer blu-ray discs are a lot lighter and less bulky than a 1TB hard drive. On the other hand, by the time such 200GB discs become available and affordable, we'll probably have 1TB pocket drives running off the power supply of the USB socket.

The simple fact is, for watching movies, standard DVD's are good enough. Given good source material, a progressive-scan DVD player and an upscaling display, the movie-viewing experience of standard DVDs is excellent. Not perfect. Not as good as HD, but excellent.

It's good enough that very seldom while watching DVD movies at home do I say "I really need more screen resolution". I have a $100 upscaling DVD player, a 55 inch Sony SXRD rear projector and over 30 years experience shooting movies.

As others have noted, archiving digital images on optical formats is inconvenient and inefficient compared to using hard drives or solid state memory.

Always have been.

Not a fair comment really as 95% of TV here is SD. So how would you suggest people not not watch SD?

Don't drink at all thanks. Not impressed by upresing of SD, just like upresing a low res still does not make it a good high res still. Plus, the look of many dramas is most definitely affected by the cruddy LCD screens most people use. The best way I can describe it is that well lit filmed dramas look like flatly lit video productions from the 70s, like a cheap soap in fact.
A few days back a TV programme that I am very familiar with, was demonstrated for me on all of Sony's top TVs. Even the £5,500 TV was crap compared to my CRT. Shockingly so. Though as the signal was from Sky, that could be part of the problem, but even that wouldn't account for the poor rendering.
There is a reason why cartoon and animations are used to demonstrate flat screen TVs, they hide the flaws that skin tones and real world scenes show up.
Part of the problem could be that the TVs were set with extra contrast, lightness and sharpeness for the shop floor/wall, as quite often the shops set demo TVs on a mode that seems to maximize the flaws of flat screens and demo footage is carefully chosen to hide the problems with the TVs.

You witter on about tiny differences of various cameras you don't own and you think HD sets do an excellent job of upscaling. Do they bollocks, They look pants and certainly not sharp.
The whole point of a big TV is one sense is to be, well...bigger, so if you place it further away to let SD look OK, then you may as well buy a smaller TV and sit closer. And save a lot of money in the process. Plus people are usually limited by house sizes as to where they sit, particularly in a crowded country like the UK.
I'll stick to a CRT in lounge for now and go to the cinema for a big screen experience.
Though a flat screen for wall in kitchen may happen simply as a CRT won't work in the space and it will not be a primary viewing spot.


Both - interestingly, the least worst [not for sharpness, but look/rendering] was the smallest LCD [32"]

They did IIRC. Very briefly.


Things you posted recently.

A HD set showing BluRay, should look good. Showing normal SD TV is not quite the same however.
If I watched a lot of discs because I lived in the sticks away from cinema, then I might invest in one. Though I'd probably go for a projector and a cinema room instead.


No, I don't have a big TV as I go to the cinema. Way cheaper too as I have an unlimited pass!
BTW my local flea has the biggest screen in the country and all screens have good seats, lots of legroom and decent raking of seating. And I sit so that my field of view is nearly filled by the screen, which makes for a more immersive experience. You sit that close to even a HD TV and you can see the pixels.
Though at least you do not have to complain about shoddy focusing/projection with TVs.


Something I notice when visiting friends and relatives that when they had CRTs the picture was usually pretty good, with flat screens it's rarely bearable.
But they don't notice how awful the picture is. Heck, my girlfriend doesn't even notice when the aspect format is completely wrong, we have 6 modes on our TV and programmes are shown in about 4 of them. She sometimes uses Auto, which somehow manages to show all aspect ratios incorrectly.

I have a Samsung Tantus 32" pure flat CRT television, and it looks pretty darn good, especially compared to all the newer "upgrade" stuff I see displayed in the local electronics emporium. When I got it x years ago (can't remember), it was an "HD TV", good for 800 lines, not interlaced. I guess that's not the real HD now, and the connectors changed. (So I am stuck with component video and optical audio.)

Plus, I have something like 200 DVDs here, so poo on Blu Ray.

By the way, I find the optimal distance is 1.5x the height of the screen. That means I can stick my foot out and touch the television, I'm that close. My kids' friends think it is weird we sit that close, but it works and there is no grain visible in the screen. (Although we don't watch any "TV" on it, so I don't know what cable TV is like.)

