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[fenrif]

Except they are examples of true innovation. They didn't just invent a technology, they invented an aspect of life to go with it. Blu-Ray has not done that. It's been out for long enough to make assumptions on it's growth.

I'm not really arguing from ignorance, I'm arguing from watching trends, cultural response etc. I'd say anyone claiming Blu-Ray is an innovative and useful technology are the ones arguing from a base of being ignorant of Blu-Ray.

The photocopier didn't create a new aspect of life, it just made an allready existing aspect extremely easier. You're implying that before the photocopier noone ever copied anything ever. No forms were ever needed to be filled out in duplicate or triplicate. Noone ever had to type up 3 copies of a document.

If being able to store much more data in the same amount of space isn't usefull, then I don't know what is. Sure it isn't groundbreaking technology, but by your logic CDs and DVDs are useless because they do the same job as floppy discs, only better. I'm sure they're dead technology too. No way they'll ever take off.

HD on 360 doesn't make a massive difference to me, at the least. TV can definitely handle it.

There are scores of games on the 360 that are nearly unplayable on standard definition TVs because all the text is unreadable, Dead Rising for example.

Speaking as someone who has played 360 on standard definition TVs from launch untill a month ago, there is definatly a difference.

[G-Flex]

The reason you don't notice a difference in quality in the Blu-Ray is because your TV and sound system aren't advanced enough to actually relay the quality to you. It sucks, I know, since (as I mentioned before) I have a 30 year old Toshiba television. It weighs four hundred pounds and is a huge box. I can't even see the sides of the picture, because everything is too wide to fit on my TV nowadays. And I certainly don't even get HD quality, let alone Blu-Ray. When I play the first Uncharted, I can barely see the enemies, it's like playing hard mode ALL THE TIME.

When you see HD and Blu-Ray on a television that can handle it, though, it really is awesome to look at.

This is almost definitely true. The difference in resolution between DVD/standard-definition TV and 1080-line is pretty damn pronounced.

That being said, buying a good TV and making sure it's good is a little annoying these days, since a lot of otherwise-decent TVs like to throw a bunch of really, really bad visual post-processing in your face, resulting in no better quality at all and sometimes even lagging the image noticeably behind the audio (although you can usually disable this crap).

DVD will disappear eventually. There's no reason for it not to get replaced by something better, as people get TVs capable of taking advantage of it. Especially when it's something that's no more difficult to use, and as the price drops.

[beorn080]

Except they are examples of true innovation. They didn't just invent a technology, they invented an aspect of life to go with it. Blu-Ray has not done that. It's been out for long enough to make assumptions on it's growth.

I'm not really arguing from ignorance, I'm arguing from watching trends, cultural response etc. I'd say anyone claiming Blu-Ray is an innovative and useful technology are the ones arguing from a base of being ignorant of Blu-Ray.

The photocopier didn't create a new aspect of life, it just made an allready existing aspect extremely easier. You're implying that before the photocopier noone ever copied anything ever. No forms were ever needed to be filled out in duplicate or triplicate. Noone ever had to type up 3 copies of a document.

If being able to store much more data in the same amount of space isn't usefull, then I don't know what is. Sure it isn't groundbreaking technology, but by your logic CDs and DVDs are useless because they do the same job as floppy discs, only better. I'm sure they're dead technology too. No way they'll ever take off.

HD on 360 doesn't make a massive difference to me, at the least. TV can definitely handle it.

There are scores of games on the 360 that are nearly unplayable on standard definition TVs because all the text is unreadable, Dead Rising for example.

Speaking as someone who has played 360 on standard definition TVs from launch untill a month ago, there is definatly a difference.

Hmm, games that are unplayable unless you upgrade your tv. That sounds expensive.

As for the copier, it depends on which one you mean.

The first copiers used Ammonia and chemical reactions to create copies.  I've used one, and the process is ingenious. Those were very useful, but limited, much like early computers. Then, someone invented the electronic copier, and opened it up for the masses, since you no longer had to work with dangerous chemicals. Much like a certain platform everyone knocks.

