Blu-ray Hits Key Milestone Faster than Standard-Def

An anonymous reader writes "Slashdot has already reported on the go-go sales for the 'Casino Royale' Blu-ray on Amazon, but now comes news that the same Blu-ray disc is the first high-def disc to ship 100,000 units within the United States. It took standard-def DVD eleven months to reach that retail milestone (in 1998 with 'Air Force One'), but with 'Royale,' the nine-month old Blu-ray format now has done it two months faster."

Re:Great....

[Anonymous Coward]

http://wesleytech.com/backupbluray-guide/83/ [wesleytech.com]

Not quite as easy as one-click DVD Shrink yet, but still pretty simple.

So I guess you'll be picking up a Blu-Ray player tonight?

Re:Faster?

[PRMan]

This is so untrue. My brother has a 27" 720p HDTV and you can EASILY tell the difference between an upconverted DVD and HD.

It is absolutely true with my 50" 720p.

Re:Shiped but not Sold?

[Anonymous Coward]

Call be cynical about whole anti blu-ray sentiment, but I slightly doubt Sony buys their discs at Amazon.

IMO, don't rely on a Playstation to play movies...

[MS-06FZ]

...Especially when said Playstation is still a new model.

I don't know about the PS3, but the PS2 was in a similar situation with its DVD drive. Ultimately, the DVD drive in the PS2 wasn't the best. It worked ok on simple movies, but it tended to get edge cases wrong on more complex discs. You'd see this as messed up subtitles on foreign films, "camera angle" changes that were handled incorrectly, menu choices that don't get translated correctly in the film and so on. Granted, a lot of these were bugs on the disc itself, but better players managed to work around the bugs and work correctly regardless.

Heh, is that all?

My PS2's DVD video playback always had a habit of freezing, stuttering through sections, or crashing to a black screen. "Unable to read disc". These were perfectly fine, brand new DVDs mind you, and my Sony DVD player plays them just fine.

Want to get lured in by the promise of a less-expensive Blu-Ray DVD player that's also a game console? OK, but in the end it may not be a player you want to rely on for movies. Then you'll still have a perfectly good game system, and you may buy a new DVD player so you can reliably watch movies, and all's well. Well, except did you make that game system purchase for the right reasons? Would you have bought that particular system if not for the lure of DVD playback? Possibly - but that's a question you should consider. Buy the game system as if it didn't have DVD playback features, and then see if it's worth it to you.

Of course, this whole post is gonna stink like FUD, and in a way it is - I had a bad experience with DVD playback on my PS2 and I'm using that to cast doubt on the PS3 because I would expect the situation to turn out similarly. Naturally, I could be wrong about the PS3. But after the PS2 I personally wouldn't bank on that - and so if I buy a PS3 at some point, I'll be buying a game system, not a movie player.

Yawn...

[spiritraveller]

This is even less impressive than Microsoft's claim that Vista is selling faster than XP did.

And it suffers from the same oversight...

That is, it fails to take into account the increases in market volume and buying power which would make it a useful comparison and instead uses the same raw number to compare two very different markets in two different eras. That raw number of 100,000 doesn't mean the same thing at the dawn of the DVD player as it does now at the dawn of the "BluRay player."

A useful comparison would consist of a ratio or percentage adjusted to take those differences into account. But it's obvious that an honest comparison isn't going to impress anyone.

After 12 years (I'm making an educated guess here), all they can say is that they beat the same raw number of purchases by 2 months?!?!

There's an old saying... "you can't polish a turd."

Re:IMO, don't rely on a Playstation to play movies

[Afrosheen]

Yeah I'd say it's FUD because you don't own a PS3 and therefore can't have a valid opinion on the Blu-Ray functionality.

I do own one and the BR support is second to none. Furthermore since it's online, any time Sony finds a bug, they can sneak the fix in with the next firmware update. The PS3 will remain the best BR player despite what anyone else builds. Not only that but tons of magazines have already had showdowns with BR players and the PS3 wins every single time. Speed, ergonomics, correctness, etc. it wins in every category.

Now there are a very small handful of 'video purists' that criticize the lack of 1080p/24fps support which is true film and prevents 4:3 pulldown, but Sony can add support at any time via firmware. Not only that but I have yet to see *any* player support 1080p/24.

Re:PS3 owners?

[xero314]

The PS3 doesn't being HDMI or RCA stereo out only.

I couldn't determine if you were saying the P3 only had HDMI and RCA outs, or if you receiver doesn't have an optical in. If you were saying the former, and your receiver does have optical in, then you are just wrong because the P3 has a single optical out port. I'm not sure how else you would be hooking up 6/5.1 surround sound (not saying there are no other options), but the preferred method, if you want high quality sound, would be by HDMI or optical. There are a number of covert options available that should allow you to hook the PS3 to your receiver and get full 6/5.1 surround sound if you don't happen to have optical in.

Five combo DVD's, play in SD too

[SuperKendall]

Those discs you mentioned also all supported DVD playback, so there's no way to infer much from the sales figures of those discs. I actually think people that just bought HD-TVs are buying some of those expecting them to look better because they are "HD-DVD", illustrating the hideous mistake made in choosing such a similar name for a new format.

Meaningless numbers

[Slashdot Insider]

UMD's shipped a ton too. How'd they sell? Oh right, so many people bought them that retailers pulled them from store shelves to reclaim shelf space.