I think it is conceivable that Blu Ray will not catch on before the world of bits takes over as the delivery method.

You are still not making any sense, jjj. Are you on some other self-medication then? I witter on about small differences in cameras that I don't own in order to find out if they are worth buying and to find out what the circumstances might be that such difference are of practical significance. You should have noticed that my emphasis is on low-noise performance at high ISO. Being able to use a particular camera at, say ISO 3200, and get the same image quality on print that my current camera provides at ISO 1600, would be reason enough to upgrade.

I witter on about the performance of cameras I don't own because I can get no reliable information about their performance (because they are new), or at best, get conflicting reports from so-called experts. The D3 is a case in point. Initial reports from around the world provided no thorough comparisons. It was claimed that the D3's low-noise performance was so good it was almost 2 stops better than any other camera on the market. The only comparison I could find with my own camera, the 5D, were jpegs from Ken Rockwell's site who claimed the D3 was now King of the Block regarding low noise. Yet the 5D images he showed on his website, although noisier, were clearly more detailed than the D3 images. When both images were treated to some noise reduction with Noise Ninja, they looked about the same.



Of course SD isn't quite the same. HD is much better, whether from Blu-ray or a broadcast. That's the reason for buying a set that can display an HD signal. It's decidedly and clearly better.



So this is the true reason why you don't get yourself a decent HD display. You've got an unlimited cinema pass . The last time I saw a movie in the cinema was actually quite recently. A guest treated us to a viewing of the new Baz Luhrmann film, "Australia", followed by a meal at a restaurant. We considered the posh cinema (Gold Pass) where the seats recline like Business Class aircraft seats. There's a table between each pair of seats and one can order wine and snacks or even a full meal that is delivered to your table, as in a restaurant. Seats were $37 each. A bottle of wine that would cost $10 in a wine store was about $35 and light snacks were around $20. For the four of us, that would have amounted to $263, sharing just the one bottle of wine. We decided against it and bought the cheaper seats, which in total still amounted to more than the cost of a Blu-ray movie.

This was the first time I'd seen a movie in a cinema for a long time. I was expecting to be enthralled by the immensity of the screen and the tack-sharp realism of the photography. In fact I wasn't. I couldn't help making comparisons with recent experiences watching a 50" plasma. The picture was difinitely bigger, but the quality, on balance, didn't seem as good. Could be a matter of viewing distance, of course.



I've had similar experiences, except when I visit friends who are still using the old-fashioned CRT TV, their CRT set is out of adjustment just as it is with LCD or Plasma sets. The fact is, most people who are not obsessed with image quality, do not seem to even notice such things as oversaturated skin tones, blocked-up shadows and blown highlights. All displays require some sort of adjustment of contrast, brightness, color saturation, color temperature, hue etc, in order to produce good results. When I first switched on my very expensive Loewe CRT set, which was the best I could find many years ago, I remember being dismayed at the oversaturated skin tones and general image quality straight out of the box with controls set at their factory default. Fortunately, the Loewe set had a tint control which worked with PAL analogue broadcasts. This is a control which is usually found only on NTSC (Never The Same Color) sets. With PAL broadcasts it allowed for very fine tuning to get very accurate skin tones.

If you do decide to avail yourself of the joys of high definition TV, I would recommend a good plasma set. The 9th generation Pioneer Kuro are the best but also the most expensive and not necessarily the best value. I saw their 60" model in a store recently, priced at A$10,000. Too expensive for me, but hopefully the price will be lower by the time my new house is finished .

Missed point entirely - upscaling! I do know why you witter on.



Shame the signal going in back of TV isn't rarely HD.


Nope. I have an unlimited pass as it saves me money, due to the fact I like to go to the cinema.


Or the film wasn't that sharp. Films vary in quality/sharpness immensely as they are all shot differently, just like photographs made by professionals do. It's a stylistic thing a lot of the time. Assuming projectionist was competant.
Also my local has two screens with digital projectors. I'd like to see you compare your measely 50" to those screens!


I don't ever recall seeing CRTs as bad as many of the LCDs screens I've seen.

The plasmas are indeed better, but seeing as most TV isn't HD, it's a waste of money for now. If my current CRT was any bigger, I'd start to see the pixels on SD.

