SACD, DVD-AUDIO, HD-DVD and BLU-RAY

I saw both HD-DVD and BLU-RAY demos at the local audio (Mirage, KEF) / video mart.

Besides coming away with a vow to never underestimate the capability of some stores to treat people like they were marks at a carnival,…

I was not able to determine much visual difference between the new HighRes video formats and their ordinary DVD bretheren.

There was not more clarity or detail or color variety or…., except in perhaps a few rare scenes, (say one out of every 10 seconds the image would tighten-up and there would be increased definition).

This is partially because DVD upsampling… I mean upscaling technologies are getting better and better all the time – and partly because the monitors are not all 1080p yet.

We’ll see more at CEDIA 2006 in Denver, but all this seems mightily familiar, doesn’t it? How SACD / DVD-AUDIO are better, but not worlds better, than the format they were trying to supplant.

If, for the money, an ordinary Mary or Joe can spend a modest amount more on the player / video screen to get more improvement than what a similar investment in the new, ‘risky’ format offers… well…..

The one thing that the new video formats have going is CAPACITY. At 10 times the capacity of an ordinary DVD, things like T.V. series anthologies will fit on fewer than, well, let’s see: the 78 episodes of Star Trek would fit on only 2 discs, and on only 1 disc when the next generation[sic] DVD discs under-development come out.

Anyway, I originally hoped that these new HD discs might be used for highres audio – but now I wonder about the future of the format itself.

Perhaps it will be up to the HTPC and ipodPC crowd to take the format where no recording conglomerate will be able to go: because there will always be the inevitable HD-DVD-burners on computers….. 🙂