Ultimate AV assesses format war thus far

[JTK]

Ultimate AV puts out a free email newsletter once a month and this is part of the latest one that just showed up in my email box this morning.

I thought this was pretty much on the money for the most part:

Blu-ray Follies Continue, HD DVD Shines On

By Shane Buettner


In spite of all the posturing by the HD DVD camp over the last couple of years, the door was wide open for Sony and Blu-ray when it prepared to launch in June.

Toshiba hadn't even gotten close to its plans to launch in 2005 with an avalanche of titles by Christmas.

In the summer and fall of 2005 Warner and Paramount jumped shipped announcing they would also support Blu-ray, giving Sony's format a seemingly insurmountable lead with respect to studio support. Although Toshiba did manage to get out a $500 HD DVD player at launch, the players are plagued with slow response time and ergonomic bugs.

The software has come out at a pace that can generously be described as a trickle.

And yet as I write this, Blu-ray's launch is stalled in first gear for at least another month.


First, rather than wait until its own player was ready, Sony moved forward in launching Blu-ray software with only Samsung's BD-P1000 player on the market.

In last month's eNewsletter I wrote how myself and virtually everyone else was less than bowled over with what we were seeing from Blu-ray on the Samsung player.

Well, we found out one of the reasons why.

On July 20th it was revealed that the Samsung player had in fact shipped with an inherent defect.

The noise reduction feature in the Genesis chip set used in the player's video processing suite was inadvertently switched on at a high enough level to soften the image, and ostensibly cause other artifacts that were clearly contributing to Blu-ray's poor showing.

And before anyone could ask how this could happen, Samsung dropped the bomb that while a firmware fix is in the works, it won't be available until September!

Holy holding patterns Batman!

Ever intrepid, Sony and Lion's Gate are plugging along and releasing more and more Blu-ray titles throughout the summer—in spite of the fact that there will not be properly working player to play them on until at least September!

In addition to Samsung fixing its player at that time we should also see players from Panasonic and Pioneer Elite, followed by Sony's own in late October.


So, thus far while Blu-ray appears to be serving as a model for how NOT to launch a format, HD DVD is looking more and more like the little format that could.


While it's only got three studios behind it, two of those studios, Warner and Universal, are pushing hard.

While Warner has something over twenty HD DVD titles available as I write this, the studio has gone on record as stating it will have as many as 50 more out by the end of the year, including a day and date with DVD release of The Sopranos: Season 6 in November.

Universal says its number of HD DVD titles will reach a total of 60 this year, and while Paramount isn't stepping up with big numbers, they have just announced that the Tom Cruise vehicle Mission: Impossible 3 will debut on October 30th on DVD, HD DVD and Blu-ray.

But numbers aside, HD DVD is setting a performance benchmark by providing consistently outstanding picture and sound quality.

On top of the overall quality, just about every other title is mind-blowing, best HD I've ever seen type of stuff. Ergonomic foibles aside, we can forgive a lot when the performance reaches this level.

Right now, we're waiting to see if Blu-ray can make a game of it.