[fenrif]

Well i was exaggerating about games being unplayable really, you can play dead rising fine without being able to read the text. But all the mission objectives are given via text, and the game is VERY heavily focused on timer missions. Nearly everything in the game has a time limit, and after that it's lost forever for that playthrough, including the main story missions I think.

I'm sure before the first ever copying machine was invented people still had to make copies. They just didn't have a machine to do it.

[Pathos]

The photocopier didn't create a new aspect of life, it just made an allready existing aspect extremely easier. You're implying that before the photocopier noone ever copied anything ever. No forms were ever needed to be filled out in duplicate or triplicate. Noone ever had to type up 3 copies of a document.

If being able to store much more data in the same amount of space isn't usefull, then I don't know what is. Sure it isn't groundbreaking technology, but by your logic CDs and DVDs are useless because they do the same job as floppy discs, only better. I'm sure they're dead technology too. No way they'll ever take off.

Actually, making an aspect of life easier is creating a new aspect of it. See vacuum hoovers etc. It frees up time to allocate to other activities, basically destroyed a bunch of jobs and created quite a few new ones.

It depends on necessity. Do I view it as necessary to have a disc able to store 50GB? No, not really. I have an external hard drive for that, which is a lot easier to reformat and mess about with. Compare with CDs and DVDs, which were a necessity in terms of practical applications (It'd take, what? 3000 floppy discs to install your average computer game nowadays?), whilst Blu-Ray really, really isn't (HD movies are necessary? They seem overhyped.).

Try and notice CDs rapidly changed pretty much everything, allowing people to place complex programming and graphical interfaces on transferable discs. DVDs didn't do this, really, but they were refining the application of using discs to watch movies, instead of just basic data transfer. Blu-Ray, in contrast, is just a simple "BIGGER IS BETTER". Do HD movies even take up 50GB? An entire season of a program (in HD) is about 20GB, which is five DVDs, something I'd enjoy in a boxset. Now, if you're trying to fit an entire series on a single disc, I can understand, but WHY would you do that?

I assume Blu-Ray might have a faster read speed, which is necessary for HD programs? Or am I wrong?

[Grakelin]

To be fair to games like Dead Rising, playing console games on an older TV is hard all around these days. Games aren't really made for small TVs anymore (mine was considered big screen back before I was born, though, honest) and HD is leading the way.

Playing FIFA World Cup 2010 on my PS3 is a pain when you can't read the names of the players or see the numbers on their back.

Not so bad for basic play. I have no issue with GTA IV where attention to detail isn't that big of an issue (except for flying rats), and when my players score in FIFA it zooms in close and I can see how photorealistic David Villa is.*


*I never play as Spain, and I never score.

And I only play the demo cause that game is $80.00

[fenrif]

Actually, making an aspect of life easier is creating a new aspect of it. See vacuum hoovers etc. It frees up time to allocate to other activities, basically destroyed a bunch of jobs and created quite a few new ones.

It depends on necessity. Do I view it as necessary to have a disc able to store 50GB? No, not really. I have an external hard drive for that, which is a lot easier to reformat and mess about with. Compare with CDs and DVDs, which were a necessity in terms of practical applications (It'd take, what? 3000 floppy discs to install your average computer game nowadays?), whilst Blu-Ray really, really isn't (HD movies are necessary? They seem overhyped.).

Try and notice CDs rapidly changed pretty much everything, allowing people to place complex programming and graphical interfaces on transferable discs. DVDs didn't do this, really, but they were refining the application of using discs to watch movies, instead of just basic data transfer. Blu-Ray, in contrast, is just a simple "BIGGER IS BETTER". Do HD movies even take up 50GB? An entire season of a program (in HD) is about 20GB, which is five DVDs, something I'd enjoy in a boxset. Now, if you're trying to fit an entire series on a single disc, I can understand, but WHY would you do that?