That's probably because modern LCD and Plasma TVs usually have a greater range of controls than the old-fashioned CRT. It's so easy to get things spectacularly wrong; a bit like photomatix and tone mapping. The Panasonic set that I bought has an 'Eco' mode which attempts to compensate for different lighting conditions, such as fluorescent lighting in the showroom, bright daylight in one's living room etc. I admit the results can be pretty awful. I rarely use it. I would suspect that this feature is probably responsible for the awful image quality one sometimes sees in the showrooms.



Well that's a problem that you are more familiar with than I am. We've had HD broadcasts for several years in Australia; ever since the introduction of digital broadcast which were initially mostly SD but are now mostly HD.

Don't think that is the issue as most people won't even touch picture controls and my CRT has as much if not more than the LCDs I've tried to sort out. My sisters is beyond making acceptable look via the menus. It looks crap as it's an LCD, nothing more complex than that.

That may be the case. It's been know for years that LCDs do not match the quality of CRTs. It's why I still use a CRT for my image processing and why I have never considered getting an LCD TV to replace my CRT TV.

However, plasma displays are in another ball park. They seem to have all the advantages of the CRT in the sense that each pixel has its own illumination, but none of the disadvantages of CRT in respect of line scanning and flicker. I've never come across any description or explanation as to what image properties a CRT might have that are not equalled or surpassed by a modern, good quality plasma set. Have you?

Comparing sets that have not been adjusted to obtain the best possible picture quality serves little purpose. When I've asked salesmen in the TV showrooms why the shop didn't employ someone to at least make an attempt to adjust each display to the same standard. The answer is usually, there'd be little point because customers often want to play with the remote and try out their own adjustments before buying a set; or, the bright fluorescent lighting in the showroom is not an ideal environment for the best picture quality; or, different customers prefer different settings. What looks good to one customer may not look good to another.

Don't you think that's a very odd effect you are describing? I don't know what cameras you use, but I suspect that when making a print the size of your TV screen, you would probably want to use at least 16mp and preferrably 24mp. Yet when the picture is moving, you're quite satisfied with a resolution consisting of less than 1/2 a megapixel. If the half megapixel looks better than you would predict, that's probably because professional videocams employ 3 CCDs, so we have a quality similar to the Foveon type sensor. Let's call it a 1mp image (Bayer type).

As a photographer, how can you be satisfied with such low resolution?

The very best resolution of an HD frame is about 2 mpix, isn't it? Not so hot, really, in the context of modern digicams. But we don't make A3-sized prints of video stills and examine the dots with a loop, so I don't see that it matters. There has always existed wildly different viewing standards, at least in terms of per frame resolution, for prints and films.

I agree with Peter. For watching TV shows and movies at home, current DVDs are perfectly fine. Sure we can do better, but so what. We can always do better but don't always need to. As an editorial aside, what's most memorable about movies and TV programs is their content, not their pixel resolution. I own a VHS copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and I don't think that a Blu-Ray version will improve the viewing experience much. But as I said in an earlier post, if I could have the improvement for little to no cost, sure why not, but if I have to spend money for something I don't think I need, then I balk. But everyone has their own criteria and I admit to becoming a late adopter. I still buy CDs, don't own an MP3 player, and have never downloaded music so there's not a entertainment company on earth that cares what I think.

What irritates me is that one medium will replace the other and people will be forced to upgrade, but I am getting used to it. My movie rental place has more kiddie computer games, soft drinks, popcorn and candy bars than it has movies to rent.

I have always found this facet fascinating. Way back in the 1950s my Dad upgraded from 8mm to 16mm home movies. Anyway, even though I was still a kid, I used the movie stuff (and still camera) more than he did. I never could figure out exactly why the 16mm Kodachrome movies projected onto an 8ft wide screen (we did have a large house) looked more or less the same quality as 35mm slides projected onto the same screen. OK, recall that I was still a kid at grade school! But I concluded that a lot had to do with the fact that the movie was moving... Same effect applies to a 2MP HD video on a 70" screen. There is no way that stills taken by the SAME videocam at 5MP look anywhere as good as the HD video. The stills look rather gritty and with harsh tonality. Stills taken by a DSLR look as good, but not astoundingly better, than the HD video, primarily because we sit some 140" away. The tonality from a 1Ds is visibly better than that of a $1000 HD videocam. Two MP moving images do a very good job at that distance res-wise (limit of 6/6 human vision). In any case the screen is only 2MP anyway, so things do get levelled out by viewing distance and screen resolution, like looking at 4x6" prints from 35mm and from MF. But agreed, moving images definitely seem to require much fewer pixels than stills.

