Has anyone taken a look at the Blue-Ray demo set-up in your neighborhood BestBuy?

I saw one the other day. It was just a disc of movie trailers, but gosh...it was singularly unimpressive. One trailer did look very good -- sharper and with clearly higher resolution than the others, but the rest looked no different from a standard 480p DVD. In fact I've seen regular DVDs which look better!

I'm assuming whoever cobbled together this demo didn't know what he was doing, because I was amazed how lacklustre it looked. And even the one trailer which looked good had visible compression -- and was noticeably inferior to HD broadcasts. It looked more like 750i than 1080i.


Paul

I saw a similarly unimpressive trade demo and the big question almost everyone was asking after was "Why does anyone need to buy it?" This was extracts from features and TV rather than trailers, but even on state of the art perfectly calibrated monitors (which maybe 0.001% of buyers will have in their homes) it just looked alright to my untrained eye - certainly no great quantum leap in quality. There was also a very telling admission from the demonstrator when she said that they didn't choose any older titles for the demo because the original quality of the films wasn't good enough for you to tell the difference - so in other words, anything before 1990 won't look any better because they can't improve on the original negatives.

As soon as one of these formats looks as good as the HD broadcasts I receive, I might then be pusuaded of their virtues.

But in order to pursude me to BUY one, I want title selection which includes Lawrence of Arabia, Barry Lyndon, Ran, Blade Runner and Apocalypse Now. Y'know, the kinds of film which are worth watching in HD!

I'm not blowing $700 just to watch Caddyshack!


Paul


P.S. -- Hey Andy, do you think they'll do an HD DVD / Blue Ray release of The Lady in White? As I recall it was done with a "supah-scan transfah"!!!