High Definition DVD Market "STATIC"

[Jerry Jones]

http://tinyurl.com/g28kp

...they have drawn mixed reviews from retailers and analysts due to technical issues and a bitter format war.

"Neither format is selling well or at the level I had expected. I had expected early adopters to step up, and other retailers have had the same experience," said Bjorn Dybdahl, president of San Antonio-based specialty store Bjorn's Stereo Designs Inc.

since Samsung Corp. rolled out the first Blu-ray player, priced at $1,000, in late June, Blu-ray has faced complaints of subpar picture quality on discs, talk of component shortages for players and other technical problems.

along comes the first Blu-ray player from Samsung, and that's when my expectations were hurt," he said. "When we put the disc in, all the salespeople looked around and said it doesn't look much better than a standard DVD."

Many experts in the DVD industry said unremarkable picture quality on some early Blu-ray releases was due to studios' decisions to encode titles in the MPEG-2 compression format instead of the VC-1 format used for many HD-DVD titles.

Toshiba launched in April its first HD-DVD players, priced at about $500, and its lower pricing gave HD-DVD an initial lead in unit sales. Research company The NPD Group Inc. said HD-DVD player unit sales were 33% higher than Blu-ray player unit sales in their respective first six weeks on the market.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Dr Mordrid]

The whole undercurrent behind BR's extra capacity has been that it can retain MPEG-2 encoding, when IMO this should have ben the least of their concerns.

MPEG-4 in its modern implementation is so superior it isn't any suprise that the BR's are looking poor by comparison, especially when compared to H.264 AVC or VC1. Properly set up & with good sources they're freakin' gorgeous.