Two MP still images also do a very good job at that distance. It so happens I have a 22"x35" print on the wall immediately above my 50" Plasma set. The image was taken with my 5D and interpolated to around 200MB for printing on my Epson 7600. I took the same file from which I made the print, downsampled it with bicubic sharper to around 5MB, converted it to sRGB, transferred the image to an SD card and displayed it on the plasma screen.

Guess what! The image on the plasma display looked better, viewing both images from approximately the same distance of 12-15ft. From that distance, neither appeared to be sharper or have greater subtlety of tonality than the other. The image on the plasma display looked better because of the transmissive nature of the screen. The contrast range was handled perfectly, and in fact the shadows seemed even more vibrant and natural than on the print.

Of course, you could argue that I must have done a lousy job making the print, but I don't believe so .

for me there is just no advantage to Blu Ray worth the extra costs. I have a large TV, and an upsampling DVD player. I can buy $5-$15 DVDs that look great to my eyes or I can drop $40+ for a Blu Ray disk I think not.

The jump from VHS to DVD was far more than just a better picture and sound. You also did not have to rewind and fast forward and DVDs were much smaller to store.

The only advantage for the average consumer with Blu Ray is that you can get a better picture but most of us just don't care.

That seems to be the general case. You're not alone with that view. Nevertheless, I still find it very curious that photographers will jump at the opportunity to double the pixel count of their DSLR yet show an almost total lack of interest in a 6x increase in pixel count simply because the image is moving.

I understand that many folks are not interested in image quality period, whether the image is still or moving. But that's not the situation on this site, is it?

I wonder, do photographers trying to make a living from selling still images feel threatened by the increasing quality of video?

I came across a recent article addressing the problems of the transition to HD, which you might find interesting, at http://www.screendigest.com/press/releases..._2008/view.html

Here's an exctract:



In Australia we have no TV license fees as they have in the U.K, and we have plenty of free-to-air HD broadcasts. I suppose that makes a difference.

I think with digital cameras Mega Pixels are one easy way to measure what you are buying. For the average buyer looking at say P&S cameras they all look the same but one is 10mp and the other 6mp so they think the 10mp ones are better simply because they have a bigger number. I think with High Def TVs you don't need pixel counts as a measuring tool as people can just go into a store and see a nice big flat LCD or Plasma TV. The physical size of the unit is all they need. Then they take them home and watch a DVD on them and are quite happy.

I also think a lot of tech savy people (like me) also see any disc based format as a dead end. Currently (where I live in the USA) I can watch hundreds if not thousands of Movies and TV Shows on Demand through my Digital Cable, many of them for free, the rest for very minimal cost. On top of that I belong to service called Netflix where I get DVDs mailed to me at my home, I can keep and watch them as long as I like, and when I am done, I just mail them back and I get more the next day. Recently I got a box that plugs into my home network where I can stream movies and TV shows directly from Netflix right to my TV no computer required. The quality is somewhere between that of a VHS tape and a DVD but I know that it will only get better with time, and with time more and more titles will be available also. My guess is that 5-10 years from now between my Digital Cable and Netflix (or a similar service) I will be able to watch just about any movie or TV show ever made, whenever I want, in High Def, and I will never touch a disk of any sort.

On a personal level I shoot digital with a Canon 30D, I am very happy with the 8mp size and don't want anything bigger. The more MPs the bigger the files, and the more I have to commit to storage and backups

Indeed I suspect that is the view of many people, even the tech savy. BD seems destined to be a flash-in-the-pan, like Laser Discs turned out to be. Pity really, since it implies that we will not get the currently available BD movie quality going mainstream for many years yet. It took many years before FM sound became widely available on VHS tapes, even though the initial mono sound format was simply horrible. All these downloaded movies, cable, satellite or broadband, even when so-called HD, are simply not comparable to BD on a large enough screen (or small screen when viewed close-up, like on a PC monitor). I find that a well recorded commercial DVD (4GB? per movie) on an upgrading HD TV or DVD player, is invariably better than the more usual compressed downloads (1.5 -3GB?). It may take many years before 10+GB downloads per movie become routine and thus competitive with BD. It will come eventually. One suspicion I have regarding DVDs is that PAL DVDs (625 lines?) seem inherently to have an advantage over NTSC DVDs (525 lines?) hence line doubling seems to have picked up more in N. America than in Europe during the 1990s amongst the cognoscenti. Anyway these days many higher end HD TVs seem to do very good upgrading from DVD to 1080 internally anyway, so perhaps there is no longer a need for higher end DVD players.

