Any format you can hold
It may not be over until the fat lady sings, but there’s a large woman standing on the stage and the band are already rocking to the Blu-ray theme tune.
Despite desperate price cuts by Toshiba on its HD DVD players in the U.S., research firm Gartner are going all Seven Of Nine and describing their resistance as futile, predicting Blu-ray’s dominance to be complete by the end of 2008 in the consumer market.
Continue reading Gartner: It’s Almost Over For HD DVD
In the all-important Japanese market, the next-generation DVD Blu Ray format is not just kicking sand in the face of its rival HD-DVD platform – it’s taking it around the back of the bike sheds and giving a right pummeling.
Much like the famous VHS vs Betamax video cassette format wars of the late 1970s, both DVD formats are hitting the shops at the same time, although this time Sony’s Blu Ray is quickly emerging as the knockout winner.
Continue reading Blu Ray DVD Format Rips Up The Japanese Sales Charts. HD DVD Sulks
Rumours are circulating that HD-DVD could be losing the support of another studio.
Yesterday, we covered Warner Brothers showing their cards and deciding to support Blu-ray in favour of HD-DVD, despite comments from Toshiba that there may be some legal contracts in place with Warners.
Continue reading Paramount Could Also Drop HD-DVD
Hollywood studio big boys Warner Bros have dealt Toshiba and the HD DVD gang a mighty kick in the lasers by declaring that their high-definition DVD titles will soon be released exclusively in the rival Blu-ray disc format.
Continue reading Warners Backs Blu-ray, Gives HD DVD The Elbow
Microsoft wants both Next Gen HD DVD formats to fail, is the allegation that looks to be made by Michael Bay, the US film director & producer of many well known films such as Transformers; Armageddon; The Rock; Pearl Harbour and Bad Boys.
Continue reading Michael Bay: Microsoft Wants HD-DVD and Blu-Ray To Fail
Two years after Samsung first announced their intention to sell a dual fomat HD player that would play HD-DVD and Blu-ray – in the same unit.
As well as being the first dual format player, the BD-UP5000 Duo HD Player supports both formats interactive formats – DB Java and HDi.
Continue reading Samsung BD-UP5000 Duo HD Player Actually Released: IFA
Movie big boys Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation have announced that their next-generation DVDs will exclusively be in the HD DVD format, as both companies dump support for Sony’s rival format Blu-ray format.
Optiarc, the product of the joined Sony and NEC’s optical storage divisions, has released the BD-M100A, their first Blu-ray Burner.
It burns single and dual layer BD-R and BD-RE Blu-ray discs, giving a storage capacity of up to 35Gb and 50 Gb respectively. It also supports BD-ROM and BD-AV discs.
Continue reading Optiarc BD-M100A: Blu-ray Burner First From Sony NEC
Microsoft have actually made a sensible decision, an external HD DVD drive for the Xbox 360 and it works.
With a recent software update the Xbox 360 was given HD support and suddenly 1080i and 1080p resolutions sprang to life (of course not all games support these new modes). Unfortunately the internal DVD is a bog standard DVD-ROM drive and it doesn’t support the new HD formats at all.
The external drive connects through one of the Xbox 360’s USB ports, it’s a shame there aren’t any rear sockets as the cable dangles out the front of the unit. Just plug it in, connect its power supply unit and install the software that comes with the unit and that’s it. It all just works. MS have been nice and included a DVD remote, though the normal game controllers work too.
Upscaled content
A nice feature is that the Xbox 360 will upscale content to whatever your output is set to (tested using 1080i), so a normal standard def DVD can be output at 1080i or 1080p. It works surprisingly well. There were very occasional artefacts or blocking – but it’s eminently viewable, even on a high action film (shame the film itself wasn’t). There are quite a few DVD players that offer some kind of upscaling feature, but it generally adds to the cost significantly.
Silence is golden
DO NOT EVER watch a film with quiet bits in it. The major downside to this set-up is that the Xbox 360 sounds like a train rumbling through your living room, it’s incredibly loud. As soon the the film quietens, there it is. You cant quite block it out.
Current Xbox 360’s also don’t support HDMI (the newly announced Elite will) so the best resolutions require component video and that means a separate audio output. The cable does have an optical out, but it doesn’t support newer digital modes like Dolby TruSurround.
Verdict
For around 130 quid, a bargain HD-DVD drive that upscales as well, but it’s bulky and noisy.
Features: 88%
Ease of Use: 90%
Value for Money: 97%
Overall Score: 81% (let down by Xbox 360 noise)
The news for Sony and their PlayStation 3 just keeps getting worse.
Early pre-UK-release signs weren’t promising, nor were they looking any better when the UK PS3 was selling for £100 under their release price, a couple of days beforehand.
On the positive side, Sony did claim to sell 165,000 consoles in the UK in the first week – making it the UK’s fastest selling home console to date.
Now the official Chart Track figures, that follow sales in the UK are reporting to gamesindustry.biz that sales of the PS3 in the UK have dropped by 82% during its second week of release.
Software sales are also suffering with “sales of the top two PlayStation 3 titles, Resistance: Fall of Man and MotorStorm, had dropped by over 60 per cent.”
It’s not looking much better for the PS3 in Japan, where Bloomberg is claiming that Sony has sold 812,000 PS3s since November 11, against a mighty 1.95 million Wii consoles by Nintendo.