By Mike Drach
This holiday season, retailers will gleefully push expensive new high-definition DVD players and movies onto consumers. Forced to choose between two competing formats — Blu-ray and HD-DVD — smart shoppers should avoid both
Though many of today’s technophiles are too young to remember the early days of the VCR, others will recognize in today’s high-definition format war a parallel to the mid-’70s, when backers of two incompatible standards were vying for your videocassette dollar.
These fierce rivals were called Betamax and VHS.
At the time, Sony — and Sony alone — was backing Beta. It was an arguably superior technology, offering mildly sharper visuals and longer runtimes. But Beta was utterly crushed in the format wars. VHS was cheaper, more widely available and it won support from both Hollywood and the porn industry.
Today, Sony is backing Blu-ray technology, but this time it’s not alone. Blu-ray is sponsored by a veritable coalition of the willing that includes Dell, Panasonic, HP and Samsung. Blu-ray’s rival HD-DVD also has some powerful supporters, just not quite as many.
When these formats were first announced, many pundits were calling for Blu-ray’s early and decisive victory. Hopefully, the easy win would avert a messy, confusing hornet’s nest of a format war that would ultimately only hurt the customer.
And what’s the verdict now that the first hi-def DVD players have arrived? Well, they both kind of stink.
Retail sales of HD players have been disappointingly sluggish — mostly because the technology itself is lacklustre. “Consumer response has been lukewarm,” says Jan Saxton of Adams Media, a home entertainment research firm. “We don’t foresee a meteoric rise in use of high-def DVDs.”
Early reviews noted what many passing customers (and a few honest salespersons) have said from the start: the new formats are not much better than regular DVDs. At this rate, both technologies could go the way of the Laserdisc.
When DVD technology first hit the market, it was a giant leap in terms of capacity, visual clarity and ease of use. They looked awesome on most television screens, they didn’t need rewinding, they didn’t jam and they could pack all kinds of frivolous bonuses.
But the bunny-hop from DVD to high-definition simply isn’t major enough to spark a consumer revolution. Given that the first HD players have been slow, glitchy and user-unfriendly, they’re in many ways a big step down.
Videophiles, luckily, have other options. If you’ve never heard of an upconverting DVD player, don’t feel bad — you’re not the only one. But many relatively dirt-cheap DVD players now include the option to “upconvert” garden-variety DVDs to qualities approaching hi-def glory. If you have a high-definition TV, a new DVD player would make a much better investment than this heavily rushed technology.
In Blu-ray’s case, the problems have been especially glaring. Sony had to delay its overseas launch of PlayStation 3, thanks to a shortage of the blue laser diodes needed for its disc drives.
To many European gamers, that meant a less than joyeux Noël. Moreover, the first Blu-ray players —$1,000 price tag notwithstanding — were unable to support the 50GB of data initially promised, saddling consumers with a relatively paltry 25GB. The first Blu-ray discs came bundled with MPEG-2 compression, despite the widespread use of superior compression formats. And headlines like CNET’s “First Blu-ray disc drive won’t play Blu-ray movies” must have caused its share of headaches around Sony’s boardroom.
Not that Toshiba’s HD-DVD format gets a free pass, either. Here’s another technology that came out too early with too little to offer. Do you really need a $500 player just to see a slightly crisper version of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic — a beige-tinted, steadicammed opus that redefined the word “gritty”? Most Hollywood movies aren’t even shot in a way that necessitates this high def-ication, so why all the hubbub?
A source close to Toshiba promises the second-generation HD-DVD players will fix previous glitches. The unit will also be “much, much more affordable.” Well, let’s hope upcoming players also address the overly restrictive use of Digital Rights Management. Suffice to say, it’s turned off the majority of early adopters who like to have control over their purchased media.
But control-freakishness is exactly the issue here. Two years ago, two consortiums decided to wage corporate war in hope of total victory for their proprietary format; now we’re stuck with a couple of so-so systems and no clear winner in sight. Competition is a great and necessary thing, but this battle might make losers out of everyone.
Don’t let them make a loser out of you. Save your cash and let it ride for a couple of years. We’ll soon know which was the winning bet and which was the losing Beta.