A comment on Netfix and Apple TV. Good systems for downloads, but for whatever reason not available worldwide, unlike LLVJ. Presumably the copyright owners are scared of piracy? Duh! The rest of the world seems to be downloading as-good or better pirate copies routinely. Any yuppie outside N.America probably has already 100+ pirated movies on those millions of 500GB and terabyte drives that are selling like hotcakes... Don't the copyright owners ever learn, eg from the music industry experience?

One thing I would emphasise though. Shoot all your home videos on HD, now! I have digitised all my home movies (starting with 8mm and 16mm in the 1950s, Super 8 in the 1970s, analogue videos from the 1980s, digital videos in the 1990s and ending with grand kids on HD) and the enormous quality difference is shocking. All these were "very good" quality for their epoch. Home videos go up in value with the passage of time. 25 years from now your kids will be watching whatever you shoot today on 8ft screens, and SD will most assuredly look horrible. Even HD 1080 will struggle, but it'll be much better than SD, perhaps like 1990s digital SD compared to analogue video from the 1980s.

True! But the point I raised was in regard to the attitude of photographers, the sort of people who frequent this site. The average member of the public buys a P&S camera in preference to a DSLR because they are not fussy about image quality. The P&S is good enough, just as SD TV is good enough.

When the P&S is not good enough and you want better quality, more resolution and/or better DR and lower noise, then you buy a DSLR. It just seems very odd that someone like jjj (for example) who obviously appreciates high image quality in his still images, doesn't give a stuff about the low image quality of SDTV. It's not good enough if the image is still. It is good enough if the image is moving. I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this dual standard.

Anyway, at least I appreciate the benefits of HD moving images. I'm pleased that grand opera is at last beginning to become available on Blu-ray. I've already ordered from Amazon a selection of operas on Blu-ray, each with a 5 star rating from reviewers; operas such as Bizet's Carmen starring Anna Caterina Antonacci, The Magic Flute, The Barber of Seville, Aida etc.

Grand opera deserves a grand plasma display in full HD .

Eh!? Not sure why you think that I don't care about moving image quality. My view is completely the opposite - I'm very fussy about it.
I do not have a HD TV as the quality of most TV [which is still SD], viewed on them is effing awful, plus the nasty digital look that most display is also something I despise. I'd much rather watch SD with subtle gradations of tone, good blacks and highlights that aren't burnt out on my CRT, that virtually any large TV I've looked at. They look OK with a BluRay source, but the chance of my buying/renting BR i very small. I have very few DVDs and have probably watched less than half of them. Don't have the time. Mainly as if I want HD I go to the Cinema and watch film or digital projection, which is way better than your meagre 50" TV.

I should also mention that I don't particularly care for the image out of most digital cameras, too video like a lot of the time.
Besides, if you look at my photography, grain and fuzziness is something I like to use creatively.
When appropriate, I actively 'degrade' my images at times, as it can look great.

That's not my experience. I think you are comparing the appearance of maladjusted, cheap or early models of big LCD screens with well-adjusted CRT displays. Any reasonably good quality SD source looks decidely and clearly better on a modern and properly adjusted HD plasma TV, viewed from an appropriate distance in relation to the sceen size. If this wasn't the case, then nobody would buy a projector. Those who do or did buy projectors, HD or not, used to be very impressed with the SD definition of DVDs on their huge 100" screens. Now such people are even more impressed with the improved quallity of full HD from Blu-ray on their 100" screens.

It's possible that certain cheap DVD players or early Plasma TVs have substandard upscaling chips which deliver disappointing results with SD material. However, I can attest that the 11th generation Panasonic Plasma sets do an excellent upscaling job, and that "The Bill" definitely looks better on my 50" plasma set than it used to on my high quality 33" Loewe CRT set.