I assume Blu-Ray might have a faster read speed, which is necessary for HD programs? Or am I wrong?
[/quote]

I don't really understand how you admit DVD's just did the same thing CD's did but bigger, but when blu-ray does it it's useless? Just because you right now don't view it as necissary to have a 50gb disc doesn't mean in the future it wont be needed. You're assuming that games and films wont ever ever need more storage, just like when CDs came out and they were useless because you could fit games on floppies? Also, when CDs were first released I'm fairly sure most CD releases didn't use the full capacity. Same with DVD's. That's not really a very good reason to just discount them as useless and dead on release.

Vacuum hoovers are qutie a bit different than photocopiers and blu-rays, since they were a drastic leap forward. Before photocopiers you could just type up more than one copy of something, or have more than one copy printed, etc. Yeah it made things easier, but not so drastically different as you're making out. To see how different life was before vacuum cleaners, try cleaning your carpet without one. You'd have to take it all up, take it outside, and beat it with a stick. It's not a valid comparison. Both improve upon something that allready existed, but the vacuum was a huge huge improvement and actually did allow people to do things they couldn't do before. Before the vacuum cleaner fitted carpets were utterly impractical, and people only cleaned them very infrequently (once a year or so). The photocopier just let people do something they could allready do easier and quicker.

Arguing that technology will NEVER improve such that more disc space might be needed in the future is really quite short sighted.

If you don't like HD movies that's fine, but for someone who is talking from a perspective of "current trends" and "cultural response" you really aren't very informed. Even to a casual observer it's pretty damn obvious that huge amounts of people are heavily investing in HD, be it players, discs, TVs, video cards, etc. There IS a difference.

Why [/i]wouldn't[/i] you fit an entire series on a single blu-ray? I mean, seriously, give me a few reasons why this is a bad idea. I'm completely dumbfounded. It's like saying "why would you want to fit an entire season on a DVD when you could have a few VHS tapes?" I'm not seeing your logic here.

I dunno, it just seems to me like you're saying "I personally don't use blu-ray, so its a dead medium that's a complete waste of time."

[Josephus]

Betamax and mini disk were far superior to blue ray

'Do notte buy Betamacks.' - Agnes Nutter, The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

[Dakk]

I'm also failing to see how exactly the "blueray is useless" argument applies here. Following fenrif's line of thought, why woundn't you make use of 1 blueray's extra storage to store the same thing in several DVD's? Its also indeed considerably faster to read, so it has a faster transfer rate, which improves quality and loading times by a decent bit, you just don't notice the difference because today's video software and games don't actualy require that much as of now, so a DVD can still fill the requirements.

They said the same thing about the DVD once it was out, though to a lesser extent because the technology of the time was actualy already surpassing the CD's limits, something which has not happened yet in our time, as DVD can handle most media by itself still. Though the wide use of HD and new image formats is changing that, the next generation may be hitting our doors soon. Microsoft apparently already has its next Xbox planned for the near future.

The main reason sony chose the blueray for the PS3 though, was due to its near exclusivity of use at the time. Its really hard to pirate a blueray game, unlike a DVD one. There are already blueray recorders out there, but they're expensive and few people have actualy cracked the proccess of burning blueray images.

Now I'm gonna be a jerk and stream video on my PS3. I'd only be happier if it could play transformice aswell. It can play flash games, but only the ones that only use the mouse.

[G-Flex]

High-definition media for the home is good because it's the first time in frigging history we're even able to watch movies in decent resolution on a home system. NTSC/PAL and DVD resolutions are, quite frankly, not very good, particularly for theatrical things. This is on top of the fact that you're dealing with fairly lossy compression.

[Pathos]

I don't really understand how you admit DVD's just did the same thing CD's did but bigger, but when blu-ray does it it's useless? Just because you right now don't view it as necissary to have a 50gb disc doesn't mean in the future it wont be needed. You're assuming that games and films wont ever ever need more storage, just like when CDs came out and they were useless because you could fit games on floppies? Also, when CDs were first released I'm fairly sure most CD releases didn't use the full capacity. Same with DVD's. That's not really a very good reason to just discount them as useless and dead on release.

