HD movies better quality then DVD?

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I highly recommend you grab one of these. These were a great deal at $500 (especially with 2 free movies if you order from Value Electronics). The hardware in these 1st gens is very flexible and being updated and improved with firmware releases all the time. The newer players will actually have inferior hardware and less features.

I am very impressed so far with the hd-dvd titles i've purchased (106" screen with sanyo z4 720p projector) -- but the toshiba is worth the money even just as an upscaling DVD player. It surpasses most DVD upscaling players costing more money, AND you get the hd-dvd playback as a bonus.

Head over to avsforums for more info, but between HBO movies and hd-dvd titles (and my current dvd library upscaled), I'm very happy with the setup.

It is the blu-ray players that are $1000 (and have a critical flaw that ruins hdmi playback currently) - plus the blu ray titles have been very poorly mastered until the most recent batch.

-Wes

 

HD Movies look much better than DVDs. Haven't rented a DVD since I went HD.

 

"Upconverting" as applied to AV receivers, PVRs, DVDRs, etc. is a misnomer. Upconversion implies that something with a lower resolution can magically reap the benefits of being scaled to a higher resolution, which would explain why the marketing hypesters have zeroed in on that term. You can "upconvert" all day, and yes, there will be more actual pixels displayed, but that means absolutely nothing as far as the effective or net resolution is concerned. IOW, SD will be just as fuzzy upconverted to 1080i as it was at 480i.

What's happening is more accurately "rescaling". And you make a good point. Modern displays handle that just fine on their own. Your TV must eventually scale whatever goes into it to the native resolution, every time.


OK, I'll bite. Gold connectors make better contact, because gold is a better conductor than silver or copper or brass or what have you, and such connectors are less likely to build corrosion at that point. Does this give you "better bits"? Well, pretty obviously, for glass, absolutely not, since light doesn't travel through any metal medium, including gold.

For hardwired, yes, I guess you could stretch a point that it actually does, but only if you consider an unmeasurable amount of extra amplitude or less capacitive or inductive rolloff "better", which is not really the case for digital signals, and not really even for analog signals, for that matter.

The real answer is that gold conductors provide no pratical benefit in any consumer application. And guess what, they aren't used at all in truly professional applications, either, which is not exactly a ringing endorsement for the practice.

 

This, of course, has not stopped retailers from selling gold-tipped A/V cables at a premium; a practice that has gone on for twenty years or more.

The utter ripoff that is the "premium" cable market has ascended to the point where an outfit like Monster can exist solely to overcharge massive amounts for a couple of bucks worth of parts. It's impressive marketing, to be sure.

 

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Monster is actually at the low end of the esoteric cable market and is generally not thought all that well of by the high-end enthusiasts. They're way overpriced and overrated for what you get. You can find some topnotch cables at not too exhorbitant prices if you shop around.

Actually, they're really all about what a decent NTSC signal should look like. Most TVs aren't properly calibrated for NTSC reception and broadcasters mangle the heck out of the signal. People are just so used to seeing a downrezzed image full of noise and other artifacts being shown on a display that isn't properly adjusted that DVDs seemed like some sort of revelation. It's the old "garbage in, garbage out" scenario. Connect a clean source directly to your TV with the proper interface and the picture will look much better than anyone is used to. HDTV just takes it to the next level.

I'm sure the new Hi-Def DVD formats look great but the reviews of the first generation players haven't impressed me so far. I still refuse to buy into one format over the other until the studios and manufacturers come to their senses and develop a single format (I'm not holding my breath for that to happen since we all know that greed will prevail and we'll get the shaft in the end). The next best thing would be if the hardware manufacturers started producing dual format players so the consumer will be able to view all HD releases on disc instead of just a single format.

 

That was actually my point -- Monster has built a business out of charging high rates for cables that are no better than cheap no-name stuff. It's quite an accomplishment when you think about it.

 

This is anannoyance, but it's not as bad as forcing it into 4:3 at least and I can live with it.

 

When I was in Ultimate Electronics waiting for my S3, I saw a demo disc being played in a Blu-Ray (or HD-DVD, I can't remember), where half the screen was 1080p and the other half 480p. The difference was startling. But, of course, the manufacturer probably made that disc. What would be neat would be if somebody put together a demo disc that had the HD version on one side, the honest DVD version in the middle (probably best to pick a movie that has a solid but not spectacular DVD), and an up-converted 1080p image on the other side. That would make for an interesting and useful comparison...

 

Hubby and I collect movies on DVD (we're up to 700+ now) so we like a good movie on DVD -- that said, HD blows it away.

We did go out and buy and upconvert DVD player/burner. For $129 the movies look better (still not HD though) and we got the benefit of being able to dump recorded shows/movies to DVD for archiving.

 

Not sure I see that much difference. Mangling the image is mangling the image. And yeah, a 2.35:1 movie crammed or cropped into 16x9, IMO, looks awful.

 

I got my HDTV and HR10-250 a month ago. I anxiously waited for GoodFellas to be shown so that I could Tivo it and watch it in glorious HD.

TNTHD was showing it so I recorded it.

2 weeks later on a Saturday night we sat down to watch this wonderful, violent, rough language film.

What did we get? "Why you dirty, rotten son of a gun!!" "Gosh dang it!" "Freak you!!" "Do I make you laugh - Am I a freaking comedian?" "You go to heck!" "Mother Freaker!" "Scum Bum"... etc...

I learned my lesson the hard way to avoid movies on TNT-HD. I thought for sure since they make us pay extra for these limited HD channels they would at least provide them un-butchered.

 

In general, HD movies will look better than DVD. They have more resolution, so things look "sharper" and "clearer". They have higher bandwidth, which seems to improve the color fidelity a bit, but DVD is pretty good there, too, when hooked up via component cables, RGB, or DVI/HDMI.

There's one place DVD will look "better" than broadcast HD: motion artifacts, or "pixelization", or the "mosaic effect".

1080i HD broadcasts have 6 times as much "picture information" to send to your screen as DVDs. However, the best broadcast medium we have (OTA) has less than 3 times as much bandwidth as DVDs. They use essentially the same compression technology (MPEG2). Then there's the issue of subchannels...grumble grumble...PBS...grumble...2 or more freakin' subchannels...grumble...used to be stunning...grumble...now crap...

So, in scenes with a lot of motion, especially camera motion, you'll see more artifacts in an HD broadcast than a DVD. The other place you might notice it more is with big luminance shifts or flashes. It's most noticeable in storm scenes with lightning. That also has to do with the GOP structure, where both HD and DVD are pretty equal, but we don't need to get too technical here.

I am looking forward to the increased bandwidth we should get out of the HD DVD formats. I know blu-ray has lots and lots of bandwidth available. I don't remember how HD-DVD compares, but I bet it's still better than ATSC broadcast TV, and it can be MPEG4 (H.264?) as well!

- LoopinFool