Duh, you still seem to be struggling with this part. You won't move your seats back and fore depending on the source material. You either sit too close for SD or too far for HD to do the best job. Now if I want a large screen I want the benefit of the large size so I won't sit a long way back just so the SD looks the same size as on the CRT. Currently, a little closer to my CRT and I can see the pixels - I have good eyesight. So a bigger screen is of no benefit for SD.
There was a article in papers this week claiming most people didn't get the benfit of big TVs/HD as their eyesight wasn't up to it. Possible a publicity stunt by opticians, but there's a germ of truth in it regardless.


Uh duh again, shops don't stock old TVs and so funnily I've been looking at the latest ones [Panasonics too], and I will also alter them as well from defaults. I'm sure I also mentioned above that that a local highend hifi shop admitted that flat screens simply aren't as good as CRTs yet - they do not sell CRTs.
Upscaled SD, simply looks upscaled to me and doesn't survive being shown on a big screen as it tends to look soft.
How far away was the CRT you watched? It may have been a smaller angle of view than your big screen and probably could have been viewed closer. Most people's CRTs were/are a long way away, relatively. I'm presently at my sisters, looking at the TV in lounge, in a typicaly sized home, it's a 32". Yet interestingly, the angle of view it covers, is less than that of a video on say an iPhone in my hand.

JJJ,
Now who's being silly? You seem to imply that I am recommending you get out your calculator and measuring tape in order to determine the ideal position to sit in relation to a screen of a particular size and a broadcast of a particular quality.

Let me be clear on this matter. Whatever the size of the TV, whatever the quality of the broadcast, I always try to sit at a comfortable viewing distance from the display. I use my eyes to determine what is a comfortable viewing distance and I understand that what may be a comfortable viewing distance for one person may not be for another. I thought everyone did this as a matter of course, so I'm surprised that you seem to have so much difficulty with this issue.

Could it be that all the chairs in your living room are bolted to the floor at an equal distance to your TV screen? This would be very unusual, but if that were the case, then I would agree you might have a slight problem with regard to replacing your CRT TV with a large HD display.



They sometimes stock new TVs with old technology. They are usually of the cheaper and smaller variety. Haven't you noticed?



Well, that settles the matter, doesn't it? Who could possibly argue with the authority of a salesman in your local hi fi shop. Salesman know everything, don't they?

Nobody sells 50" flat panel CRTs, so we can't compare, and your local hi fi shop apparently does't even have a small CRT with which to compare.

The impression that LCD monitors are not as good as CRT monitors for critical image processing, has been around for a long time. It seems to be the case (or certainly was the case) that only top-end and very expensive LCD computer monitors could rival the quality of a medium priced CRT computer monitor. For this reason I have not bothered to replace my old CRT computer monitor with an LCD monitor, although I can see there would be other advantages unrelated to image quality, such as a wider and bigger screen and a smaller footprint.

Plasma displays are in another category. What has been described as the deficiency of the LCD monitor, relatively poor contrast ratio and blacks lacking detail, exists in spades on the plasma screen. I doubt that any old-fashioned CRT would have a better contrast ratio than a modern plasma set.

If you have any links to authoritative sources that can specify in what ways a CRT is still better than the best of the current crop of plasma sets, I'd be interested.

No, I'm not. I'm pointing out there is a variation in optimum distance that's all. Unlike a photo on a gallery wall, you don't normally have the option of varying viewing distance depending on whether the programme is HD or SD.
Plus, now you've mentioned it, it occured to me that to to pick TV in first place, you may well have to get tape measure out to decide which size is best. Why? Most rooms in Europe have a place for the TV and a place for the sofas, usually on opposite walls as houses/flats are rarely as big as in the less populated countries.

I'm not, you seem to be struggling with reading. The optimum viewing distance for SD + HD on a big screen is not the same, hence the problem.

No not bolted but very heavy and against the wall. A very normal arrangement. Besides to repeat point yet again, who's going change seating arrangements when changing channels if some progs are in SD and some in HD?


And why would I be looking at small, cheap TVs? I work with images for a living, I'm hardly going to look at crap kit, particularly as it doesn't even show HD anyway. I was looking at a £5.5K Sony plasma a few days back. Not that impressive really, apart from price and size. Not as good a the Panasonics.

Duh, yet again. They were saying a product they don't even sell is better [in many ways] than one they do sell. That's a very honest answer as it will lose the sale.

