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Taking a Look Things didn't start off very well. In the beginning, the only titles really available were from Sony's Columbia and Tristar studios. Most of these titles had obvious MPEG artifacts, including macroblocking, banding, and haloing. Resolution overall seemed lacking, with most titles appearing only slightly better than their SD counterparts. I would compare the quality to that of an average to below-average HD cable broadcast minus the horrendous macroblocking issues typically associated with those broadcasts. In some cases, the cable broadcasts that I have archived on D-VHS outperformed their BD counterpart. One example was The Fifth Element. Comparing the BD release to the original aspect ratio broadcast from HBO showed a HUGE difference in overall resolution and depth. The HBO broadcast was cleaner, crisper, and far more detailed. The BD software just lacked that clean detailed look that is commonly associated with a good high definition presentation and was more in line with a great up-converted DVD presentation. Not a good sign. Just recently, this changed. Warner's initial slate of BD titles boasted improved video quality despite using MPEG-2 instead of VC1 (as they use exclusively on HD DVD). Their next round included titles mastered in VC1 that were every bit as good as what I've seen from the same presentations on HD DVD. Sony also just released Tears of the Sun, a film that has one of the best transfers I've seen in HD to date. Disney's initial Blu-Ray offerings have been pretty good, with one minor exception, Dinosaur. Of the four titles launched by Disney, it is one of two mastered in MPEG-2, and it appeared extremely soft. In fact, we compared it directly to the standard DVD release playing through my reference Denon DVD-5910, and the standard DVD presentation actually looked better in regards to detail. The other two titles were a big step up though. While there is a rather large inconsistency in software, things are starting to look a lot better for the future of BD software. On the audio side, I was rarely unsatisfied. My surround sound processor (the Anthem Statement D2) supports the HDMI 1.1 specification, so I could take full advantage of the uncompressed 5.1 PCM soundtracks. Sony's use of uncompressed PCM has paid off, and the majority of the titles so far have sounded far better than their DVD counterparts. Even the high bit rate Dolby Digital tracks outperform their DVD counterparts in terms of spatial resolution, imaging, and dynamic range. But in the end, I highly recommend taking advantage of the uncompressed soundtracks if possible. As the format progresses, you can be sure we'll be on top of it. We will be providing extensive coverage of Blu-ray software in our Movie Renter's Guide.
The Future of Pre-Recorded Media? While I think we all would have preferred a one format solution, this war does provide competition, so hopefully that will benefit the consumers in the end. Both formats have to deliver high quality content and hardware if they expect to survive, so we reap that benefit. If there was only one format on the market, we would be forced to just deal with whatever they threw at us, so content quality could suffer. If what we saw from the early Sony titles is any indication, we could have been left with a single format that wasn't worth owning. HD DVD's quality has probably put pressure on the Blu-ray format to provide quality as good, if not better than HD DVD if it wants to become the next generation software format of choice.
Conclusions
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