Actually, DVDs didn't. It allowed videos to be placed onto discs a lot easier and be read by specialised technology. So, essentially, you COULD watch videos using discs. It's impossible for CDs to do that (I think), you can only use computer drives to read them and them temporarily store them on your hard drive whilst watching the movie.

CDs were able to be used for things other than games. Music and the like, which they're still used for because they're the best format.

Blu-Ray's been out for... About eight years, now? Five in the Western market? It really doesn't seem like people are that interested in them. Maybe because of the expensiveness of all players, but I don't see it dropping any time soon (maybe five to ten years) and by then we'll have that holographic disc on the rise, as it has already been developed - all they have to do now is manufacture it far cheaper.

Vacuum hoovers are qutie a bit different than photocopiers and blu-rays, since they were a drastic leap forward. Before photocopiers you could just type up more than one copy of something, or have more than one copy printed, etc. Yeah it made things easier, but not so drastically different as you're making out. To see how different life was before vacuum cleaners, try cleaning your carpet without one. You'd have to take it all up, take it outside, and beat it with a stick. It's not a valid comparison. Both improve upon something that allready existed, but the vacuum was a huge huge improvement and actually did allow people to do things they couldn't do before. Before the vacuum cleaner fitted carpets were utterly impractical, and people only cleaned them very infrequently (once a year or so). The photocopier just let people do something they could allready do easier and quicker.

Really, get a printing press or whatever. I'm sure you can't.

Photocopiers allowed your average person to do all this. It doesn't matter if it could be done, it matters if the masses can do it.

Arguing that technology will NEVER improve such that more disc space might be needed in the future is really quite short sighted.

If you don't like HD movies that's fine, but for someone who is talking from a perspective of "current trends" and "cultural response" you really aren't very informed. Even to a casual observer it's pretty damn obvious that huge amounts of people are heavily investing in HD, be it players, discs, TVs, video cards, etc. There IS a difference.

Why [/i]wouldn't[/i] you fit an entire series on a single blu-ray? I mean, seriously, give me a few reasons why this is a bad idea. I'm completely dumbfounded. It's like saying "why would you want to fit an entire season on a DVD when you could have a few VHS tapes?" I'm not seeing your logic here.

I dunno, it just seems to me like you're saying "I personally don't use blu-ray, so its a dead medium that's a complete waste of time."

I'm not saying that it never will, but by the time Blu-Ray is in a place to be competitive with DVDs, there will already be technologies overtaking Blu-Ray.

Here. People are buying HD TVs etc because they allow them to watch HD channels and because they LOOK pretty damn nice and wide. People aren't buying Blu-Ray because it's really not that interesting. Total spending on Blu-Ray discs: 151.4m euros. Total spending on DVDs: 1.3bn euros. There's a massive difference, and as the article says, sales have already slowed, even during Q4. (ie. Christmas?)

Disc could get damaged, lost, etc etc. More discs, less data gets lost if you lose a single CD. Nevermind there's no real point in shoving it all onto a single CD when you could have a pretty boxset.

That's pretty much what I'm saying, but I'm fairly certain I'm correct. It's just a transitionary step (and not even a longlived one) up to higher formats which will probably just be as useless.

[Soulwynd]

Are you sure? Everyone and their mom in any big city here has a bluray player and 1080p movies with 5.1/7.1 audio.

Maybe the US is a bit late on the blurayness? Course, Brazil for some reason shares the same region code as the outback and kiwiland, and we all know they're japan's bitches when it comes to technology and vehicles. That makes us bitches-in-arms in the entertainment business.

[G-Flex]

So, essentially, you COULD watch videos using discs. It's impossible for CDs to do that (I think), you can only use computer drives to read them and them temporarily store them on your hard drive whilst watching the movie.

