rileyuk.co.uk

Blu-Ray has won! Toshiba have announced that following the decision from major US film studio's backing of Blu-Ray there is now a very small chance that they will win the format war and have decided to halt production. The units will be on sale till the end of March 2008 and then, presumably, they will have used up all their back stock. The technical support will be in place till the end of the year and then over and done with.

I sort of feel sorry for all those people who bought the very expensive HD DVD drives over the last few years, to have the format culled very quickly must be very annoying. Not only that but they will have to now go and get the Blu-Ray drive and rebuy all of their high definition discs.

We were lucky that our tv will not cope with the high resolution. Therefore we did not buy the high definition drives! In fact I don't think our current tv actually has any definition at all (that might just be the size of the unit though to be fair). It would be nice to get a big, high res tv but we will need to get a bigger house first which is way too expensive at the moment.

I'd never advise anyone to take up a new technology within the first few years of it's inception. Firstly, the first-gen equipment will always be a little flaky and frankly you can never be certain (like HD-DVD) whether it's going to last long enough.

I still can't get any great enthusiasm about blu-ray...I don't want to replace all my dvds!

And we have a winner! Thankfully. At least Sony get some karma for their loss to their technically inferior rival in the VHS versus Betmax war. Replacing DVDs would be a pain in the backside, except that I don't actually own any, but I do empathise.

At least Betamax survived in variant form as a professional format for TV production.

As regards hiring films, DVDs are dreadful, much worse than VHS ever was. The slightest scratch and they jump back to the beginning, which is very frustrating. It was very rare for a VHS tape to be unplayable.

Actually VHS was capable of excellent quality, but I think that quality was latterly deliberately reduced to make DVD seem more attractive.

I'll buy Blu-Ray eventually, but there's no rush and to be honest there aren't that many films worth paying the price of the discs for.

johnriley1uk wrote:As regards hiring films, DVDs are dreadful, much worse than VHS ever was. The slightest scratch and they jump back to the beginning, which is very frustrating. It was very rare for a VHS tape to be unplayable.

I don't accept the quality any more when a DVD jumps it goes right back in the post with the faulty sign ticked. My personal DVD's never have any problems so it must be that people renting them let their dogs chew the disk or leave them upturned on the coffee table - they have no real respect for someone else's property when it happens. I suppose that a disk will usually have the content on show for 100% of the time - a tape reveals the sensitive part containing the information only when playing, thusly the main cause of damage would be a faulty player.

johnriley1uk wrote:Actually VHS was capable of excellent quality, but I think that quality was latterly deliberately reduced to make DVD seem more attractive.

I wonder if they had to worsen the quality of components to get the cost of the machines down thusly having an effect on the quality of playback. It is an interesting questions but arguably there are more quality consistent DVD disks than VHS. That said DVD's would have a life span of about 20-25 year, I wonder how old the oldest VHS is? Anyone know?

I wonder how old the oldest VHS is? Anyone know?

Our oldest VHS recordings were made in 1980 and still look the same now as they did then. Tape does eventually deteriorate, but we are talking many many decades. Print through is one possible fault, where the magnetism of one part of the tape affects the layers packed next to it, but the effect on video is very small.

Don't forget that most of the professional audio recordings made on tape since the late 1940s are still perfectly fine. Early video suffers from synch problems now, but mainly because the recorders able to play the tapes can be in shocking condition.