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more on STUPID STUPID High-Def Forced To Down-Convert
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2006 08:25:58 -0500
Begin forwarded message: From: Tim Onosko <onosko () gmail com> Date: January 26, 2006 2:00:33 AM EST To: dave () farber net Subject: Re: [IP] more on STUPID STUPID High-Def Forced To Down-Convert Reply-To: tim () onosko com I beg to differ with Mr. Stahlman, as he spouts the party line without checking his facts. First, he is correct that the studios want HD, and for the exactly the "arms race" reasons that he suggests. Many in the studios believe that, just as the American viewing public dumped their VHS cassettes for DVDs, they will abandon DVDs for the HDTV equivalent. Unfortunately people love their DVDs and value the extraordinary film libraries the medium has allowed them to built. And, for now at least, most consumers don't yet see the value in upgrading to the next generation systems that are expensive and offer only a handful of film titles. More on this in a second. The form of digital cinema that one finds in a very select (fewer than 1000) number of theaters today, is "2K," not "4K," which is envisioned but still in development. The industry spec for 2K digital cinema was only released last year, and isn't even implemented on a wide scale yet. Super high-res 4K digital cinema is NOT anticipated for the home, and is where H'wood draws the line between the quality of a theatrical experience and the home cinema. As for 8K resolution? A pipe dream, but hardly a new development straining to break free from the labs. The Japanese CE manufacturers want the high-def DVDs so they can right what it sees as a rip-off by the Chinese, who dropped the bottom out of DVD prices with their sub-$50 players. The new high def players will range from very expensive ($500 for the forthcoming Toshiba) to staggering ($1800 for Pioneer's new Blu-Ray player). These are going to be a very tough sell. What Hollywood must overcome with the HDTV version of DVD is a widespread inability, on the part of the audience, to tell the difference between a regular DVD and a new HD disc on a screen smaller than five or six feet. Regular DVDs look phenomenal on new HDTV sets, and it is going to take some very dramatic marketing to interest any but the predictable wave of maybe a couple hundred thousand videophiles, the same crowd that were wedded to the ill-fated Laserdisc, twenty years ago. Resistance is futile? Many will "resist" by simply ignoring the new discs without a more compelling reason to invest in them. Oh, and by the way, there is also little wisdom to the forthcoming format battle between Blu-Ray and the competing format, HD-DVD. That alone will sour most consumers. On 1/25/06, David Farber <dave () farber net> wrote:
Begin forwarded message: From: Newmedia () aol com Date: January 25, 2006 4:02:55 PM EST To: dave () farber net Subject: Re: [IP] ] more on STUPID STUPID High-Def Forced To Down- Convert Dave:When are people going take the hint that Hollywood does not want HD to be successful?Quite the contrary -- the studios are completely betting their future on HD . . . completely. Super HD (4K x 2K) is in the theaters now and coming to our homes in a few years. Ultra HD (8K x 4K) is in the labs now.
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