Video CD. It exists. It never really caught on, but it was a standard, and it was used, even in dedicated players. There's no fundamental reason whatsoever why you couldn't use a CD for dedicated video; again, it even has its own industry standard. It never caught on because DVD was just around the corner and Video CD simply didn't offer very great quality for, say, movies.

There are a ton of CD standards; look up the Rainbow Books on Wikipedia.

CDs were able to be used for things other than games. Music and the like, which they're still used for because they're the best format.

How does that make CDs unique? DVD is used for games, movies, and music, just like CDs are/were. In fact, DVD-audio is better than CD-audio, but at that point, there are such diminishing returns in audio quality that the impetus to replace the old technology simply doesn't overcome the social and technological inertia/hurdles involved. So no, CDs aren't "the best format"; we have vastly better formats in terms of portability (flash memory based players) and in quality (DVD-audio, or any arbitrary audio file sitting on your computer file mastered with quality greater than that of CD-audio), but the latter simply never caught on.

Blu-Ray's been out for... About eight years, now? Five in the Western market? It really doesn't seem like people are that interested in them.

This happens sometimes. DVD was around for many years (I think since 1997 in the US?) before it started getting ubiquitous, even.

Maybe because of the expensiveness of all players, but I don't see it dropping any time soon (maybe five to ten years) and by then we'll have that holographic disc on the rise, as it has already been developed - all they have to do now is manufacture it far cheaper.

Things are routinely developed very, very far prior to being commercially viable. The "manufacture it cheaper" (and more reliably, I might add) part can take a very long time.

Disc could get damaged, lost, etc etc. More discs, less data gets lost if you lose a single CD. Nevermind there's no real point in shoving it all onto a single CD when you could have a pretty boxset.

Are you serious? People don't spread data across multiple disks just because it looks nice. The only reason box sets exist is because the data won't fit on a single disk. Looking pretty has never, ever been the reason for multiple-disk sets to exist. Ever. It has always been due to necessity. Seriously, that's like asking why people would want a music CD when they could have a pretty album cover instead. It might be pretty, but it's not the guiding factor whatsoever. It would cost less to produce, and not to mention be a hell of a lot more convenient for the consumer, if things could come on a single disk instead of multiple. Always has been, always will.

That's pretty much what I'm saying, but I'm fairly certain I'm correct. It's just a transitionary step (and not even a longlived one) up to higher formats which will probably just be as useless.

Why would they be useless?

[beorn080]

-snip-

Long quote is long.

First part. CD's are quite capable of running video off of them, and a great many players have that capability. The problems are primarily space related. You can just about fit one episode at good quality onto a CD, and still have it play. If you use the standard compressed methods that common, they don't play on dvd players, but they store nicely.

Second part. Quite right. Fenrif has never used a typewriter before, or he wouldn't say this sort of thing. There is a reason large companies hired typists in bulk.

Third part. Again. Have to agree. Current storage capabilities vs need isn't even close. Aside from the seedier side of data storage, there isn't any NEED for such massive storage. All truly essential documents, wordfiles and the like, can be stored on a CD. I can almost guarantee that a single CD is sufficient backup space for the true essentials. If not, two or three. Yes, this doesn't count save files or other entertainment, but those are optional.

Heck, I've heard of new developments giving us storage rates at a terabyte a square inch, with upper theoretical limit of 10 TB/In squared. That's hard drive space incidentally.

Ninja edit: Soul, Yes, they may have a bluray player, but whats the ratio of DVDs vs Bluray?

Double ninja edit: ugh im just postin

[G-Flex]

You seriously expect people to back up all their essentials on CDs? I've done that recently. It's a royal pain in the ass. Hell, I've had to split up RAR archives across CDs. I do not want to have to do that again.

And that's not even counting multimedia stuff, which wasn't even on the hard drive I had to back stuff up off of, nor was it a full disk image.


You're also not considering heavier-duty usage like, say, servers. Those need as much storage as they can get, trust me.