Image quality is not simply defined by contrast ratio. Just as sound quality is not definined by the figures used to sell audio kit or MPs to sell cameras. It's not the contrast that is the main issue, it's the overall digital look, only part of which is related to the blacks

One of my main skills is parsing image quality, so I actually have no need to ask anyone else's opinion on this particular matter and I've spent a lot of time of late looking at Plasmas, they are certainly better than they were, but are still lacking, particularly as I keep repeating, when viewing normal SD TV [95% of current TV], as it simply does not look too good that big, especially after upresing. When SD becomes the minority format then I'll consider a larger replacement for lounge. Though one for the Kitchen is a vague possibilty for convienience, but girlfiend will find it a bit odd having the newer, bigger and fancier TV in kitchen. But as Kitchen viewing distance is quite long compared to lounge, it makes more sense to do that.

No problem for me. I can understand if you are renting temporary living quarters, that the seating arrangements might be inflexible. If you own your own house then I presume you would arrange everything to suit your own living style and preferences in all matters. If your argument is, 'I live in rented accommodation which does not lend itself to any sort of flexibility with regard to seating arrangements and it would therefore be impractical and inconvenient for me to install a large screen HD display', then I understand completley. Why didn't you say so in the first place? Duh! Duh! Duh!



I don't know why, except I deduced you might have been looking at crap because you seem to have the view that upscaling of SD material is very unsatisfactory. I find it susrprisingly good. I get the impression that Sony are not noted for the excellence of their plasma displays. There was some talk a while back of their discontinuing production of plasma displays and concentrating on LCDs.

By the way, you can get small and cheap, full HD displays. I have a 24" LCD display from Acer that I picked up for around US$270. First impressions are, it's very much lacking in contrast ratio. It probably does all processing of the signal in 8-bit mode and displays the results in 6-bit dithered.




It's a shrewd answer. Since you are such a clever fellow and your salesman is local, he knows already that you have the impression, rightly or wrongly, that CRT is better. He also knows that you are not going to buy another CRT TV and that there are no Full HD CRT TVs available anywhere. When you are ready to buy a full HD plasma (after you've sorted out your seating arrangements), he knows you are likely to return to him because he's given you the impression that he's perceptive and knowledgeable on such matters. He will also be in a good position to persuade you to buy a more expensive display than you otherwise might have bought, on the grounds that this latest Plasma display (a Pioneer Kuro perhaps) really is better than a CRT.



95% of broadcasts in the U.K are still SD? Dear me! When I used to visit the U.K. when my parents were still alive, I would occasionally find there was some confusion amongst friends and relatives as to whether the time in Australia was 10 hours ahead or 10 hours behind. I sometimes clarified the situation by saying it was easy to remember. Just remember that Australia is ahead in everything. (I know how to win friends and influence people.)

I think part of your problem with SD image quality might have something to do with the difference between the analogue broadcast signal and the digital broadcast signal. A CRT set cannot receive a digital signal, except through a set-top box. During the time of the Olympics in Beijing, and before I bought the Panasonic plasma set for my partner, I hooked up the Loewe CRT TV to a set-top box. The Loewe Calida has a real 16:9 option whereby the scan lines are vertically compressed to the 16:9 aspect ratio (as opposed to cropping the scan lines which effectively reduces vertical resolution).

Through the set-top box I was able to get a very clear 16:9 digital broadcast, which was presumably the full HD signal downscaled to SD, and it seemed to have the resolution edge compared with the analogue broadcast of the same material. However, there were one or two aspects of image quality with which I was not satisfied. First, there was a tendency towards blown highlights which reminded me a bit of the differences between film and digital cameras. The digital highlights tend to clip suddenly whereas film is more gradual in its handling of highlights. I wondered at the time if analogue broadcasts were more like film in this respect.

The second disappointment was in the fine tuning of color shades. The Loewe set has a tint control which was very useful with analogue broadcasts. With the digital broadcast, this control was not functional. It had no effect. These disappointments with the way a CRT TV handles a digital signal influenced my decision to buy a modern plasma display.

There is also sometimes evident, a certain plasticity in the complexions of people in a digital broadcast, as though the image has been subjected to heavy noise reduction. I don't see this effect in HD footage from Blu-ray discs, so I think such effects are in the source material and are a result of digital manipulation. I think you might be confusing such digital manipulation, that seems to be quite common, with the quality of the display.

I've read that the extra clarity of the HD standard in portraying every wart, pore and blemish is a great problem for the porn industry, so I've heard. And I can believe it without seeing for myself.