Answer honestly

[anarky]

I've seen BluRay demos at Costco of Spidey 3 and Pirates 3. Call me insane, but I actually think the quality is too good. They wind up looking like they were filmed with those cameras they use for soap operas.

Sad thing is, DVDs will be marketed more and more for dumbasses who want foolscreen and don't mind the compression caused by having three or four movies on a disc, leaving those of us who actually care about movies but don't want to upgrade sorta "in the lurch."

[Seven]

Do you give a flying rat's assfuck about HD-DVD or Blu-Ray?

What are these things you speak of?

Just another fucking technology gimmick so bored Americans have something to buy

[UKWildcat]

I give a flying rat's assfuck about HD-DVD or Blu-Ray!

[Ran]

This is probably a stupid question, but how do they get these old movies and make them HD?

[RoIIo Tomassi]

This is probably a stupid question, but how do they get these old movies and make them HD?

I don't think it's stupid. Here's a simplified answer. When they made VHS tapes back in the day, they would transfer from whatever source they had availible. On newer films it could be the master xfer, but on older films, they might make do with a print of the film ( which is a copy of a copy and is degraded over time.) Now that we have DVD and HD and digital, a lot of movie companies are making a big deal of going back to the original film print master ( which was only used once to make the original film prints) and is generally stored someplace cool and dark and safe for posterity. So they take this original film print and make a direct digital xfer of it, and sometimes they even do digital touching up ( but not always) to make it crisper and cleaner.

And in today's surround sound dolby 9.2 world, its a given they completely re-mix the entire soundtrack from the ground up. They might use original elements and whatnot, but its a complete do over

[Ran]

Thanks. Can't remember exactly what movie it was, but I began to wonder about that when I saw some movie from the 70s on Blue Ray on the shelf. Then I just saw an ad to pre-order the 50th Anniversary of Sleeping Beauty on blue ray.

[Antropov]

Thanks, Rollo. I always wondered the same thing as well.

As for giving a shit about format you can count me out too. Titties look like titties in any resolution.

[Seven]

I love pixelated titties

Sharp titties hurt

[jjreason]

Now that's a chronic pain that I could live with.

[anarky]

I still suspect that the studios are doing unscrupulous things to boost the sales of blu-rays higher than they should be.

For instance, I saw an ad for Pirates of the Caribbean 4 coming out this week. "Shit, I'll want to have that," I thought. I looked it up, and only the blu-ray is this week. The DVD is November 18.

So, you reckon they're counting on people seeing the combo pack and asking store employees who know nothing, who will say, "There isn't a DVD-only version"?

[jjreason]

That is some bullshit & it's the first I've heard of it. My wife would still buy most movies in dvd only as that's the only format she can use in the car, and it still works everywhere else. Only on the off chance that it's something I want & participate in the buying of do we get blu-ray. I do try to buy combo packs when I can for the aforementioned usefulness of dvds.

[anarky]

I'm of the mind that it's unnecessary to have combo packs. Sure, if you have two formats, you'll use them both. But you don't need both. Discs are really lousy for the environment to manufacture. It's one thing to make a shit-ton of them. It's another thing to make two shit-tons of them because you're convincing folks to buy the one with two copies of the same damned movie.

And I'd like to see a breakdown on DVD sales vs blu-ray sales vs combo pack sales. I suspect the marketing is getting people to go combo pack.

(It reminds me of the Wall-E deluxe edition a little. A movie about the environment, and they packed it in cardboard so it was more eco-friendly. Only to get that second disc worth of extra stuff, you got a third disc that only had a code for the digital copy. And, like all digital copies, it expired like a week after the release date. So why bother with the cardboard pack?)

[jjreason]

Discs are bad, but I still prefer to own a source disc than just the digital file, figuring I could always rip to whatever pc I want the file on once I own the disc. Owning a movie in 2 separate formats that you're going to use I can justify. The combo packs I've purchased are kids movies (as a matter of fact I can't think of any "combo packs" I've seen that aren't kids movies), I don't give a shit if the stuff I like won't play in the car (not that the stuff I like comes in combo packs anyhow - GLu would NEVER cut off a revenue stream like that). The digital copies we've used from time to time, and we've never experienced one that was expired, even when buying an older movie that includes one. I'm not sure that they do expire in a time-frame, but they are only good for one download of the source material. The fact that you need a THIRD disc to get your digital copy IS crap - those discs are totally wasteful.

[Sleazer]

I bought the Dark Knight Bluray Target edition in the batman mask case for 9.99 a couple weeks back...and of course the digital copy was expired. But I assumed it would be, so I knew that going in.

Still worth the ten bucks, though.

[Senor JabbaJohnL]

My family got a Blu-ray player when the Star Wars set came out in September, but given that my family's still using a 4:3 non-HD TV, the difference isn't super obvious (you can tell there is more information on the Blu-ray than on the DVD, especially when the picture has a curved line that isn't chopped up like steps as it is on DVD, but since my TV only displays it at 480 lines anyway, there's not a huge difference). But I recently went through Lazy Jedi Episode II and replaced the ROTS DVD footage with Blu-ray footage and the difference in picture is pretty clear on my computer, especially in fine details. There, it looks a whole hell of a lot better.

So until my family or I get a new TV, I'm not going to go nutty with the Blu-rays. I did get Inception (a combo pack, no less), The Matrix, and The Terminator on Blu-ray at Walmart's Black Friday sale for $5 each, since why not. For some things, like comedies or TV shows, I don't necessarily see the need to upgrade to HD if you already have the DVD.