The newest Blu-ray basher: Stereophile!?

[UFAlien]

Does anyone here read Stereophile? It's a magazine I get for no apparent reason, and I'm regularly entertained by how hypocritical just about everything they write is.

Today I got an issue where one of the writers used the "Sam's Space" section to discuss the evils of region coding and how he somehow thinks Blu-ray made this worse.

Here are some choice quotes:

There are only three Blu-ray regions. A Region 1 Blu-ray player bought in the US or Canada might be able to play some Region 2 or 3 discs. That's because some Blu-ray discs are manufactured as Region 0. But which ones?

Sam leaves this hanging, apparently implying that it's impossible to know.

I was at a press conference recently at which a manufacturer presented an expensive Blu-ray player. I asked if there was a way to unlock the region coding for regular DVDs. Apparently not - at least, no way that the manufacturer would reveal in public.

Uh... DUUUUUUUUUUUUHH.

If I was ever tempted to buy a Blu-ray player to play favorite movies such as Pinocchio and Reds, I am no longer. I won't have to replace my vast DVD library, only to have my new Blu-ray player gag on our Region 2 and 5 DVDs.

Well IF he replaced them, he wouldn't HAVE Region 2 or 5 DVDs, would he? And it's not as if he needs to replace Region 1 discs...

And the following quote concludes the article:

Blu-ray? I should say shoo-ray!

Oh, well played, Sam. That piece of comedic genius is sure to guarantee nobody calls you out on your bull.

Here is the letter, in full, that I sent them:

I began receiving Stereophile a few months ago, and I still haven't figured out how it happened. It just sort of showed up one day, but I'm fine with that since it makes a good fly swatter. Sometimes I'll get really bored and read some of it. Now, I am not into the audio hobby - part of why I'm so perplexed at the fact that I receive it.

What I am interested in, and quite intensely, is film. I took enough offense to your article questioning the benefit of surround sound, which was capped off with the author stating he usually only watched movies in mono - brilliantly discrediting everything he'd just written about how useless surround is for anything other than "action movies". But the article on region coding - which then turned into an exercise in Blu-ray bashing - was rather pathetic.

Sam mentioned how a region free player allowed him to buy DVDs from Amazon UK, without mentioning the NTSC and PAL standards. You can put as many PAL discs into an NTSC player - region free or not - as you want, and get nothing. As for the purpose of region coding, it is done for a valid reason - the same company does not necessarily distribute the same film all over the world. They are simply protecting their investment in distribution rights. Another reason is simple economic differences - in Japan, for example, the average DVD is much more expensive than the USA.

As for his mention of upconverting to 1080i - upconverting in general is a very mixed bag. You cannot generate detail not present on the source. The best upconversion can do is smooth out "jaggies" in the video, and it can, in fact, remove smaller details. Also, for your information the "special uses" region coded DVDs are for certain international uses, like in-flight movies on airplanes.

As for region 1, 2, and 3 Blu-rays... well, for one, they are A, B, and C. Secondly, finding which Blu-ray discs are region-free is a rather simple matter. Websites such as www.blu-ray.com maintain lists of just this info - perform a simple search for any Blu-ray release and you'll get region information along with plenty of other technical info.

And then he decides not to buy a Blu-ray player because it uses region coding and can't play region 2 or 5 DVDs, and furthermore, as Sam seems shocked to report, the company won't tell the press how to disable region coding in a public venue. A company protecting its partner's interests? Unbelievable! Certainly, nothing like this could have happened with DVDs.

He then mentions how cheap DVDs are - a valid point, for sure, perhaps the only one in the article. If you don't think the quality is a large enough improvement from DVD to justify the price, that's your decision. But telling customers to avoid Blu-ray because it can't play foreign DVDs - a format which, in the same article, he refers to as "obsolete" - and deriding it for not openly telling the world how to hack its technology (which he apparently thinks was a common practice with DVD) is ridiculous, especially when, once again, in the same article, he points out one can in fact obtain region free BD players from the internet.

As a magazine about the audio hobby, you could, perhaps, avoid similar accuracy and logic issues by keeping articles limited to a field you are knowledgeable in - namely, audio. It would also improve the quality of the magazine if self-contradiction was less abundant.