Who's down with the Blu-ray?

Upconverting DVD players are hype. You can't "create" information that doesn't exist - you are still getting DVD-resolution. Granted, many upconverting DVD players have a better scaler than some TV sets, but there is simply no way DVD can approach Blu-ray, because Blu-ray has 6x the resolution of DVD.

Of course, there is a limit to the resolution the eye can perceive. Still, on a sub-65" set, that limit is around 720p, not 480p.


To each is own. I agree the BR is better picture but not enough better to justify the extra dollars.

Is this much of an upgrade over my VCR? I was thinking about upgrading that to a DVD player sense its hard to rent VCR tapes. I can find them by the box at garage sales but how many times can you watch Jaws.

lol, nah, it's all hype. I hope your VCR is a Beta, though - I hear VHS is dead.

lol, nah, it's all hype. I hope your VCR is a Beta, though - I hear VHS is dead.

No never could afford the Betta so I stuck with VHS.

In the day a Beta machine was like a couple hundred bucks, I feel bad for the people who jumped on that wagon.

My step-dad still has one...

Nothing beats the awesome inconvience of an oversized Laserdisc. I can still remember staring at them in awe at the old Erol's video.

My step-dad had that, too, along with about 200 laserdiscs. And we had Erol's around the corner. Red box meant VHS, black meant Beta.

With respect to Blu-Ray longevity, it's gonna be here for at least 10 years. Honestly, people shouldn't be discouraged by whether it has staying power, it actually beat out HD-DVD and the people advicing the studio executives aren't smart enough yet to figure out what the public really wants yet. They're simply too scared to take the streaming movies over the internet pludge without making the whole process painful and a turn off. I ****ing hate DRM but maybe most people don't care enough to care either way. Me? I like owning physical things and I loath iTunes and Zune...renting music my ass.

As for laserdiscs, GMU library had a large collection of laserdisc movies when I went to school there...I wonder if they still have them...I watched all the classic movies on them.

I remember trips to Erol's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erol%27s) to rent videos. Before Erol's, there was a small chain (I know of stores in Bethesda and Gaithersburg) called The Video Place that we went to. And we also had a Beta machine, that had a wired remote that essentially had 2 functions on it: Play and Pause.